UK general election live: Starmer will try to set up ‘permanent Labour government’ if he wins, James Cleverly claims | Politics

Q: [From ITV’s Robert Peston] In France millions of people have voted for the far right. What lessons do you take from that?

Starmer says the lesson he draws from that is that people are disaffected, and that they do not trust politicians.

The lesson I take from that is that we need to address the everyday concerns of so many people in this country who feel disaffected by politics, who feel that either the country is too broken to be mended or that they can’t trust politicians because of what the Tories have done for the last 14 years.

We have to take that head on and we have to show, on Thursday for the United Kingdom, and across Europe and the world, that only progressives have the answers to the challenges that are facing us in this country and across Europe.

We have to make that progressive call. But we have to, in making that, understand why it is, certainly in United Kingdom after 14 years of chaos and failure, that people do feel disaffected with politics, return politics to service, and continue to make that argument that politics is a force for good.

Starmer’s reference to “progressives” may do something to assure people on the left alarmed by the briefing in the Sunday Times yesterday, from a Labour insider, saying that if Starmer wins the election, he will use his first speech as PM to “show that politics can be a force for good rather than the utopian view of progressive liberalism”.

James Cleverly has accused Keir Starmer of indulging in a “dog whistle attack on the Bangladeshi community”.

He made the point in at least two of his interviews this morning, telling BBC Breakfast:

The only intervention recently [on small boats] that Keir Starmer has had on this is this weird dog whistle attack on the Bangladeshi community where he’s claiming that that we are not returning people to Bangladesh which was, A, not true and, B, not relevant, because the Bangladeshi community make a tiny, tiny, tiny, less than a half a percent of small boat arrivals.

In another interview, Cleverly claimed he was “quite shocked” by Starmer’s remarks about Bangladeshi migrants.

He was referring to Starmer telling the Sun TV Q&A last week that “at the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed because they’re not being processed”. The comment caused considerable offence in the Bangladeshi community, and Starmer later sought to clarify what he meant, saying that Bangladeshi people have made a big contribution to Britain, that he was talking about returns agreements, and that it is a good thing the UK has one with Bangladesh.

James Cleverly, the home secretary, has condemned the Banksy artwork of an inflatable boat holding dummies of migrants at the Glastonbury music festival, describing it as a “celebration of loss of life”. Matthew Weaver has the story.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak has always sounded unconvincing when he tells interviewers that he genuinely thinks the Conservative party could win the general election but last night, after England’s victory in the Euros, he was able to post this message on X giving Tories a crumb of hope. “It’s not over until its over,” he said.

Of course, the analogy is not exact. England were rescued by a player capable of brilliance.

With only three full days of campaigning left to go, the parties are reverting to their core messages and, for the Conservative party, it is not in fact ‘we could still win’, but ‘don’t let Labour win with a massive majority’. James Cleverly, the home secretary, has been doing an interview round this morning and he claimed Keir Starmer would want to establish “a permanent Labour government” if he won. Cleverly told the BBC:

The reason that this is so important is because Labour have already said they are going to gerrymander the system, they have said they’re going to pack out the House of Lords, they’ve said they’re going to get votes at 16, they’re going to get votes for foreign nationals, they’re probably going to get votes for criminals.

They are determined to have a permanent Labour government and they are quite willing to distort the British political system to get that – that is what is at stake. This is not an election which is about giving the Conservatives a bit of a telling off, and many people might think that is legitimate …

[Labour] have said they’re going to distort the political system and I think there’s a real risk, there is a genuine risk, that they take a majority if that is what they get to try and lock in their power permanently, because they don’t really feel confident that they’re going to be able to make a credible case to the British people at the next general election.

As Kiran Stacey reports, Rishi Sunak will be making a similar argument in speeches today.

Here is the agenda for the day.

8.30am: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Eastbourne. Later he will be in Wokingham and the Cotswolds.

9.45am: Keir Starmer is campaigning in Hertfordshire. Later he will be in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

10.30am: Rishi Sunak has a campaign visit in Staffordshire, where he will take part in a Q&A. In the afternoon he will be in the West Midlands, and in the evening in the East Midlands.

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