UK politics live: Sunak talks up tax cuts after byelection defeats | Politics

Rishi Sunak has insisted that his government can afford to cut taxes, despite the country having entered a recession, because “economic conditions have improved”.

Speaking to the media, he said “our plan is working” and he can “give everyone the peace of mind that there is a better future for them and their families”.

He said tax cuts were possible “because of our plan to halve inflation, which has been successful over the past year, and because economic conditions have improved. We have already been able to start cutting taxes for people.”

He continued:

We delivered a significant tax cut at the start of this year, cutting the rate of national insurance from 12% to 10%, now that means someone on an average earnings of about £35,000 is seeing a tax cut worth £450 that hit their payslips in January.

Now that will benefit everyone in work, it demonstrates that our plan is working. And if we stick with that plan, I can give everyone the piece of mind that there is a better future for them and their families ahead, and we can all have a renewed sense of pride in the country.

Sunak is in Harlow today, where he has been meeting the local police force.

He told the media that he was making progress on his five key pledges. He said:

We’ve clearly been through a lot over the past couple of years as a country, but I genuinely believe at the start of this year we’re pointing in the right direction.

Now we’re not out of the woods yet, but across all the priorities that I set out we’re making progress.

Inflation has been more than halved, the economy out-performed expectations last year, debt is on track to fall, we’ve cut the number of illegal migrants coming by a third and we’re making progress on the longest waits in the NHS.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said that his party has achieved a decade’s worth of work turning the party around after the last election result to become “credible contenders” at the next one, but added “that is all we are.”

He told BBC Breakfast:

I’m proud of the work I’ve done as leader. The progress we’ve now made from the worst results since 1935 to being now credible contenders – and that is all we are – for the 2024 election.

I have to say, when I took over as leader most people shook my hand and said: “Good luck Keir,” and in the next breath they said: “You will never do this in one five-year parliamentary term.”

We are trying to do, if you like, what Kinnock, what Smith and Blair did, over 13 or 14 years, in four short years.”

Rishi Sunak has said the next general election is a choice between himself and Keir Starmer as prime minister, and that a vote for any party other than the Conservatives was a vote to put Starmer in power.

He told reporters:

A vote for anyone who isn’t the Conservative candidate, whether that’s Reform or anyone else, is just a vote to put Keir Starmer in power.

That’s the actual choice at the general election, between me and him, between the Conservatives and Labour.

Now I believe our plan is working. At the start of this year we’re heading in the right direction, taxes are coming down, inflation is falling, and if we stick with that plan we can deliver everyone a brighter future.

This week the UK went into recession.

Steven Morris

Steven Morris is in Kingswood for the Guardian

Interesting comments from the Labour MP Chris Bryant who led the campaign in Kingswood and has been celebrating in the park with the successful candidate. He told the Guardian the sense of relief at the win was “massive”.

“At 6pm yesterday evening, I thought, oh, no we’ve lost it. It had been tipping with rain. Would voters turn out? At the beginning of this campaign everyone was saying, Labour’s bound to win this. I never thought that – so yes, massive sense of relief, massive achievement.”

He said it was a boost to Labour’s chances of winning in the south and south-west of England. “This shows we’re on track. A lot of people think it’s time for a change and that is replicable across lots of constituencies.”

Bryant also pointed out that a chunk of the Kingswood constituency (which is abolished at the next general election) goes into Jacob Rees-Mogg’s.

Rees-Mogg’s response to the result has been to say that the combined Tory and Reform UK vote was larger than the Labour one. “But that’s not how it works. How patronising can you be to voters? You just go, they’re really ours, they’re not. He lost badly and I got the feeling this was very much his campaign.”

Bryant also criticised the Tories’s campaign for being “just rude” about the Labour candidate, Damien Egan, continually claiming he wasn’t local, though he was raised in Kingswood.

He took a swipe at the Tory candidate, Sam Bromiley, for his swift exit from the count hall.

“The Tory party used to be the party of manners. It is rude to the voters just to run away at the end, not even make a little speech of concession. They all need to go back to finishing school.”

Bryant said Labour’s troubles over comments made about Israel this week weren’t mentioned on the doorstep, though the U-turn on green energy did surface. “If anything people were saying fair play to the Labour party, they are telling it like it is and being upfront before the election.”

Steven Morris

Steven Morris is in Kingswood for the Guardian

Labour activists have been in a damp Kingswood park to celebrate their byelection win in South Gloucestershire. Pleasingly – and by sheer coincidence – the spot on the mapping system What3words is “reason anyway vote”.

Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, said the results in Kingswood and Wellingborough had been “fantastic” and were a “mark of the progress we have made in recent years and stand testament to the desire of voters to see change.”

McFadden said he hoped the Tories would act courageously and call a general election. He said that Keir Starmer had acted “decisively” when he suspended Azhar Ali and contrasted this with “long drawn out Tory scandals” involving Peter Bone and Owen Paterson.

The new Kingswood MP, Damien Egan, said:

The issues people talked about time and time again was the NHS – nowhere in Kingswood can you get an NHS dentist, how hard it is to find a doctor, the cost of living crisis, which is so much more than a slogan – mortgages up by £400 a month, people having to worry about what they put in their trolley, keeping their house warm in winter, families cancelling holidays. Safety on our streets – people want to see police back in our community. The hard work starts now.

Keir Starmer says he has told his team that the Labour party must fight for the next general election “like we are five points behind”.

Appearing on BBC Breakfast and asked if he took the Wellingborough and Kingswood victories as a personal endorsement of his leadership, he said “I don’t tend to personalise it. I’m very proud of that result. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done as leader. I’ve changed the Labour Party, and we brought in a very good result last night. I don’t want to get into the warm bath of saying: ‘Job done.’”

The Labour leader then said he had told his team to “fight like we’re five points behind”.

He told BBC Breakfast:

I think the country is crying out for change. Everybody knows that. Things aren’t working. Their NHS isn’t working. They’ve got a cost of living crisis. I think they’ve concluded that the Tories have failed after 14 years.

They can see now the Labour party has changed. It’s a different party to the party in 2019. And they can see that we’ve got the answers to their problems, and I was very pleased last night to see that we were clearly getting Tory switchers, in other words, people who hadn’t voted for the Labour party before coming out last night and voting for the Labour party.

He added: “But I would say this particularly to my team, there is more work to do. There is always more work to do.”

Pat McFadden, Labour campaign manager, has said that the byelection results in Wellingborough and Kingswood were “fantastic results” but that “the real test is to come later this year”.

Speaking from Kingswood, he told viewers of Sky News:

We had a fantastic result last night, overturning a Tory majority of around 11,000 and in Wellingborough an even bigger victory overturning a majority of 18,000. These results are a mark of the progress that the Labour party has made in recent years under Keir Starmer’s leadership. We are back on the pitch in a credible way. So they were fantastic results. But of course, we also know the real test is to come later this year and the general election.

He said Labour’s chance to show what it would do in power “can only come when the prime minister stops sitting in Number 10, waiting for something to turn up, and actually calls the general election that will give people the choice over the country’s future.”

He said that people didn’t need statistics to see that the country was in a poor state. He said “people can see it in terms of the cost of living. They can see it in terms of public services. And they can see it in terms of the difficulty of paying the bills.”

Pressed on what Labour would do differently with the economy, he said:

First of all financial stability: no repeat of that disastrous Tory mini-budget that crashed the economy and put everybody’s mortgages up.

Secondly, change the planning laws to get the economy moving again, making it easier for people to invest in the UK and get Britain building again.

Thirdly, make a success of the green transition. We’re going to set up GB energy, and have a national investment fund to really drive forward this green transition that will give us more energy security and in the long term, reduce people’s bills.

These are the kinds of things that we need to do to get the economy moving again, because without getting economic growth, it is really difficult for people’s living standards to increase. We know the Tories have failed on that.