General election 2017: Theresa May struggles to defend 'dementia tax' U-turn in BBC interview – as it happened

Here are some tweets from Prof Matthew Goodwin, the academic and Ukip expert, on the back of today’s Guardian/ICM poll results.

22 May 201711.09 EDT

Steven Morris

Support for Labour in Wales has surged while the Conservative momentum has gone into reverse, a new poll suggests.

Earlier polls seemed to indicate the Tories were on course for a historic breakthrough in a traditional Labour heartland.

But the latest YouGov Welsh barometer poll suggests that Labour could be on course to win one more seat in Wales than in 2015 – Gower in south Wales.

The poll asked people how they would vote in the general election. The results are:

Labour: 44% (+9 compared with a poll carried out at the start of the month)

Conservatives: 34% (-7)

Plaid Cymru: 9% (-2)

Liberal Democrats: 6% (-1)

Ukip: 5% (+1)

Others: 3% (+1)

Roger Scully, professor of political science at Cardiff University’s Wales governance centre, said in his blog on the figures:

While Labour have been making some progress in the Britain-wide polls, it is not on the scale of what we see here in Wales – where the party are fully 14 points higher than they were in the first poll of the campaign.

Assuming that the findings in our new Welsh poll are correct, they may have been at least partially influenced by the timing of the poll – the fieldwork for which was conducted in the immediate aftermath of the death of [former Welsh Labour leader] Rhodri Morgan. It is possible that there may have been some short-term sympathy boost for Labour.

While short-term factors may account for some of what we see in this latest barometer poll, it does appear that after the extraordinary success of the Conservative party at the beginning of the election campaign, they are losing some ground to Labour.

At least for the moment, Labour seem to be winning the campaign, if not the election as a whole. That is particularly true in Wales. The recent local elections showed the resilience of the Welsh Labour party.

A party does not dominate the politics of a nation for nearly a century, as Labour have done in Wales, simply by accident. Challenged strongly by the Conservatives in this election, Labour seem to be fighting back strongly.

22 May 201711.05 EDT

Steven Morris

At Welsh Labour’s manifesto launch first minister Carwyn Jones has promised a “real partnership” between the government in Cardiff and a Labour Westminster administration.

This feels like a shift in tone - at the start of the general election campaign it was expected that Welsh Labour would try to maintain a distance from Jeremy Corbyn, believing he was a vote-loser in Wales.

The Welsh Labour manifesto carries an image of Corbyn - though he is pictured alone rather than with Jones.

Speaking at the manifesto launch in Delyn, north Wales, Jones said:

Welsh Labour is in power in Wales and we want to establish a real partnership with a UK Labour government.

Our Welsh Labour manifesto is what we can do together – with your support. It builds on the vital commitments already announced by Jeremy Corbyn and his team.

By working together with the UK party, we’ve brought forward proposals that will make Wales a fairer, more prosperous country – with power closer to the people.

He said that after years of Tory cuts, an estimated £1.5bn extra would come to Wales every year through UK Labour spending plans.

But Jones also made it clear there was a need for a separate Welsh Labour. He said the party in Wales had become a “real, campaigning, fire-breathing entity” thanks largely to the guidance of the late former first minister Rhodri Morgan, who died last week.

You can read the manifesto here.

Here’s some key commitments from it. It’s striking how many of the headline grabbers relate to north Wales, where the Tories hope to make gains.

The party has promised “big projects” to get the economy moving including:

• Helping deliver the planned £14bn Wyfla Newydd nuclear power station on Anglesey

• Backing the tidal lagoon project in Swansea.

• Securing rail electrification for north Wales

• A metro system for south and north-east Wales and M4 relief road in south Wales.

• Backing a third crossing over the Menai Strait to support the economy of Anglesey and north west Wales.

The manifesto says it will work to abolish the Severn Bridge tolls and promises a new development bank of Wales – in the north.

On higher education it says education should be free and – if funding allowed – there should be no tuition fees. When a Labour government is elected in Westminster, it says it will look again at the issue.

The manifesto also says it is working towards getting one million people speaking Welsh.

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Sir Andrew Dilnot, who chaired the commission that first produced plans for a cap on the amount people should have to pay for social care, has welcomed Theresa May’s U-turn. This is what he said in an interview with Sky News.

• Dilnot welcomed the Conservative U-turn, saying it would provide “a great deal of reassurance to people”.

• He urged the government not to set the cap much higher than at the £72,000 planned by the David Cameron government. Originally his commission proposed that the level should be set between £25,000 and £50,000 (in 2010 prices), which would be equivalent to a maximum of £65,000 today.

A figure around that would seem reasonable. So I do hope that when the amount is fixed it is not set at a significantly higher level than the £72,000 that was put into legislation by the last government and was in the last Conservative manifesto.

• He said the government could afford to set the cap at around £70,000.

It is certainly the case that doing things in this case space has a significant cost. But the cost shouldn’t be exaggerated. The cost of a cap at that sort of level, £72,000, would be about £2bn a year, compared to total public spending of more than £700bn.

Dilnot said that winter fuel payments, which the Tories were planning to means test, cost £2.1bn a year. And he said that the Tory plan to take into account the value of someone’s house, as well as their assets, when care delivered at home is being means tested would also save the government money.

So, overall this should be certainly manageable. And it is a sign of what kind of society we want to be. If we want to be a good and caring society, then looking after people in this particular form of extremity seems like an obvious thing.

• He said there was a principled case for a cap.

It is a perfectly reasonable argument to say we should have higher levels of inheritance tax, if there are people who think that inheritance tax, particularly for people with large houses, should be higher. That’s a perfectly reasonable position. What does not seem to be a reasonable position is that we should have an inheritance tax that’s much higher if you happen to be one of the one people in 10 who’s unlucky enough to have dementia.

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Tories in the Theresa May camp are hitting back at George Osborne over the Evening Standard’s splash headline (see 2.38pm), according to HuffPost’s Paul Waugh.

Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, has produced a graph that seeks to explain how someone spending £150,000 on care would be affected by the various Tory plans. He explains the figures in the tweets below.

Corbyn says there are 1 million people in the country who need social care.

He says he does not want to follow the Conservatives and start setting one generation against another.

He is not blaming the old, he says. They have made a fantastic contribution.

But he says it is also true that it is not the fault of the young that public services are under pressure and that the government’s finances are in deficit.