Andrew Neil grills PM on day that she was forced into a major climbdown over the plans for social car laid out in her manifesto
Neil asks how they Tories will pay for their promised extra £8bn for the NHS. May talks about the economy and social care. She says the party’s “economic credibility is not in doubt”, while Labour’s is. “Your ability to answer this question may be in doubt,” Neil says.
Pressed to say where the money will come from, May again touts the Tories’ record on the economy, which will “generate the funds”.
Neil asks May what the cap will be, “now that you’re in favour of it”. May refuses to say, explaining that it will come out of her planned consultation.
Neil asks why was this not in the manifesto. May insists that the idea of a consultation was, though the idea of a cap was rejected. She again presses the line that fake claims have been put about by her opponents, accusing them of “playing politics” with the issue.
Neil gets on to the social care U-turn. “Nothing has changed from the principles,” May insists. She says the social care system will collapse if it is not fixed.
Neil presses her: “You say nothing has changed,” before hitting her with quotes from her own health secretary rejecting the policy the party now proposes. May needs to be honest, Neil suggests. May insists she is being honest and says the party is setting out a plan it believes will fix the problem. She accuses Corbyn of seeking to “sneak into No 10” by playing on people’s fears.
May insists the Tories have “not rewritten” the manifesto because the principles remain the same. The manifesto explicitly rejected a cap on social care costs.
Neil presses her further on the honesty issue. May says all she has done is clarify what the policy is.
Neil suggests that May thought she could get away with winning with “uncosted and half-baked” policies, which May rejects.
Andrew Neil’s interview with Theresa May is under way on the BBC now. It is part of a series of interviews with the party leaders.
He opens by asking her about the cut in her poll lead. “There’s only one poll that counts,” May responds: the election itself. She portrays the vote as one about who people want to conduct the Brexit negotiations: her or the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
The BBC has released some details from Andrew Neil’s interview with Theresa May, which is due to air at 7pm. The prime minister insisted once again that “nothing has changed”, despite the Tories having explicitly rejected the policy that they propose.
She said the cap meant “protecting people for the future”, the BBC reported.
We are providing a system that provides sustainability in our social care for the future and we have got an ageing population. We need to do this otherwise our system will collapse.
We have analysed whether or not May is right to claim that “nothing has changed”.
Critics have accused her of presiding over a “manifesto meltdown” but she has claimed that rival parties have been “trying to scare” elderly people.
Nicola Sturgeon is widely expected to confirm she still supports a 50p top rate of income tax, but only if it is implemented UK-wide, as she reopens her battle with Labour over the right way to support public spending at the Scottish National party’s manifesto launch on Tuesday.
Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, said at her manifesto launch on Monday that she was justified in calling for higher across-the-board tax rates in Scotland than those proposed by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, for the rest of the UK. McDonnell has promised no tax rises for those earning less than £80,000.
Dugdale said that since Holyrood has full autonomy to set different rates and bands to the rest of the UK above 10p in the pound, she can raise taxes to fund Scottish priorities.
Her officials said raising the basic rate by 1p to 21p for those earning above £11,500 and the higher rate to 41p for those earning over £42,385 would, alongside a 50p top rate for those earning £150,000 or more in Scotland, raise £690m a year.
With that, Scottish Labour could:
But, if Labour wins the general election, Dugdale will face claims from her rivals that her tax increases are unnecessary, since Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to boost spending by £41bn UK-wide will mean Scottish parliament funding will rise by £3bn by 2022.
Angus Robertson, the SNP’s deputy leader, said after Dugdale’s manifesto launch:
Labour cannot pretend to support ordinary workers when, at the same time, they want to hit them with a fresh tax bombshell – something even the UK Labour party have avoided. As always on tax, on Trident and on Brexit, Labour are at sixes and sevens.
Andrew Neil has been interviewing Theresa May for a programme going out on the BBC at 7pm. He is being interviewed about his interview now.
Theresa May is first up tonight in Andrew Neil's week of leaders' #GE2017 interviews https://t.co/L9HspVBmgU #BBCElection pic.twitter.com/r7UoGt5jOg
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) May 22, 2017
He says they recorded the interview at 4.30pm. They recorded 27 minutes. It was recorded “as live”, meaning it will go out as it was recorded.
It was a wide-ranging interview, he says.
He says that, whatever he asked, May usually said that she knew how to run the economy and handle Brexit.
He says the campaign is not going the way May expected. She is “more on the defensive than she expected to to be”.
Q: Was she rattled?
Neil says she was on the defensive.
He says May insisted that she had not changed her position, even though he put it to her what Jeremy Hunt said about this last week. Most commentators will conclude that there has been a change.
He says May would not rule out taxes going up.
Q: How are you approaching these interviews?
Very much with a BBC1 prime-time audience in mind. He is trying not to be too technical and to break out of ‘Westminster bubble’ thinking.
That’s all from me for today.
My colleague Kevin Rawlinson is now taking over the blog.
The row over Tory plans for social care which unfolded in a quiet north Wales village has been an unexpected boost to Labour on the doorstep, according to the constituency’s MP Ian Lucas, who is defending the seat where Theresa May was forced to say that care costs would be capped.
The Wrexham MP, who is battling to keep his seat with a wafer-thin majority over the Tories, said it was palpable how the chaos over elderly care had resonated with voters.
When the Guardian joined him campaigning in Brynffynnon, central Wrexham, a few hours after the prime minister’s speech, several voters said they had changed their mind about who to vote for over the past week.
Lucas said the party now, perhaps unexpectedly, had a doorstep-ready message for pensioners who had deserted the party in 2015. He said:
We lost a lot of elderly voters in 2015, we did really badly with pensioners. And with the way the Tories have treated these voters now, it has given us a lot of help in dealing with those concerns. We can talk to them about it, and we can say, we’re keeping the triple lock, winter fuel allowance. It’s a very simple message, stick with us and we’ll fight for those things. And we didn’t have that to say in 2015.
In Wales, the so-called dementia tax would not apply because the issue is devolved to the Welsh assembly, though means-testing of winter fuel allowance would come into force. But Lucas said the row over social care funding still had cut through in places such as Wrexham because it seemed at odds with the principles of the NHS.
Whether you’re a millionaire or not, you get care. People buy into the NHS and support it because of that – that’s why this feels so wrong. My mother had dementia, she died during the last general election, I’ve been through the mill with it myself.
Lucas, an MP for 16 years, admitted Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was a topic on the doorstep, generally coupled with concerns about his record on defence.
When voters are worried, Lucas uses a tactic that many independent-minded MPs have used on the doorstep. “I’ve seen five Labour leaders and five Tory leaders, they come and go, you’re voting for the person who is representing you,” he said. “I’m the best person to stand up for Wrexham.
“We need a strong opposition, just look at what’s happened in just three days when she’s put under pressure.”
Here are three blogs about the Theresa May U-turn that are worth reading.
The potential problems are of two types. If May wins this election, which she is still overwhelmingly likely to do, her backbenchers will now fancy their chances of seeing her off on anything they don’t like. If you can get her to back off on self-employed tax or social care, they will reason, why not school dinner cuts, local authority funding or maybe even grammar schools? Governing is a lot more difficult when that is the mood.
Secondly, there is the wider insidious damage of coming to be seen as a wobbler. Margaret Thatcher had a brief cluster of bad polls in the 1987 campaign, and her close ally Lord Young was soon shouting at Norman Tebbit that “we’re losing this fucking election.” Whatever happened in private, however, the lady herself was never seen to panic and went on to clean up on election day.
In 1997, likewise, faint Labour hearts began fluttering when one ICM poll showed the party’s lead being squeezed down to three points; Tony Blair was always beset with anxiety about his advantage slipping away, but he never let himself look worried to the electorate, and his projection of confidence was rewarded with a landslide.
May could very well still win one as well. But she has let the country catch a glimpse of the whites of her eyes. She might yet live to regret it.
Amongst other things it shows the perils of entrusting the manifesto to one man. Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s joint chief of staff, has been working with Cabinet minister Ben Gummer and some others on the manifesto, but there is no question who is pre-eminent and no question whose brainchild this now ditched policy was. Nick Timothy even inserted a swipe (p65) at “the Dilnot Report, which mostly benefited a small number of wealthier people.” The Tories are now picking up Sir Andrew Dilnot’s idea of a cap on individuals’ exposure to care costs.
Civil servants will say this is a reflection of the sort of problems encountered in Whitehall, where Mr Timothy (and his fellow joint chief of staff, Fiona Hill) want everything signed off by them before it meets the eyes of Mrs May. Plenty of officials worry that raises the prospect of Mrs May not getting their advice unfiltered.
One of May’s great assets as Tory leader has been her connection with the base, their sense that she was one of them. In many ways she is, she joined the party as a teenager and met her husband at a Tory event and still goes out canvassing most weekends. This trust has made them willing to follow her. But the row over social care has for the first time suggested that her values and theirs might not be totally aligned.
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