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

22 May 201712.16 EDT

Robert Booth

Earlier today the Conservatives bought the rights to the top Google search when you type in “dementia tax”. It was a failed attempt to defuse a row over Theresa May’s social care policy.

Before news of the U-turn broke, I asked them for their thinking behind the move, which meant the first thing voters searching on Google saw was a link to a website titled The so-called ‘dementia tax’ – get the real facts. A Conservative spokesman explained:

It is quite right we take steps to tackle the misinformation and fear being spread by Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party.

The term “dementia tax” was being used this morning on the front page of both the Financial Times (see 8.38am) and Daily Mail as well as by Labour.

After a bruising day on the issue, the Conservatives appear to be no longer buying the top slot for the term. It has been snapped up by Labour which has set up a page called The Dementia Tax - Get The Real Facts.

22 May 201712.12 EDT

Severin Carrell

The Scottish National party has been forced into retreat after election candidates attacked an Edinburgh nurse who told Nicola Sturgeon during a live BBC leaders debate that her low pay forced her to use food banks.

Claire Austin, who works for NHS Lothian, came under intense criticism from SNP supporters on Twitter after she challenged the first minister’s decision to hold nurses’ pay rises at 1% for the last eight years. Austin said she was prepared to go on strike over pay with the Royal College of Nursing, which itself reports nurses around the UK using food banks to supplement low pay. She told Sturgeon: “You have no idea how demoralising it is to work within the NHS.”

Joanna Cherry QC, the SNP candidate defending Edinburgh South West, was forced to delete a tweet wrongly alleging Austin was married to a Tory councillor. Cherry apologised and retweeted Shona Robison, the Scottish government’s health secretary, who said: “Important to hear voices of nurses in #leadersdebate, we are offering to work with unions on pay.”

Murdo Fraser, the Scottish Tory MSP sitting alongside Cherry in the BBC debate spin room, alleged the MP had been told to make the Tory councillor claim by Jeane Freeman, the Scottish government welfare minister. “It was a disgraceful episode and Nicola Sturgeon and her party should be thoroughly ashamed,” he said. “This smear operation points to something endemic within the SNP.”

Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories also attacked SNP activists who latched on to Austin’s Facebook pages, which showed her sipping champagne as she celebrated new year in the Plaza hotel in New York, dining at Malmaison in Edinburgh and apparently show her daughter at a fee-paying school.

On the campaign trail on Monday, Sturgeon apologised for the social media attacks on Austin. She said:

The nurse on the debate last night was absolutely entitled to raise the issue that she did and, as I said, she raised an issue that I think is one of the biggest in this campaign, the level and value of real wages, not just in the public sector but in the private sector.

Austin said friends and family had paid for those expenses seen on Facebook, and she was defended by the Poverty Alliance, a voluntary sector organisation that oversees the Scottish government’s living-wage programme. The alliance said it was wrong to make moral judgments about the way people lived, adding:

People move in and out of poverty, very few people remain in poverty throughout their entire lives. Items can also be gifts, bought on finance or with a credit card. It is also important to remember that people on low incomes deserve the same treats we all enjoy.

The Evening Standard editorials have become a lot more interesting since George Osborne became editor. Here is an extract from today’s.

The current Tory leaders should have been ready to defend their approach. Instead we had a weekend of wobbles that presumably prompted today’s U-turn. The Pensions Secretary Damian Green was unable to answer basic questions in a TV interview about who will lose their fuel payments, and how much extra money will go into social care. Either the Government is prepared to remove these payments from millions of pensioners who are not in poverty, and don’t receive pension credit, and spend their substantial savings on social care; or they chicken out, target the tiny percentage of pensioners who are on higher tax rates, save paltry sums and accept the whole manoeuvre is a gimmick. Certainly, if the savings are to pay for a new care cap, then many pensioners will lose their winter fuel payment. This isn’t for consultation after an election — it’s an issue of honesty before an election.

Equally, Boris Johnson should have spent more time genning up on his own notes rather than trying to steal those of his TV interviewer. When asked about changes to social-care funding, he immediately retreated, saying that while the broad thrust was right, the details might change. It was unfortunate that this weekend, of all weekends, was when he compared other politicians to blancmanges.

Johnson used the blancmange line in an article in the Mail on Sunday in which he said that if Jeremy Corbyn were prime minister, “he would go into the negotiating chamber with all the authority of a smacked blancmange.”

The Tories are not planning to announce a proposed level for the social care cap, my colleague Anushka Asthana reports.

Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, says Theresa May is lying about her social care U-turn and that, if she can lie about this, she can lie about other things too.

22 May 201711.31 EDT

Matthew Weaver

Northern Ireland secretary James Brokenshire challenged Jeremy Corbyn to condemn the IRA after he failed to do so in specific terms – as opposed to in generalised terms – in an interview with Sky News on Sunday. Brokenshire’s comments were passed on by a reporter from the Sun during the launch of Labour’s arts manifesto in Hull earlier.

Asked whether he condemned the IRA as terrorists, Corbyn said:

I condemn all acts of violence in Northern Ireland wherever they came. I spent the whole of the 1980s representing constituencies with large numbers of Irish people in them. We wanted peace, we wanted justice, we wanted a solution. The first ceasefire helped to bring about those talks which represented all sections of the community of Northern Ireland.

The Labour government of 1997 helped bring in the historic Good Friday agreement, the basis of which was a recognition of the differing cultural histories and values of Northern Ireland. It stood the test of time and it’s still there. We have a devolved administration. We should recognise that that peace was achieved by a lot of bravery both in the unionist and in the nationalist community.

People that walked a very difficult extra mile when they were under pressure from their communities not to do so, both republicans and unionists, walked that extra mile and brought us the Good Friday agreement. I think we should use this election to thank those people who brought about the Good Friday agreement.

We are going to be working with the devolved administration to make sure Brexit doesn’t bring about a barbed wire border between the north and south.

If you are interested in knowing who first coined the term “dementia tax”, this thread, in response to a Twitter question by the BBC’s Amol Rajan, is interesting. The consensus is that it emerged organically, although the Spectator’s Will Heaven is credited with being the first person to use it in an article.