Question Time leaders' special: May under fire over NHS and education –as it happened

Jeremy Corbyn has challenged Theresa May to debate with him directly on tonight’s Question Time election programme. This is from the BBC’s Tom Bateman.

Unless May accepts Corbyn’s challenge (which seems improbable, to put it mildly), the two will appear on the programme one after the other, with May due to go first.

The Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank, has published figures suggesting that Labour support among non-white voters is rising sharply. Labour now has a 34-point lead over the Conservatives among this group, it says.

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Omar Khan, director of the trust, said:

A number of recent polls have suggested that Theresa May’s lead over Jeremy Corbyn has been narrowing and the race is becoming tighter than previously thought. Our polling analysis indicates that Labour’s support among ethnic minorities may well be increasing in the latter stages of this campaign ... Conservative hopes of capturing a greater share of the ‘BME vote’ from Labour may be optimistic.

Sir Vince Cable, the former Lib Dem business secretary who is trying to win back his Twickenham seat (which he lost to the Tories in 2015), gave a speech on the economy and business today. He used it to criticise the Conservatives and Labour.

He said that Theresa May was not interested in economic policy and cared more about cutting immigration than about economic prosperity. He said:

[May] has some likable characteristics and admirable characteristics, but it was always very clear that she was never the slightest bit interested in economic policy.

There was one issue actually that crystallised it ... which is the issue about overseas students.

In order to meet the target, they reduced or tried to curb visas for overseas students - but they are not immigrants because they don’t stay here, they go back, but it fits within the numbers, so they have to be cut.

May said he and other ministers objected, saying cutting the number of foreign students coming to the UK was “ridiculous”.

And the answer we got [from May) was intriguing and revealing and highly relevant to today. “It wasn’t: ‘Well, you’re wrong’, it was: ‘So what? What does it matter if it’s damaging the economy? We’re controlling the immigration.’

So this is why the crashing out scenario [leaving the EU with no deal], which is looming now very large, is potentially so disastrous and why the Liberal Democrats have to be absolutely clear that we would not accept that and we would want to provide a route back, an opportunity to think again about this process.

And, on Labour, Cable said:

If you turn to what’s happening on the other side of the Labour party, I find it very difficult to understand why their economic proposals are not being torn to shreds.

They’ve progressed from Keynesian economics to Venezuelan economics ... that was the role model.

Price controls, printing money, nationalise everything that moves or doesn’t move – complete economic chaos at the end of it – that’s their role model.

A Labour candidate has written to voters in her marginal constituency saying that “realistically” Jeremy Corbyn will not win the general election and urging them to back her as an independent-minded local MP, Jessica Elgot reports. Joan Ryan, who was Enfield North’s MP between 1997 and 2010 and regained the seat from the Conservatives in 2015, encouraged voters to elect her “whatever your misgivings about the Labour leadership” because she expected Corbyn would not become prime minister.

The full details of the Ipsos Mori poll (see 12.08pm) are now on its website. And you can read the charts here (pdf).

Here is an extract from the Ipsos Mori write-up.

Theresa May still commands a lead over Jeremy Corbyn when it comes to who Britons think would be the most capable Prime Minister. Half (50%) think Mrs May would be the most capable (down 6 points from two weeks ago) while one in three (35%) say Mr Corbyn (up 6 points). Younger voters prefer Mr Corbyn (by 57% to 30% among 18-34s), but older voters still choose Mrs May (by 67% to 18% among 55+).

Theresa May also leads Jeremy Corbyn when it comes to leadership satisfaction ratings; however, her numbers are much lower than seen in our last poll two weeks ago. Forty-three percent say they’re satisfied with Theresa May doing her job (down 12 points) while half (50%) say they’re dissatisfied with her (up 15 points) – leaving her a net satisfaction score of -7 (her first negative rating since becoming Prime Minister). This compares with two in five (39%) satisfied with Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader (up 8 points) and half (50%) dissatisfied with him (down 8 points) – giving him a net score of -11. Conservative voters still strongly back Theresa May with 82% saying they’re satisfied with how Theresa May is doing her job (14% are dissatisfied). Labour voters have become more enthusiastic for Jeremy Corbyn, with 71% saying they are satisfied in his performance and 19% dissatisfied.

Gideon Skinner, head of political research at Ipsos Mori, has tweeted these charts.

And here is some Twitter comment on the poll findings.

From Matt Singh, the analyst who runs the Number Cruncher Politics website.

From the academic Matthew Goodwin

From the Press Association’s Ian Jones

From the Evening Standard’s Joe Murphy

2 Jun 201709.14 EDT

Alan Johnson says he may have been been wrong about Corbyn who now has 'realistic chance' of winning

Mark Brown

The former Labour cabinet minister Alan Johnson now believes Jeremy Corbyn has “a realistic chance of winning” next week’s general election.

Just six weeks ago Johnson was interviewed by the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone and said the opposite. He has also previously called Corbyn “useless”, “incompetent” and “incapable”.

Speaking at the Hay literary festival in Wales, Johnson said: “It is just amazing how things have gone since that interview [with Hattenstone]. Theresa May and the Conservatives committed that cardinal sin of taking the public for granted.”

May has made three big mistakes, Johnson said.

• Calling the election in the first place, only two years after fixed term parliaments were agreed. “People don’t like that, they don’t like being taken to the polls when there is no obvious need.”

• The U-turn on having a cap on adult social care. Johnson said he thought he was responsible for the fastest U-turn in recent political history when, in 2006, he was education secretary and changed his mind on forcing faith schools to take more pupils of different faiths. “That took five days … this was within a day!”

• May’s refusal to take part in the live TV debate. “On top of the other two, suddenly we’re not in strength and stability, we’re in to weakness and instability.”
  

Asked if he had been wrong about Corbyn, Johnson said: “Maybe. It was always about is he capable of leading us into government? Was I wrong about that … maybe. I hope so.”

Johnson said something was clearly happening out in the country and if it continued “there could well be a Labour government”.

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Here is more from what Ed Miliband said on the World at One about Theresa May being “weak and feeble and spineless” for not being willing to condemn President Trump for pulling out of the Paris climate change treaty. He said:

The reason this matters is the signal it sends, the signal it sends about British leadership, and Theresa may is sending a signal that she is weak and feeble and spineless, I’m afraid ...

If ever there was a moment when Britain needed a strong leader, it was now, and it turns out we’ve got an incredible weak one who is missing in action. I’m afraid that is what people are increasingly thinking about Theresa May ...

Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs does not normally tweet at all. Now, I’m not a friend of Goldman Sachs on everything, but he actually tweeted for the first time yesterday to say how wrong this decision is. And that is the scale of this. Barack Obama, Al Gore, business leaders, scientists, all coming out and saying President Trump. And where is British leadership? It is absolutely nowhere ...

The reason why the British response matters is that the Paris agreement was a fragile thing and a hard thing to negotiate, and the lack of American leadership, and America withdrawing from it, is bad, and let’s make no bones about it. But it’s so important that the rest of the world now says, with determination, not just that we are going to carry on, but that it’s unacceptable, that you are a pariah of the international community, to withdraw from it.

When it was put to him that May has said she expressed disappointment about Trump’s decision, Miliband replied:

Disappointment is when your football team loses a match. It is not when somebody makes a devastating decision like this. America is one of the two largest emitters in the world, along with China. This decision was backed by every country in the world apart from Syria, which is in the middle of a civil war, and Nicaragua, which wanted us to go further. American leadership was so important to this.

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Craig Mackinlay, the Conservative candidate for South Thanet, has put out a statement on Facebook about the CPS decision to charge him over alleged overspending in the 2015 election. He said:

My candidature in South Thanet is entirely unaffected and my campaign continues as before. I will not let this decision affect the hard work I do for my constituents and the hard work I hope to do for them after 8th June.

Our justice system is underpinned by the presumption of innocence and I am confident that I will be acquitted as I have done nothing wrong and acted honestly and properly whilst a candidate in 2015, and as all candidates do, acted upon advice throughout.

Clearly this is a shocking decision by the CPS, given that I’ve done nothing wrong and I am confident that this will be made very clear as the matter progresses.

I am very disappointed with the way this has been handled by the CPS and Kent police, and I must question the timing of this decision given that Kent police confirmed on 18th April that their file had been sent to the CPS to review and make their decision: why leave this until a few days before the election?

• Theresa May has been labelled “weak and feeble and spineless” by Ed Miliband for refusing to condemn Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate change agreement. Miliband, the former Labour leader and former energy secretary, told the World at One said it was important for May to tell Trump that his decision was unacceptable. Miliband spoke a few hours after Jeremy Corbyn accused May of a “dereliction of duty to our country and our planet” for failing to speak out more strongly on this issue. Corbyn said May had opted for “subservience”. (See 9.48am.) May herself rejected this. In a clip recorded for broadcasters, when asked if she was being subservient to the US, she said:

No. The UK’s position on the Paris agreement remains as it always has been. We believe this is an important international agreement on climate change. The UK is one of the leading nations across the world in dealing with climate change. I made clear to President Trump, as did other G7 leaders last week, that we believed [in] the importance of the Paris agreement and we wanted the United States to remain within it. I spoke to President Trump again last night, I made it clear that the UK would have wanted the United States to stay within the Paris agreement and that we continue to support the Paris agreement.

May also said that, although the UK had not joined France, Germany and Italy in signing a letter criticising Trump’s decision, Canada and Japan, which were also G7 countries, had not signed it either. But they all agreed the American decision was wrong, she said.

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• May has sought to clarify the Conservative position on immigration, saying it would “take time” to hit the party’s target. Last night David Davis, the Brexit secretary, said it could take more than five years to get net annual migration below 100,000, after May herself suggested it would happen in the next parliament. (See 8.09am.) Asked to clarify the position, May said it would “take time” to meet the target. She added:

We haven’t set a timetable in our manifesto. Of course we want to do it as soon as we can, but we have to keep working at this.

• Nicola Sturgeon has said the SNP would not enter into a formal coalition but has pledged support on an “issue-by-issue” basis to any anti-Conservative progressive alliance in a hung parliament.

• Tim Farron has refused to say whether he believed homosexuality is a sin after being repeatedly pressed on the issue by a caller during a radio interview.