General election latest: Sunak vows to bring back national service as Streeting aims to turn around the NHS

Rishi Sunak will not attend Southampton’s Championship play-off final against Leeds at Wembley Stadium on Sunday because he is meeting voters in the South East, it is understood.

The Prime Minister is unable to go to the game because he is campaigning, but will be keeping a close eye on the score from afar this afternoon, sources said.

Wes Streeting has set out a three word vision of the guiding philosophy of a Labour government if, as expected, it wins power on 4 July.

The shadow health secretary had echoes of Tony Blair’s new Labour when he promised that his party would be “compensatory not confiscatory”.

Mr Streeting was in discussion with The Independent’s editor Geordie Greig in front of an audience at the Hay Festival discussing the election, politics and his book One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up.

Rishi Sunak’s team have published “five things you need to know” on his X/Twitter account about his national service plans – which he says will partly be funded by money previously brought in to replace EU structural funding as a major part of the government’s levelling up agenda.

The posts state: “Every 18-year-old will get the choice of how they do their National Service. Deciding to either serve their country in the Armed Forces or serve their community by volunteering”.

This “bold new model will open up a world of opportunity” and “make sure young people in the UK get the same chance in life as their peers in allies like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and France”, he claims.

He added: “Everyone will get the life-changing chance to learn from the best of the best – from the men and women of our Armed Forces, our inspirational NHS staff or the fire service. Gaining skills for life in everything from cyber to leadership.”

Rishi Sunak’s national service plans are “ill-thought through” and would be an “enormous potential burden” on Britain’s military, a military veteran of 25 years has warned.

“From the military point of view, this is an enormous potential burden,” Justin Crump told Sky News. “It’s certainly not the solution to the military’s problems and I think everyone I’ve spoken to this morning still has their head in their hands slightly in the same way.

“I think the aspiration is meritous around the fragmentation of society and the role of service within that and duty, which of course everyone in the armed forces ardently supports.

“I think though the scheme, the idea of putting people towards the military for just a year, and the way it’s been described, is very ill-thought through. It would provide a huge distraction of what the military needs to do at the moment and doesn’t address its core funding needs – in fact it makes it worse.

“So it’s very close to the sort of thing people might like to see, but I just think the military component of it feels very ill-thought through by comparison. And particularly, the very stark difference between spending a year in the military or spending two weekends a month closer to home.

“Those are the big areas that have us scratching our heads a little bit at this point.”

The head of the Best for Britain campaign group has condemned Rishi Sunkak’s plans for national service, warning that “any serious party” who “genuinely cared” would be seeking to address the litany of impacts of severe generational inequality afflicting young Britons.

“It is ageist,” Naomi Smith told LBC. “What are we asking older people to do? What are we asking the over-65s to do? Are we asking them – many of them owning their own home outright without a mortgage – to be taxed at a far higher asset class taxation rate in order to fund the new building of homes for young people?

“Are we offering these young people anything in return if they were to complete this mandatory – yet somehow voluntary – [scheme]? Mandatory volunteering if they don’t take the military route? That seems odd. Are we offering them subsidised rents in good quality homes?

“Would they get an exemption on tuition fees if they completed their national service? It’s not offering them anything. If anything, it’s asking them to do something that perhaps they don’t want to do,” she added, questioning whether we “want the military to be stuffed full of people who don’t want to be there”.

Labour would revive Rishi Sunak’s plans to ban young people from ever being able to legally smoke after they failed to become law ahead of the General Election, a shadow minister has said.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill was not included in the legislation that was rushed through by MPs ahead of Parliament being prorogued on Friday, during a period known as “wash-up.”

Asked if Labour would reintroduce it, shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall said: “If we’re elected we will make that happen and make it less likely that young people will smoke than vote Tory.”

A Labour government would not increase income tax or national insurance, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has insisted.

“There’s nothing that will be in our manifesto that we haven’t said where the money is going to come from,” Ms Reeves told the BBC.

“We’ve made those commitments so VAT and business rates on private schools, private equity bosses being taxed properly on their bonuses, an extension of the windfall tax so the energy profits are properly taxed, ensuring non-doms pay their fair share of tax in the country they live in, and also cracking down on tax avoidance – which is costing our economy billions of pounds every year.”

She added: “Beyond that, we have to grow the economy”, before being pressed further on taxes.

Ms Reeves said: “What I want and Keir (Starmer) wants is taxes on working people to be lower and we certainly won’t be increasing income tax or national insurance if we win at the election.”

She added: “We opposed the increases to national insurance when Rishi Sunak put those forward as chancellor. We would like taxes on working people to be lower but unlike the Conservatives, who have already racked up £64 billion of unfunded tax cuts in just three days of this campaign, I will never play fast and loose with the public finances, I will never put forward unfunded proposals.”

The Tories’ plan to introduce national service would threaten funding for Scotland, the SNP has warned, claiming the proposals are “completely out of touch with families and young people”.

The SNP highlighted that funding for the plan appears to come from the UK shared prospertiy fund – a replacement for EU structural funds.

Amy Callaghan, candidate for Mid Dunbartonshire, said: “The SNP will stand firm against Tory plans to slash Scotland’s funding and impose mandatory national service on young people – showing why it’s essential to vote SNP to get rid of the Tory government and put Scotland first.

“It’s shameful Keir Starmer also claims mandatory national service is ‘needed’ and won’t rule out imposing it on Scottish families – these plans from a bygone era are completely out of touch with families and young people in Scotland – and deeply damaging to Scotland’s communities.

“Only the SNP can be trusted to fight Scotland’s corner and protect Scotland’s interests. It’s bad enough the Tories and Labour Party are wedded to imposing Brexit but to slash Scotland’s EU replacement funding by millions of pounds is a national scandal.”

Lord Heseltine has warned that the 2024 general election campaign “will be the most dishonest in modern times” because of the refusal of the main parties to debate the consequences of Brexit.

The former deputy prime minister who fell out with the Conservatives over leaving the European Union, has written exclusively for The Independent explaining how the big issues in this general election – the economy, immigration and defence – all need to be debated in the context of the UK’s relationship with the EU.

But he claimed that Labour and the Tories are too scared to discuss Brexit because of the potential impact on their voter bases.

He wrote: “Both major parties are afraid of losing votes to the hard right. Labour needs to rebuild its Red Wall while the Conservatives run scared of Reform.”

Nigel Farage signalled a return to rightwing shock tactics for his Reform UK party as he used his first election interview to attacking Muslims in the UK for “not sharing British values”.

His words on Muslims and immigration to Sir Trevor Phillips on Sky News shocked the studio guests including Labour peer Baroness Ayesha Hazarika who said: “This reveals his true colours as a nasty race baiting character.”

Commentator Lord Daniel Finkelstein said the remarks had made him pleased that Farage was not running for parliament, and questioned why Mr Farage claims to “speak for real people as if those who disagree with him are somehow not real”.

Our political editor David Maddox has the full report: