Labour condemned as ‘undemocratic’ in row over Corbyn’s seat — as it happened

Corbyn, the Labour leader from 2015 to 2020, was told he would not be the candidate, prompting criticism from several backbench MPs on the left of the party. He has since announced he will stand as an independent.

The shortlist, announced on Wednesday, contained only two names — Nargund, and Sem Moema, a London Assembly member. The party then announced the candidate selected two days later.

Local activists say they had chosen a different candidate, and that Nargund was imposed upon them from Labour headquarters.

In a statement, officials in the constituency Labour party (CLP) said they discovered a different candidate had been selected via social media.

“The CLP was not given the opportunity to meet the appointed candidate nor to understand what his policy positions are. This is the final stage in an egregiously undemocratic selection process. Once again, the national Labour Party has shown contempt for hard working and dedicated members … the actions of the Labour Party have fallen far short of its stated democratic standards.”

This election feels like 1997, the Liberal Democrat leader has said, adding the party is “not putting a ceiling on our ambitions”.

Launching the party’s campaign in Cambridgeshire, Sir Ed Davey said: “The Liberal Democrats are getting a great response — a better response than we’ve had for a generation.

“I was elected back in 1997 and this feels to me quite a bit like that. I don’t worry about the other parties, I’m just excited about our job and excited about change.”

Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, has said the Tory proposal on National Service is a “distraction”.

He said: “What we need is full-time, professional, highly-trained troops. We’ve got the best army in the world and we should be backing it.”

He made the comments as the party launches its first battlebus, coined Yellow Hammer 1, which will travel across the around 90 target seats for the party, mainly in the south and southwest of England known as the “blue wall”.

The prime minister has made his first appearance on TikTok to address criticisms of his plans to re-introduce national service for all 18-year-olds.

He said: “Sorry to be breaking into your usual politics-free feed, but I’m making a big announcement today, and I’ve been told that a lot of you already have some views on it.”

Rishi Sunak has chosen not to attend Southampton’s Championship play-off final against Leeds at Wembley Stadium to focus on the campaign trail.

The prime minister, who was born and grew up in Southampton, will instead be meeting voters in the southeast of England.

Sunak attended the club’s 3-1 semi-final victory against West Bromwich Albion last week wearing a jumper emblazoned with the words “Saints 85”, a reference to the club’s founding date.

He said he was “still buzzing”, adding “we’re going to Wembley”.

Move over Mondeo Man. The 2024 general election could be determined by “Surrey shufflers” and “Wokingham Waitrose women”, according to the Liberal Democrats.

Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, hopes to take advantage of tactical voting by targeting 90 “blue wall” seats held by the Conservatives in southern England.

He has already visited Michael Gove’s consitutency in Surrey Heath, as well as Cheltenham, Eastbourne, Lewes and Chichester. Today he is expected to take the battlebus to Cambridgeshire as he continues to argue the Lib Dems are “the only party who can beat the Conservatives across the blue wall”.

Experts believe the party could claim as many as 40 seats on July 4.

Read more here: Tactical voting threat to Tories as Lib Dems target 90 seats

The prime minister hesitated over a promise to the mother of a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing to pass a law requiring venues and local authorities to prepare against terror attacks.

Figen Murray, the mother of the Manchester Arena bombing victim Martyn Hett, told Times Radio she feels “misled” by the prime minister over a promise he made to her about introducing the law change before the summer.

She said: “The meeting was an interesting one because the prime minister promised me, that he will bring Martyn’s Law and introduce it into parliament before summer recess and I actually repeated ‘you promise?’ and he said, ‘yes, I promise’. So I actually reached my hand out and said, ‘can we shake on this?’ and there was this split second of hesitation, which I found a bit puzzling. It was only a very short moment, but I was a bit confused about that, that sort of hesitation.”

“A few hours later, when he announced the election, that hesitation obviously made sense to me. But he did shake my hand and did say he will promise to introduce it before summer recess. Obviously, a few hours later, he then called an election and that put everything into question.”

The Tory campaign HQ has questioned the whereabouts of Sir Keir Starmer today following criticism of Rishi Sunak’s decision to stay at home for large parts of yesterday.

A senior Conservative campaign source said: “Yesterday the PM hit the campaign trail two hours before Sir Keir surfaced. Today there is no sign of Starmer whatsoever and we are just four days into the campaign. Campaigns are tough, tiring things and it’s understandable that he may be weary. But being prime minister is a 24/7 job which requires stamina.”

A defence minister said proposals to re-introduce National Service would damage morale in the Armed Forces just days before Rishi Sunak announced it as his first major policy of the election campaign.

Andrew Murrison rejected the idea because the “demanding, increasingly technical nature of defence today is such that we require highly trained, professional men and women in our regular and reserve Armed Forces”.

He said there were “no current plans” for the restoration of any form of National Service in a response to a parliamentary question from Mark Pritchard, Tory MP, on Thursday.

He said that the potential of “unwilling National Service recruits” being forced to serve alongside professional servicemen and women “could damage morale, recruitment and retention and would consume professional military and naval resources”.

Every year, Swedish 17-year-olds across the country hear the thud of the letter hitting the doormat, calling on them to protect their country’s democracy by signing up to do their National Service.

After completing an online questionnaire, those selected — young men and women — complete a battery of physical and mental tests, after which they’re allocated to a military unit for between nine and 15 months.

Not everyone makes the cut. Today, Sweden’s conscript forces are built through a “hybrid system” where a large segment of the population — about 100,000 a year — are called up for assessment, but not everyone has to, or can, serve.

Read more: How Swedish National Service works — a model for Britain?

National Service has only existed twice in British history — around the First and Second World Wars.

The first period was between 1916 and 1920, legally referred to as “Military Service”. The term “National Service” was coined only in April 1939, initially for single men between 20 and 22, but expanded rapidly at the outbreak of war in September.

As the war ended, the country moved into a long period of peacetime conscription under the National Service Act 1949.

Healthy males between 17 and 21 — with exemptions for critical industries, conscientious objectors, and men in Northern Ireland — were called up to the armed forces for 18 months, and stayed on the reserve list for four years afterwards.

The Suez crisis in 1956 forced a change in the defence mindset, with National Service seen as a burden for the army, which no longer had a large empire to maintain and a drain of young work on the economy.

The last men were mobilised in 1960, and by the time the last servicemen demobilised in 1963, two million men had been conscripted.

Labour will not increase income tax or national insurance in government, Rachel Reeves has said.

The shadow chancellor rules out raising either tax, telling the BBC: “I want and Keir [Starmer] wants taxes on working people to be lower, and we certainly won’t be increasing income tax or national insurance if we win the election.”

After the Tories announced its new national service plan this morning, Labour has called it a “desperate, £2.5 billion unfunded commitment”.

Reeves added: “There’s nothing that will be in our manifesto that we haven’t said where the money is going to come from.

“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 home secretary’s strongest hint of how the government will enforce National Service would be to do it “just as we do with mandatory education between 16 and 18”.

He is referring to the rise in the participation age, passed into law by the Labour government in 2008, which makes it a requirement for a young person to be either in education or training between the ages of 16 and 18.

The law came into force in full much later, with pupils who left year 11 in the summer of 2014 being the first cohort affected.

Crucially, however, the part of the law which allows for fines has never been triggered by ministers, who fear the negative consequences of using the “stick” approach to non-compliance. Instead, councils are merely obliged to encourage young people to participate in the workforce.

Rishi Sunak, it is clear, intends to make the economy the centre of his election campaign. He went to see the King last week after the release of figures showing inflation dropped to just above the official 2 per cent target, and following data this month that revealed the economy had an unexpectedly strong start to the year.

He believes that, as a former chancellor, he will have the upper hand in any debates with Sir Keir Starmer on the economy, although that belief let him down when he fought Liz Truss for the Tory leadership.

To understand how he will frame the economic argument, it is useful to think of three distinct periods that the Tories will draw on to defend their record and seek to convince voters that sticking with them is the right thing to do.

Read more here: Can Rishi Sunak really rely on the Conservative economic record?

The national service scheme will be implemented using “pre-existing structures”, James Cleverly has told Times Radio.

The home secretary told Adam Boulton: “We’ll be utilising pre-existing structures. We have things like the Special Constabulary, on-call firefighters, first responders. There are charities and organisations desperate for additional people to go into their programmes.

“There will be additional costs, that’s what the £2.5 billion is allocated towards. But the idea we’re creating a whole other structure from scratch with all the upfront cost implications is a completely wrong assumption”.

James Cleverly’s seat benefited from £1.6 million of funds now set to pay for the proposed introduction of a national service plan, the Liberal Democrats have claimed.

The Conservatives have said that the cost of the scheme would come from the Shared Prosperity Fund, touted as a “pillar” of levelling up.

Braintree, the home secretary’s constituency, has received £1.6 million from the scheme, used by the Conservative-run council to fund rural job prospects and provide cost of living support to young people.

Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat spokeswoman for local government, said: “The home secretary is content to leave his own constituents high and dry by putting millions of pounds of funding at risk in a desperate plea for headlines.

“The fact they are planning to slash local funding to pay for these ludicrous plans shows just how out of touch the Conservative party has become. The British people deserve vital community projects, not Conservative vanity projects.”

Who is Keir Starmer really, and what does he want? Jason Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman, says in a piece for The Sunday Times that he often hears this question about the man who has led Labour since 2020.

Cowley describes an “opaque” figure whose personal ratings remain poor, in contrast to those of his party; someone who lacks a coherent politics or philosophical lodestar; someone who is respected by Labour MPs but does not inspire devotion.

In reality, Starmer is relentlessly focused on winning over voters rather than activists, with the pursuit of power as “the object of the exercise”, says Cowley. “Despite his flaws, Starmer’s cautious, pragmatic style seems well suited to these times.”

Read more here: The Keir Starmer I know: an outsider driven by self-belief, not politics

The national service plan is a “a headline-grabbing gimmick that doesn’t deal with the real challenges young people face”, Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary has said.

Liz Kendall told Times Radio’s Adam Boulton: “Elections should be about the future of the country, not fighting for a better past, and bringing something back that has been promised many times before.”

Kendall referred to a “similar promise” made by David Cameron in the run-up to the 2010 election. That promise, meant to end the “pointless waste of potential” among 16 and 17-year-olds, was formally launched in 2011 as the National Citizen Service. It had its funding cut by almost two thirds under Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

Kendall added: “What we want to see is a proper plan to tackle the issue of one in eight of our young people who are not in education, employment or training. We need to overhaul apprenticeships. We need to tackle the mental health problems so many young people face”.

James Cleverly has confirmed to Times Radio there would be no consequences if a young person refuses to participate in the “compulsory” National Service the party proposes.

Asked what would happen if young people said no, he said: “In the same way that we mandated full time educational training for people between 16 and 18. Actually, the compliance levels are incredibly high. Almost nobody pushed back against that. Now, whilst this isn’t exactly the same, we do … envisage there will be a very high level of take-up.”

• Tories want mandatory National Service at 18

Some element of compulsion may still apply, Cleverly insisted, but said “some of the details like that we want to do through a royal commission”.

The prime minister has released a video explaining the Conservative’s commitment to providing young people with the “opportunities they deserve”.

Britain should follow Israel’s model of National Service as it has created young people who are “unbelievably skilled” and “confident”, a Conservative MP has told Times Radio.

Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, said: “In Israel, all young people take part in military service. Their young people are unbelievably skilled, confident, competent, grown up, because of that experience.

“Those are things that we want to emulate here in this country. They need to take risks, gain competence by pushing themselves. This is doing them a service by giving them those opportunities at the start of their adult life, rather than coddling them, which I’m afraid is what some aspects of society have done over the last 10 or 20 years.”

Cates said National Service would boost the UK’s “sense of national identity and cohesion”.

She added: “It’s a really good idea, asking all 18-year-olds to contribute in some way to society. We need to boost recruitment into our armed forces. It’s really important for our sense of national identity and national cohesion to bring the generations back together. Volunteering in the community is a fantastic way of doing that.”

Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip and now honorary president of Reform UK, is not a fan of the Tories’ National Service plan. “[The Conservatives] don’t support it either — it’s a joke, isn’t it?” he told Sky News.

“You get a focus group of half a dozen Reform voters in a room, the chairman says ‘Now, what about national service?’ When you’re a weak leader — and Sunak is not a leader in any way at all — you’re a follower, so you follow what the focus groups say, and you say ‘by doing this I can attack the Reform vote’. That’s what it’s all about.

“Look, it’s totally impractical. The army has shrunk from 100,000 to 75,000 in 14 years of conservatism.”

Farage told GB News: “National service on any scale is literally impossible unless you build up the size of the army, and you need another 20,000 people to be trainers if you were doing it seriously. That is what followship is instead of leadership. Everyone knows he doesn’t mean it, everyone knows he’d never, ever implement it.”

Teenagers are forced to do things “all the time”, the home secretary said as he defended the Conservative proposal to introduce a form of compulsory National Service.

James Cleverly told Sky News that society recognised that 16-year-olds were not “fully-formed” and required education. “So the decision was made that they remain in education or training. So we force teenagers to be educated. No one argues with that. I think we all agree that it’s an investment in them,” he said.

“This is about maintaining that investment in young people, in the future of our society, in bringing people together, in pushing people sometimes out of their comfort zone, and perhaps priming a lifelong habit of volunteering, which is good for the individual, and good for society.”

Labour has refused to back the Conservative promise to introduce National Service for all 18-year-olds, calling it a “desperate £2.5 billion unfunded commitment”.

A party spokesman said: “This is not a plan — it’s a review which could cost billions and is only needed because the Tories hollowed out the armed forces to their smallest size since Napoleon.

“Britain has had enough of the Conservatives, who are bankrupt of ideas, and have no plans to end 14 years of chaos. It’s time to turn the page and rebuild Britain with Labour.”

After announcing his decision to stand down as an MP, Michael Gove is now said to be focusing on his dance moves. But this time the secretary of state for levelling up isn’t preparing to hit the nightclubs.

Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times chief political commentator, reports that he has set his sights on the BBC show Strictly Come Dancing. Shipman also reveals that Gove thinks Rishi Sunak was “daft” to call the election and suggests that “there is a reasonable case to make that he is the most consequential politician never to have held one of the four great offices of state”.

Michael Gove shaped Britain — and divided it. What’s next?

Nobody will face criminal sanctions for refusing to take part in Rishi Sunak’s plans to mandate every 18-year-old to sign up for a year of National Service, the home secretary has said.

The prime minister unveiled his first manifesto commitment, under which young people would have a choice between a full-time course or one weekend a month volunteering in their community.

James Cleverly said only teenagers who chose the military option would be paid as part of the programme. Asked on Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips what consequences somebody resisting the compulsory scheme would face, and if that would involve a prison term, Cleverly said: “No, there’s going to be no criminal sanction. There’s no one going to jail over this.”

Cleverly said the aim of the national service plan was to build a society where people “mix outside of their bubble, whether it’s through military service, other uniformed service or non-uniformed”. The plan would help “build a cohesive society” and tackle “social fragmentation” .

Most of today’s newspapers — including The Sunday Times — focus on the prime minister’s vow to bring back mandatory National Service for 18-year-olds. Rishi Sunak’s first manifesto commitment would offer teenagers the choice of a full-time course in the armed services or spending one weekend a month volunteering with the emergency services, the NHS or charities.

National Service in the UK officially ended in 1960. The Conservatives say this is a “new version” rather than a return to conscription, while Labour described it as a “desperate, £2.5 billion unfunded commitment”.