Shadow health secretary says Tory election victory would be ‘nightmare on Downing Street’ and expresses fury junior doctors’ strike is not resolved

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Wes Streeting has declined to rule out council tax hikes or re-evaluations.

Pressed on whether this could happen under a Labour government on Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, the shadow health secretary repeated the party’s line: “We don’t want to see the tax burden on working people increase …

But to get policies in the manifesto, you had to run the gauntlet of answering two fundamental questions. Can we keep this promise? Can the country afford this promise? And if the answer to either of those questions was no, it’s not in the manifesto …

Once we get the economy growing, which is the central starting point of a Labour government if we win the next general election, we will have more available to either invest in our public services or put back into people’s pockets.

For 45 years, Britain has been blighted by Conservative ideologies that promised a path to prosperity, but achieved nothing of the sort

The Tory party in three weeks’ time promises to be in a more ruinous, even life-threatening position than Labour was in the aftermath of the 2019 general election. Labour at least had a route to recovery after an epic defeat – to blend mainstream and centre-left opinion around a pragmatic programme for government, to eliminate all traces of antisemitism and to marginalise its toxic extremists. The question was whether its leadership, membership and trade union backers would have the capacity and want power sufficiently to pull it off. They have.

Today’s Tories and their blindly ideological press – which has had such an important role in reducing the party to the political carrion on which Nigel Farage’s Reform now preys – has no such shared grasp of the task ahead. There is no longer a strong centre right existing as a coherent formation that could anchor such a recovery, or skilled politicians who might lead it. Instead, over this parliament the party has disintegrated into a babble of rightwing cults ranging from Trussite libertarians to “National Conservatives” stressing the traditional virtues of family, faith and national community. The response to the desperate condition in which millions now live and the wider crises of stagnant productivity and investment, intensified by Brexit, is to blame immigration, working-class fecklessness and high taxes – even if those are moderate by European standards.

Guardian analysis of messaging in post-war Tory and Labour manifestos reveals shifting political focus

Climate change, Brexit, and Europe might have been key touchstones in previous election campaigns, but Guardian analysis shows they are given less prominence in the two main UK parties’ latest manifestos in 2024 .

Looking into the text of every Conservative and Labour election manifesto dating back to 1945 shows that, while both parties still dedicate column inches to the climate emergency, these issues are less prominent than in the last election cycle.

Landmark powers to impose huge fines to tackle tax evasion and avoidance are ‘pointless’, figures show

The UK’s tax authority has not fined a single “enabler” of offshore tax evasion or noncompliance in five years, despite landmark powers to impose huge fines.

Tory ministers claimed new laws introduced in 2017 allowed HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to pursue accountants, lawyers and bankers who facilitate offshore tax evasion would “create a level playing field”, with potential fines of several millions of pounds.

Labour may currently have a commanding lead, but a second lacklustre half to the campaign could lead some voters to stay at home

Twenty-point poll leads, historic strength on all the polling indicators, a flailing opponent fighting for third place – and yet still Labour worries. It is no wonder.

Dark nights of disappointment in suburban leisure centres haunt Labour nightmares, with candidates and activists cruelly betrayed by late swings and polling errors: 1970, 1992, 2015 – every generation of Labourites bears its scars.

The Conservatives have no new vision for the next five years and the Liberal Democrats project a qualified optimism, but Labour could eventually prove transformative

The Britain that the next government will inherit on 5 July has been profoundly misgoverned for 14 years. Productivity, the heart of prosperity, has stagnated, as has business investment; the already weak trends were ruptured in 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum, and have stubbornly refused to budge since. Low growth and frozen living standards are thus guaranteed until those trends are reversed. Even though taxation has climbed, there cannot be one citizen unaware of the intolerable stress on underfunded public services set to intensify in the years ahead on current spending plans.

Meanwhile, life expectancy in disadvantaged parts of England is falling for the first time in more than a century; infant mortality is rising ; poverty so blights 4.3 million children that we have among the shortest five-year-olds in Europe ; one in six adults are illiterate or innumerate . People commonly live with their parents until their mid 30s because housing, whether rented or mortgaged, is prohibitively expensive. Having children is deferred; the birthrate is falling.

Analysis by leading experts the Nuffield Trust reveals that main parties’ manifestos would squeeze health spending

Labour and the Conservatives would both leave the NHS with lower spending increases than during the years of Tory austerity, according to an independent analysis of their manifestos by a leading health thinktank.

The assessment by the respected Nuffield Trust of the costed NHS policies of both parties, announced in their manifestos last week, says the level of funding increases would leave them struggling to pay existing staff costs, let alone the bill for massive planned increases in doctors, nurses and other staff in the long-term workforce plan agreed last year.

Labour lead would soar to 24 points if Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman became leader, according to Opinium poll

Three out of the four Tory MPs seen as the most likely replacements for Rishi Sunak would fare even worse than the current prime minister in a general election battle against Keir Starmer, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer .

The Conservatives have been involved in a fresh bout of leadership speculation over the past week, after rumours surfaced of a plot to dump Sunak and replace him with Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House, before the next election.

Drawing on his years at No 10, the UK foreign secretary is happy to ruffle feathers on the international stage while setting the agenda

It is only four months since Rishi Sunak brought him back into government as foreign secretary but already, having felt the pace quicken around them, officials and diplomats have given David Cameron their own title: prime minister for external affairs.

“Cameron is on a whole other level,” said one diplomat on the inside. “Before, we had [Boris] Johnson, we had [Dominic] Raab, we had [Liz]Truss and then [James] Cleverly. Cameron can read a room – he immediately sees the elephant in it, if there is one. He constantly comes back on summonses and wants to know: ‘When can I get more on this? When can I get an update on that?’”