Good morning. Two days to go. Labour is urging people to get out and vote. For a couple of weeks now, Labour’s priority has been to remove any complacency about victory among its voters. The fear is that Tory failure is being taken for granted. If the results on Friday aren’t as comfortable as predicted, expect this narrative to be central to the post-match analysis.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, are talking up bizarre claims that Keir Starmer won’t work hard after he said he wanted to protect time with his kids on Friday evenings. I suppose this plays into the Tory line that Starmer is arrogantly taking the result for granted. But I don’t think it will land. As I pointed out when the Tories deployed the “sleepy Keir” jibe at the start of the campaign, people don’t like a try-hard. Wanting to spend time with his kids on a Friday evening makes Starmer seem more relatable, not less.
These are the dregs of the campaign. But the Conservatives have ceded something important: economic growth.
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Cut taxes; stop the boats; protect pensioners. That was the offer Rishi Sunak made on the BBC this morning. It’s part of the Tories’ defensive strategy, which is focused on retaining older Tory voters and people worried about illegal migration. Conservative promises are noticeably short-termist. There is no attempt to set out a vision for the next five years. Economic stability is only mentioned as the precondition for tax cuts. Economic growth is barely mentioned at all.
That goes against the political consensus. Keir Starmer knows growth is key. So did Liz Truss. She thought cutting taxes would incentivise individuals and companies to work harder, boosting economic growth and increasing tax receipts. For Labour, growth is the answer to all its problems. Not enough tax revenue? We’ll grow the economy. Low wages? Growth. Spending cuts? Ditto.
Ceding the economic growth line to Labour has been damaging for the Tories. It has made them seem uninterested in the future. To be fair to Sunak, the BBC interviewers spent more time trying to catch him out on the price of a loaf of bread than focusing on his policies. (Well-prepped Sunak knew the answer, of course.) But Sunak himself was not forthcoming with plans for beyond the next Budget. And he could have been. Like Labour, the Conservative manifesto promises to speed up planning permission for infrastructure projects. It also promises to fund Northern Powerhouse Rail with extra funding on top of the savings from cancelling HS2. More childcare is a core Tory promise.
But you don’t hear about it. Instead, the Tories are briefing about what Starmer does on a Friday night.
Attention watch…
The gambling scandal broke through the attention barrier. Reform will also be concerned: 9 per cent of people registered the revelations about racism among its candidates and activists. This interesting graph from YouGov shows which news stories voters have noticed most:
Freddie’s picks
Has a Supreme Court ruling in America put the president above the law? Katie explains its significance.
“Neither the politicians nor the broadcasters have distinguished themselves in this election,” Roger Mosey writes in this damning appraisal of the media’s campaign.
Hannah writes her column on Reform’s problems with its activists and candidates.
UK military unprepared for “conflict of any scale”, warns ex-defence official – concerning interview in the Financial Times.
Andrew, Hannah and I discuss Joe Biden, the French election and whether Starmer can stave off Reform:
Mailshot
Guardian: British female politicians targeted by fake pornography
Reuters: Ukrainian air base under fire as Russia aims at arriving F-16s
Roger Cohen: The centre collapses in France, Macron marooned
Rebecca Mead: Fitzcarraldo Editions makes challenging literature chic
Micah Meadowcroft: In search of American aristocracy
Corey Robin: Hayek, accidental Freudian
James Meek: The housing crisis
Why whole-genome sequencing can improve child cancer treatments
Rare look inside prison that housed world’s most dangerous criminals
Ben’s take
Error margins. “The Conservatives are an error margin from oblivion,” was a line from one of my first pieces of the 2024 election campaign. Nothing has happened to change my mind on that possibility since then. But what if the polls are overstating Labour’s forecasted share of support?
Well, it turns out, this could be quite big. It doesn’t change the narrative: Labour will still win. The next government will be a Labour government. But if Labour’s forecast share is overstated by three percentage points, and you assume a proportionate redistribution to the other parties, then Labour will end up winning 382 seats not 434, as Britain Predicts is currently forecasting.
We are less than 48 hours from polls opening in what will likely be the most totemic general election in recent memory. But the breadth of probability is astonishing. Labour could be in with a healthy majority, or an overwhelming one. The Conservatives could be reduced to 20 seats, or something shy of 200. That’s what the polls say. Twenty is as likely as 200. That’s a lot of people’s jobs.
And with that…
Let me know what you think about today’s Morning Call by hitting reply. My thanks to Barney, Ben and George.
Have a great day,
Freddie — @freddiejh8
On Sunak, bet he’s booked the biz class family ticket to LA for Saturday - he won’t stay. The polling is interesting. Weariness has set in for politicos and voters, everyone is going through the motions, and maybe Labour are slipping a point or two as the reality of voting gets closer. The supermajority attack line was silly, for anoraks, but the “don’t surrender” one from last week probably worked better, was more emotive, less irritating.
Is the triumph of the far right in the first round of the French election likely to have any knock-on effect one way or the other on Reform UK? Not necessarily with the public, most of whom probably neither know nor care, but within the party itself and its strategic planning going forward?