Farage Rejects Tory Calls to Clear Path for Johnson: U.K. Votes
Parties Re-Run Brexit Battle Over EU Immigration: U.K. Votes
Nigel Farage said he will fight all Labour-held seats, despite calls to stand his Brexit Party candidates down and clear the path for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to win a majority and deliver Brexit.
The pound earlier gained on speculation Farage could pull out of more seats -- but fell after he confirmed he would not. His decision makes it more difficult for Johnson to win the seats he needs to take from Labour if he is to secure a majority in Parliament for the Conservatives.
On Monday, Farage announced he would not contest seats that the Tories won at the last election in 2017. But Conservatives and pro-Brexit campaigners said this did not go far enough and urged him to stand aside in the seats the Tories are targeting.
Johnson is trying to win a clutch of key districts that Labour currently holds but which also voted for Brexit in the referendum in 2016. Johnson now faces competition from Farage’s team for the support of these crucial pro-Brexit voters.
Key Developments:
- Farage says he won’t give Johnson any more help and will compete with Tories to win Labour-held seats
- Security minister Brandon Lewis pledges to publish report on Russia meddling after election
- Polling expert John Curtice says Tories might need a bigger lead to get a majority, while Labour almost certainly won’t get a majority
- Nominations for candidates closed at 4 p.m.
- Must read: Black Ice and Blue Lips: U.K. Braces for Rare Winter Election
Corbyn Won’t Set ‘Arbitrary’ Immigration Target (5:15 p.m.)
Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn said he wouldn’t set ‘arbitrary’ targets on immigration and he wants a “fair system” that doesn’t keep families apart and allows people with needed skills into the U.K..
“Putting arbitrary figures on it as successive governments have done doesn’t work,” he said in a BBC TV interview. “We have to be realistic that in this country we have 40,000 nurse vacancies, we have a great shortage of doctors, we have shortages of many skills and they cannot be met very quickly because we’re not training enough people, so there’s going to be immigration in the future.”
Corbyn also said “as a point of principle, I want people to be able to be reunited with their families and I want British people to be able to work across Europe as they are at the present time.”
EU Takes Action Over U.K. Commissioner (5:10 p.m.)
The European Commission threatened a lawsuit against the U.K. for its failure to send Brussels a candidate to be its next commissioner. Britain said on Wednesday that it couldn’t make a nomination during an election campaign.
The commission, the EU’s executive arm, has given the U.K. until Nov. 22 to respond. In theory, the U.K. could be fined for breaching the EU treaties but that’s a long process that would go beyond the country’s currently scheduled Jan. 31 departure date.
A new commission, which is meant to comprise an official from each of the 28 EU countries, is slated to start work on Dec. 1 for a five-year term.
Nominations Close With A Brexit Withdrawal (4 p.m.)
Nominations closed for candidates to stand in the Dec. 12 election, one minute after the Brexit Party candidate in ultra-marginal Dudley North announced he would not be standing.
Rupert Lowe, who was due to contest the seat, which Labour won by just 22 votes in 2017, said he feared he would split the vote and help Jeremy Corbyn to win power.
The Green Party, which reached a deal with the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru not hinder each other’s chances in 60 seats, said it will be fielding 500 candidates in the election.
Labour Slams Record Hospital Waiting Times (12.45 p.m.)
The main opposition Labour Party attacked Boris Johnson’s Conservatives over the latest National Health Service data, which shows record waiting times for accident and emergency patients and missed cancer treatment targets.
“Any decent health secretary worth their salt would today apologize to patients for the worst A and E waits on record,” Labour’s health spokesman, Jon Ashworth, said on Twitter. “Today proves we need the 40 billion pound cash rescue plan Labour has for the NHS.”
Ashworth’s comments come after Health Secretary Matt Hancock tried to argue the poor figures illustrate the dangers of handing responsibility for the state-run health service to a Labour government. “The last thing our NHS can afford is Labour’s plans for a four-day week and uncontrolled and unlimited immigration,” he said.
Proper funding and protection of the U.K.’s National Health Service is always a key battleground in British politics, and is expected to be especially important in the run up to the Dec. 12 election. Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, said he was “worried that the NHS is under this degree of pressure at this point, well before the full onset of winter.”
Polls Suggest Tories Should Win, Curtice Says (12:10 p.m.)
“With a ten-point lead the Tories ought to win an overall majority -- but that’s not a prediction,” John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, told reporters in London.
Curtice is one of the most respected election experts in the country and masterminded the official exit polls, which accurately predicted the last two surprise results on election night.
“But because the Brexit Party are standing down in Conservative-held seats it could simply be a case of the Tories piling up more votes in the seats they are going to win anyway and therefore the lead the Tories may need in the polls in order to get an overall majority could be greater than the six or seven points that we currently anticipate.”
The Tories have been hovering around 39% in the polls to Labour’s 29% in the first fortnight of campaigning.
Curtice told another event in London that Corbyn would almost certainly not win a majority. “The chances of Labour winning a majority are as close to zero as it is possible to be,” he said.
Farage Won’t Stand Down in Labour Seats (11:43 a.m.)
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage indicated he won’t stand down his candidates in key Labour-held seats the Conservatives are targeting. “We’re going to stand up and fight Labour in every seat in this country, be in no doubt” he said at a campaign event in Hull.
He attacked Corbyn’s Labour for being out of touch with its traditional Labour heartlands in the north of England. “The Labour party is more about Hoxton” in a fashionable district of London, than it is Hull, he said. “They have been taking over by the north London intellectuals.”
Farage said his candidates “are now coming under relentless phone calls, emails and abuse and being told they should stand down.” He added: “That’s a complete and utter disgrace.”
Brexit Party Candidates Say They Won’t Quit (11:20 a.m.)
The highly anticipated Brexit Party event in Hull today has so far proved relatively uneventful. They’ve announced Michelle Dewberry, a previous winner of the U.K. version of TV show “The Apprentice,”, as their candidate for Kingston Upon Hull West.
“Standing in this election was a tough choice for me to make,” she said. “But ultimately, I believe passionately that there are many people in Hull West and Hessle who have been let down by Labour. As for the Tories, they have shown, year after year, that they do not care about the north.”
Despite speculation, there has been no sign that Farage will stand down candidates in key Conservative target seats, with Dewberry urging the crowd to “not fall for all this nonsense about tactical voting.” Farage and party chairman Richard Tice are due to speak soon.
EU Mulls Reaction to U.K. Commissioner Snub (10:45 a.m.)
The legal services of EU institutions are assessing the implications of the U.K’s refusal (see earlier) to nominate a candidate for the bloc’s executive arm, three diplomats said in Brussels. While European law dictates that the new EU Commission can’t be confirmed and sworn in until it has 28 members, European Parliament lawyers are of the opinion that a single member state can’t bloc the functioning of institutions, one of the officials said.
The second official said that at this stage, there are no concerns about complications in the functioning of the Commission, adding that the U.K. letter was expected. “The Council now has to reflect on this,” the third official said, after reminding that the U.K. is in breach of its commitment -- under the Brexit extension deal -- to nominate a commissioner.
A spokesman for the bloc’s executive arm declined to comment further than reiterating that the U.K. had committed to both nominating a commissioner and to not disrupting the functioning of EU institutions.
Hogan: Standards Key to EU-U.K. Trade Deal (10 a.m.)
Incoming European Union trade commissioner Phil Hogan said an agreement on regulations and standards will be central to EU-U.K. talks on a free trade deal, and that the bloc is “ready to go” on negotiations once the withdrawal agreement is ratified.
“I think the British public will demand and expect that their govt will sign on to EU standards, because we have the highest standards in the world,” Hogan said in an RTE radio interview.
Lewis: Tories Committed to Cutting Migration (8:30 a.m.)
Home Office minister Brandon Lewis said a Conservative government would be committed to reducing net migration using a points-based visa system -- though he declined to say by how much -- and said his party’s estimate that Labour’s policy would allow more than 800,000 migrants every year is an underestimate.
“We want to target net migration so that people can see that we’ve got control,” Lewis told BBC Radio 4. He also tried to shift the blame to the Liberal Democrats -- the Conservative Party’s coalition partners from 2010 to 2015 -- for the government’s failure to control immigration in those years.
Lewis also said the government will publish Parliament’s long-awaited report into Russian influence on U.K. democracy after the election. He was answering a question on Russian links to the Conservative Party; former U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said this week she was “dumbfounded” the government would wait until after voters have already cast their ballots before releasing the report.
Labour Not Split on Immigration: Pidcock (7:30 a.m.)
It’s a “false flag” to say Labour is split over its immigration policy, the party’s employment spokeswoman Laura Pidcock said, emphasizing that stricter regulations would answer the concerns of workers that their pay and conditions are being undercut by immigrants.
Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, Labour’s biggest labor union backer, said on Wednesday that the Labour conference vote to retain free movement of people in the EU was not “a sensible approach” and that he would argue against it appearing in the party’s manifesto.
McCluskey “is the leader of the trade union that I am a member of, he talked very clearly about there not being an environment where national terms and conditions can be undermined by exploitative bosses,” Pidcock said. “The issue is not about migrant labor, the issue is about what kind of legislative environment we have for workers, and we will create one where all workers are protected.”
Brexit Party Will Help Tories: Farage (Earlier)
Nigel Farage said his Brexit Party’s role is to hold Boris Johnson to his promises and not soften his line on leaving the EU.
Johnson “has made a promise, the job of the Brexit Party is to hold him to account,” Farage said in an interview with the BBC. “If we trusted the Conservative Party we’d never have had a referendum,” he said. “All the change that’s happened in the Conservative Party” has been down to the Brexit Party and its predecessors, he said.
Farage said his party will continue to aggressively target Labour seats and he will be campaigning in the West Midlands and north of England in the coming days.
“This election will be decided by tactical voting decisions across the country,” Farage said. “In 2015 the effect of the UKIP vote helped the Conservatives,” he added. “We took more Conservative votes in the south and south east and more Labour votes in the north.”
Liberal Democrats Won’t Help Gauke (Earlier)
The Liberal Democrats won’t stand aside for former Conservative Cabinet minister David Gauke, who is standing as an independent, because he wants a “soft Brexit,” Luciana Berger told BBC radio.
Berger appeared not to be aware that Gauke, who asked on Wednesday for the Liberal Democrat candidate to stand down in his district, has shifted his position to favoring a second referendum and pledged to campaign for Remain.
Gauke repeated his pledge after Berger spoke: “Let me reiterate what I said yesterday about Brexit. My preference was for the country to come together behind a soft Brexit. But that’s not going to happen -- it’s no longer an option,” Gauke wrote on Twitter. “The best option now is a confirmatory referendum on the PM’s deal. I would campaign to remain.”
The Liberal Democrats also won’t step down to help any candidates who “want to get Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street,” said Berger, who quit the Labour Party over Corbyn’s leadership. The deadline for nominations is 4 p.m. on Thursday.
U.K. Refuses to Nominate EU Commissioner (Earlier)
The U.K. formally told the European Union it won’t nominate anyone for the bloc’s executive arm, in what Brussels may see as a clear breach of the terms under which the Brexit extension was granted. Adding insult to injury, the U.K. only responded after EU Commission president-elect sent two letters to Boris Johnson, reminding him of the U.K’s legal obligations as a member state.
The development puts the EU in an awkward legal situation. The new EU Commission can’t be confirmed and sworn in unless it has 28 members, one from each state. Under the bloc’s treaty, a unanimous decision by member states is required to alter this clause, and the U.K signaled it won’t object.
Altering the composition of the Commission could land the EU in a difficult legal situation if the Tories don’t win the election, and the U.K doesn’t leave the EU at the end of January after it has been stripped of its commissioner. “It’s uncharted waters,” a senior official in Brussels said.
Earlier:
--With assistance from Stuart Biggs, Nikos Chrysoloras, Peter Flanagan, Thomas Penny and Alex Morales.
To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Ritchie in London at gritchie10@bloomberg.net;Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.net;Ian Wishart in Brussels at iwishart@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Stuart Biggs
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