Sunak defends decision not to take immediate action against Tories accused in betting scandal – UK election live

Key events

We will be liveblogging Nick Robinson’s BBC interview with Adrian Ramsay, co leader of the Green party, which kicks off at 7pm.

Starmer sidesteps question about whether he is likely to become 'progressively more radical' in office

Cole says the recent Starmer biography quotes an aide saying Starmer is the sort of person who might become more radical over time.

Starmer says he has a big job. He is looking forward. He dodges the question about the extent of his potential radicalism.

And that is it.

Cole was referring to this quote from Tom Baldwin’s biography of Starmer.

As one former adviser puts it, political leaders more usually define themselves by a ‘radical vision’ which they are then forced to cut and trim down through compromise. Starmer begins the other way round; he exhausts conventional options before, if necessary, becoming progressively more radical.

That is all from me. Nadeem Badshah is now taking over.

Q: Are you ready for winning with a supermajority?

Starmer says this is a change election. But he is taking nothing for granted. Change will only happen if people vote for it.

Q: Why do people like JK Rowling think Labour is wrong on women-only spaces.

Starmer says he respects what Rowling has said. She has made some really important points, he says.

He says it is important that people discuss these issues with respect for each other.

Starmer defends saying he would not go private if he or family member were on NHS waiting list

A woman in the audience says Starmer said he would rather have a family member die than have them use private healthcare.

Starmer says he never said that.

He says he was asked (in the first TV debate) if he or a family member would pay to jump the queue if he were on a waiting list.

He says the waiting list is almost 8m. He suggests the idea of someone wanting to be PM, and charged with bringing waiting lists down, skipping the queue would not be right.

If a family member was in an acute, life-threatening situation, he would want them in the NHS, because NHS hospitals are best for acute care, he says.

He says he experienced times when his mother was in hospital and her life was at risk. He speaks from experience, he says.

Cole says there is a 65% success rate for asylum applications. So the odds of being able to stay are good.

Starmer says, under the government’s policy, the chance of staying is 100%. That is because applications are not being processed. If claims are not processed, people cannot be returned.

He says the current situation is not a disincentive. Rishi Sunak says passing the Rwanda legislation would be a disincentive. But the number of people coming is going up, he says.

Starmer says, from his time running the CPS, he is confident that he can smash the gangs behind the small boat crossings.

And he says he would put more staff in the returns unit so that people whose applications for asylum are turned down can be returned.

A person in the audience says people destroy their documents. So where are you going to return them to?

Starmer says you can return people. The number of returns has fallen by 44%, he says.

He says he knows what it is like to share intelligence with other countries. “I’ve been in the room when we’ve done this,” he says. With other countries, the UK agreed a strategy, and an arrest strategy, so people can arrested in the same time. He has seen that done with terrorist cases. He thinks it can be done with people smuggling cases too, he says.

Starmer says he will not take the UK back into the EU.

He does not want to return to what was a “pretty awful period” for the UK politically.

Starmer says he thinks he was right to serve under Corbyn, and push for change in Labour from within

A member of the audience says, if Starmer said he thought Corbyn would be a great PM, that meant he was willing to lie. How do they know he is not lying now?

Starmer says he helped changed the police service in Northern Ireland. He did that with the Crown Prosecution Service too. And he has done that with Labour.

He says he now wants the chance to take the country, which he says he thinks has been broken, and change it.

Cole asks the person in the audience if he is convinced.

The man who asked the question says he hopes Starmer was not being wholehearted in his endorsement of Corbyn.

Cole says other Labour MPs did not serve under Corbyn.

Starmer says he did not vote for Corbyn. But the party chose him twice. People had to make a decision. But he thought deciding Labour’s policy would be important for the future. And he wanted to be able to challenge on issues like antisemitism from the inside.

Q: But you failed to change the party.

It is fundamentally different now, Starmer says.

Q: But you did not change it when Corbyn was leader.

Starmer says, even when Corbyn was leader, he never let him take Labour away from Nato.

Q: But you did not speak out against Corbyn.

Starmer says he did on issue like antisemitism.

He says he knew there would be a day after Corbyn when they would have to rebuild the party. He implies he is glad about his decision to fight for that change from inside.

Q: Do you stand by exactly how you behaved during the Corbyn years?

Starmer says he has reflected on this. He thinks it was right to fight from within.

Cole says Starmer said last week that Jeremy Corbyn would have been a better PM than Boris Johnson. How would he have been better on Ukraine?

Starmer says he is going to do something he does not often do – praise Johnson. He says he supported Johnson’s line on Ukraine. And he supported Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss on Ukraine policy too, he says.

Q: Would it have helped or hindered our response to the war in the Middle East if we had had a PM who described Hamas as friends?

Starmer says the choice at the last election was a bad one. He never expected Labour to win. He says he has changed Labour, and Corbyn is now not even a Labour candidate.

Keir Starmer is being interviewed now.

When Harry Cole puts it to him that he is days away from becoming PM, Starmer says he has a lot of work to do and won’t stop until 10pm next Thursday.

Sunak says people 'queuing up in Calais' waiting to come to UK because Labour planning to ditch Rwanda policy

Sunak says taxes will go up under Labour. “It’s as simple as that.”

People have to ask themselves if they can afford £2,000 more in taxes that he says they will have to pay under Labour, he says.

(Labour does not accept that figure.)

Sunak accepts there were some things the government should have done differently.

But the election is about the future, he says.

Q: Do you regret calling the election now?

No, says Sunak. He says after he got inflation down, this was the moment for the country to decide its future.

Under Labour, every pensioner will be paying a retirement tax, he says. But that won’t happen under the Tories, he says, because the party will raise the income tax threshold for pensioners in line with the state pension.

And the Rwanda policy will be abandoned, he says.

Those illegal migrants will not be on planes to Rwanda. They will be out on our streets putting pressure on public services and, by the way, I can tell you now they are queuing up in Calais waiting for a Starmer government so they can come here and stay here.

And that’s it. The Sunak Q&A is over.

Sunak says people can trust what he says about Labour because he was right about what would happen under Liz Truss

Q: Do you feel any responsibility for inflicting Liz Truss on voters?

Sunak says he spent a summer trying to persuade the Tory party that what she was saying was wrong.

He was right in what he said about Truss.

And that is why people can trust what he says about Labour, he says.

UPDATE: Sunak said:

I was right then when I warned about Liz Truss and that’s why all of you can trust me now when I also warn about the damage that Keir Starmer would do to our economy.

In that election, everyone said I was going to lose, I was saying something that no-one wanted to hear, but I was saying it because I believed it, and I’m telling you again now, it all seems a bit familiar, if Keir Starmer’s your prime minister the economy is going to suffer and all of you are going to suffer.

I don’t want to see that happen. That’s why I’m carrying on going every day at this election, I believe in what I’m saying and I want to stop those tax rises happening for all of you.

Q: How do you feel about the pressure people are under due to interest rates?

Sunak says bringing down inflation was his priority.

Q: But what about people who have lost their homes?

Sunak says everything he is doing is about giving people more security.

Under Labour, everyone will face higher taxes, he claims.