The two candidates to become Britain’s next prime minister clashed sharply over tax, immigration and health policy in a televised debate on Tuesday, with political rivals cutting into each other’s mouths and at times becoming unpleasant.
The standoff comes just a month before a crucial general election that will determine whether the opposition Labour Party can capitalize on its large lead in the opinion polls and end 14 years of chaotic Conservative-led rule that has seen five prime ministers.
Early in the debate, Chancellor Rishi Sunak repeatedly claimed his rival, Labour leader Keir Starmer, would raise Britons’ taxes by £2,000 a year if he won the election, a claim he eventually hit back at as “complete nonsense”.
Labour said the figure was based on flawed assumptions, and senior Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth, in a post-debate interview with Sky News, claimed Mr Sunak had lied. But Mr Starmer’s failure to explicitly deny the allegation earlier in the broadcast set the tone for what followed: a solid but defensive performance from the opposition leader against a dynamic and sometimes ruthless opponent.
A poll of viewers showed Starmer was more well liked and seen as more trustworthy, but Sunak won by a narrow margin. The debate is unlikely to swing votes significantly, but Sunak’s performance may have eased some tensions within an uneasy party.
The broadcast was Mr Sunak’s chance to jump-start a faltering election campaign, with the Conservative Party trailing far in the polls for more than 18 months. After a gaffe-ridden start, the prime minister’s prospects appeared to worsen on Monday after right-wing insurgent Nigel Farage’s surprise decision to stand in the election.
Starmer’s main aim was to avoid losing momentum ahead of the July 4 general election, which opinion polls show he will likely win comfortably.
There were no decisive blows in Tuesday’s hour-long debate, filmed before a studio audience in Salford, near Manchester, and the first of two planned televised showdowns between Mr Sunak and Mr Starmer.
A spirited but sometimes bossy Mr Sunak was forceful in his arguments, accused Labour of having no plan for governing and frequently interrupted Mr Starmer despite pleas for calm from host Julie Etchingham.
But Mr Sunak struggled to defend the Conservatives’ 14-year record in power, and Starmer mocked his failure to cut the health system’s waiting list of more than seven million treatments, as he had promised.
“We had 7.2 million, now we’re at 7.5 million. The Prime Minister says the population is falling, but he’s a man who says he’s good at maths,” Starmer said of the Prime Minister.
“It’s down from when it was high,” Sunak replied, drawing laughter from the audience.
In the usual exchange of claim and counter-claim, Starmer said the government had “lost control” of the economy, adding that “ordinary people are paying the price”. Sunak insisted his plans would help restore economic growth and said Labour would put that progress at risk.
Televised general election debates are a relatively recent phenomenon in Britain, with the first one held in 2010. This time, it was up to Mr Sunak to make an impact: the broadcast was described as “one of the last opportunities for the prime minister to change the course of his party’s politics”, by Lee Cain, who worked in Downing Street under one of Mr Sunak’s predecessors, Boris Johnson.
Farage, who became leader of Reform UK, a small far-right party which campaigns for cuts to immigration, spoke to several hundred people in Clacton-on-Sea earlier in the day, part of the area where he plans to stand in the general election.
Farage used his reputation as a political disruptor to urge voters to send him to Parliament as a “terrible nuisance”. But not all bystanders were friendly, with one protester hurling what appeared to be a giant milkshake at Farage and a woman being later arrested.
Farage, a Brexit supporter, has tried and failed to become an MP seven times before, but analysts say he has a good chance of winning in Clacton, a district that strongly supported Britain’s departure from the European Union and was once represented by a member of Farage’s pro-Brexit party, the UK Independence Party.
The UK electoral system favours the two largest parties and makes it very difficult for smaller parties to make inroads, so Reform UK is likely to win only a small number of seats nationally.
But Mr Farage’s party tends to get more votes from the Conservatives than from Labour, potentially costing Mr Sunak’s party thousands of votes and dozens of seats it won in the 2019 general election.
Mr Sunak on Tuesday made a new attempt to appeal to potential Reform Party voters by promising to limit immigration by setting an annual cap on immigration.
Under his plan, a committee of experts would recommend the maximum number of immigrants allowed each year, which would then be voted on in Parliament.
Labour has dismissed previous Conservative election promises to limit immigration as meaningless, pointing out that they have been broken and net immigration has almost tripled since the last election in 2019.
During Tuesday’s debate, Sunak accused Labour of having no plan to curb the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, and suggested he would be willing to take Britain out of international agreements if he remained prime minister, blocking his attempt to put some asylum seekers arriving on British shores on one-way flights to Rwanda.
Mr Starmer called the plan an “expensive gimmick” and blamed Mr Sunak for the surge in legal immigration since the 2019 general election. “The chancellor says it’s ‘too expensive’,” Mr Starmer said, adding: “Who is to blame?”
