The two contenders to become Britain’s next prime minister clashed furiously over taxes, immigration and health policy on Tuesday in a televised debate that at times devolved into bad-tempered exchanges as political rivals talked over each other.
The confrontation came exactly a month before a crucial general election that will determine whether the opposition Labor Party can capitalize on its strong lead in opinion polls and end 14 turbulent years of Conservative-led government during which the party has had five different prime ministers.
Almost as soon as the debate began, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claimed that his opponent, Labor leader Keir Starmer, would raise taxes on Britons by £2,000 a year if he won the election, repeating the claim numerous times. “Absolute rubbish,” Starmer finally responded.
Labor said the figure was based on faulty assumptions, and Jonathan Ashworth, a senior party lawmaker, claimed in an interview with Sky News after the debate that Sunak was lying. But Starmer’s failure to clearly reject the claim at the start of the broadcast set the tone for what followed: a strong but defensive performance by the opposition leader against a feisty and sometimes ruthless opponent.
A quick opinion poll of viewers declared Sunak a narrow winner, although Starmer was seen as more likable and trustworthy. While the debate is unlikely to generate a significant number of votes, Sunak’s performance may have calmed some nerves within his anxious party.
With the Conservatives ranking poorly in opinion polls for more than 18 months, the broadcast was an opportunity for Sunak to revive his stalled campaign. After a gaffe-prone start, the prime minister’s prospects apparently took a turn for the worse on Monday when Nigel Farage, a right-wing insurgent, made the surprise decision to stand in the election.
For Starmer, the main goal was to avoid losing momentum ahead of the July 4 general election, which opinion polls show he is on track to win, perhaps comfortably.
There was no decisive blow in Tuesday’s hour-long debate, which was filmed in front of a studio audience in Salford, near Manchester, and was the first of two scheduled televised contests between Sunak and Starmer.
Buoyed but sometimes intimidating, Sunak was more aggressive in making his point, accusing Labor of having no plans for government and often speaking over Starmer, despite pleas for calm from Julie Etchingham, the moderator. .
But Sunak struggled to defend the Conservative Party’s 14 years of rule, and Starmer ridiculed his failure to cut waiting lists for treatment of more than seven million procedures in the healthcare system as he had promised.
“There were 7.2 million, now there are 7.5 million. He says they are going down and this is the guy who says he is good at math,” Starmer said of the prime minister.
“They are coming down from where they were when they were higher,” Sunak responded to laughter from the audience.
In a well-known exchange of claims and counterclaims, Starmer said the government had “lost control” of the economy and added that it was ordinary people “who are paying the price.” Sunak argued his plans were helping to revive economic growth and said Labor would put progress at risk.
Televised debates for general elections are a relatively recent phenomenon in Britain; the first took place in 2010. This time the responsibility for making an impact fell to Sunak, in a broadcast that was described as “one of the last opportunities The prime minister has to change the political fortunes of his party”, by Lee Cain, who he worked in Downing Street for Boris Johnson, one of Sunak’s predecessors.
Earlier on Tuesday, Farage, who took over as leader of Reform UK, a small far-right party campaigning to reduce immigration, addressed a crowd of several hundred people in Clacton-on-Sea, which forms part of the area in which you plan to compete in the general election.
Capitalizing on his reputation as a political disruptor, Farage appealed to voters to send him to Parliament “to be a bloody nuisance”. However, not all onlookers were friendly and one protester threw what appeared to be a large milkshake at him. A woman was later arrested.
Farage, a leading Brexiteer, has tried and failed seven times to become a member of the British Parliament. But analysts believe he has a good chance this time in Clacton, an area that voted heavily in favor of Britain leaving the European Union and was once represented by a lawmaker from the UK Independence Party, the party. pro-Brexit party that Farage used to form. lead.
Nationally, Reform UK is unlikely to win more than a handful of seats under Britain’s electoral system, which favors the two largest parties and makes it very difficult for smaller parties to advance.
But Farage’s party tends to win more Conservative votes than Labor and could divert thousands of votes that Sunak’s party won in the 2019 general election, potentially costing it dozens of seats.
On Tuesday, Sunak made a new attempt to appeal to potential reform voters, promising to limit immigration by putting an annual cap on entrants.
Under their plans, a committee of experts would recommend a maximum number of immigrants to be allowed each year, which would then be voted on by Parliament.
Labor dismissed the promise as meaningless, pointing out that previous Conservative election promises to limit immigration had not been fulfilled and that net migration had roughly tripled since the last election in 2019.
At one point during Tuesday’s debate, Sunak accused Labor of having no plan to curb the number of asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats. And he hinted that he would be willing to pull Britain out of international agreements if he remained prime minister and was thwarted by his efforts to send some of those arriving to British shores on one-way flights to Rwanda.
Starmer described that plan as an “expensive stunt” and attacked Sunak over the rise in legal immigration since the 2019 general election. “The prime minister says, ‘It’s too high,’” Starmer said, adding: “Who is in charge?”.