John Swinney set to be confirmed as new SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister – UK politics live | Politics

The former UKIP MEP, Patrick O’Flynn, has written an interesting piece today in which he analyses the role Reform UK is playing a role in Rishi Sunak’s attempts to make centre-right voters fearful that Britain faces a Labour-led “coalition of chaos.”

The real target of this message is the Reform UK vote. The Tory machine thinks this is squeezable and squeezable very hard so long as it can get this binary up and running among right-leaning people.

O’Flynn, who recalls George Osborne deploying a similar strategy, with some success, against UKIP, adds on his substack that Reform’s current leadership risk “looking like a pair of kamikaze pilots” in their celebration of moves to bring about the destruction of the Tory Party

If they were to become “less tribal and more imaginative then they could further divide and weaken the Tory parliamentary party over the summer,” he says, although O’Flynn reckons only Nigel Farage could do this.

He was named recently by Liz Truss as one of her favourite political leaders of moment, but the former prime minister gone below the radar of Argentina’s president, Javier Milei.

“Quién? [who?]” asked Milei, when asked by the BBC in an interview what he thought of her.

Truss had said “Well, I like Javier Milei,” during a recent interview with GB News when she was asked for her “favourite Tory leaders” other than Churchill and Thatcher.

Milei, a self-styled standard bearer for libertarian policies, has been pressing ahead with plans for Argentina’s embattled economy, which is grappling with inflation above 200%, depleted foreign currency reserves and a timebomb of debt repayments owned to creditors and investors. In January he dropped some of the most divisive spending reforms but – despite clashes on the streets – has now outlasted the 49 days in power of Truss.

“I don’t have elements to give an opinion but what in the UK is defined as conservative, well we we libertarians have a lot of common ground with that,” he told the BBC.

Argentina’s presidebt, Javier Milei, has said that he accepts the Falkland Islands are currently “in the hands of the UK.”

That subtle change of language, in comparison to previous Argentine leaders, was accompanied by a view from Milei to get the islands back through diplomatic channels, though he told the BBC in an interview that there was “no instant solution”.

Milei, who won a resounding victory in the presidential race last year, had said after his victory that Buenos Aires had “non-negotiable” sovereignty over the Falklands, the archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean known to Argentinians as the Islas Malvinas.

The islands were the subject of a bloody conflict in 1982 after Argentinian forces invaded and briefly occupied the territory. The war claimed the lives of 255 British service personnel, three islanders and 649 Argentinian personnel.

We also have some bank holiday listening for you if you missed it yesterday.

In the first of our Politics Weekly Westminster episodes, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar and political correspondent Kiran Stacey go over the big wins and losses from the local and mayoral elections

We’ve now turned on comments below the blog for those eager to share bank holiday political thoughts.

The French President Emmanuel Macron has been marking the 30th anniversary of the linking of the Channel Tunnel.

Rishi Sunak has yet to do likewise (cue music), though at least one Conservative MP has retweeted Macron.

Meanwhile, Jonn Elledge has also been thinking of the same moment from the 1990s. In a comment piece for the Guardian, he wonders [brace position]:

Tunnel or no tunnel, perhaps England and France were never that distinct after all.

Labour has marked the anniversary of the Conservatives re-entering government at the 2010 election by launching a what the opposition have called “Conflix” website [geddit?] that mockingly tells the story of “14 years of Tory chaos”

The party’s chair, Anneliese Dodds, was challenged about the site on Sky News this morning and whether the party was relying on “stunts” rather than policy proposals. She insisted that the “detail of policy” was there, in the form of initiatives like GB Energy.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has received an “immediate lift” in canvassing sessions as John Swinney prepares to become its next leader, the party’s deputy leader has claimed.

Keith Brown said the “field is clearing” as it is expected that Swinney will run unopposed and be confirmed as SNP leader later today.

Brown was speaking to the BBC ahead of the close of nominations at noon in the race to replace Humza Yousaf as the leader of the SNP.

Polling boss dismisses Sunak’s hung parliament prediction

Labour is winning people back in those areas that are so important on the road to Number Ten, the party’s chair, Anneliese Dodds, told Sky News in an earlier interview.

But she also took issue with analysis that “assumes that you can just take local election results and somehow read off from those what will happen at the general election.”

That’s never been the case. Local elections tend to deliver a far higher proportion of independent councillors, far higher proportion of smaller parties being elected with councillors. That’s about a fifth of those who were elected actually last Thursday.

At least two more Conservative MPs could defect to Labour before the next general election, HuffPost UK’s Kevin Schofield reports.

He says that handful of Tory MPs are understood to have held talks with Labour officials about the possibility of switching sides.

The would join two other MPs elected as Tories in 2019 – Christian Wakeford and Dan Poulter. The latter, a former health minister staged a dramatic defection to Labour last month, saying the Conservatives have become a “nationalist party of the right” that has abandoned ­compassion and no longer prioritises the NHS.

The Chair of Labour, Anneliese Dodds, has told broadcasters the party will “act on the concerns” of people who had voted for it in the past but had turned away against the backdrop of the conflict in Gaza.

It was important for Labour to “have a discussion” and “understand” why people had shifted away from the party and then reflect them, she told Good Morning Britain.

An analysis has shown that despite huge gains in council seats, seizing the West Midlands mayoralty, and Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London, winning a third term, there was an almost 18% drop in the Labour vote in areas of England where more than a fifth of people identified as Muslim.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Maria Caulfied was unable to explain how Sunak was including Scottish and Welsh voters in calculating there would be a hung parliament at the next election.

Asked repeatedly how many seats Labour would have in Scotland under the projection Sunak was referring too, Caulfield eventually said “I think because these were English local elections, it doesn’t touch on the Scottish results.”

It was then put to her that the assumption being made is that Labour would retain just one seat in Scotland. Recent polling has suggested that Labour may have taken a small lead over the SNP in voting intention for a general election.

She was told “nobody is suggesting that these results would be replicated at a general election. The experts aren’t suggesting it. I put it to you that, really, the prime minister, if he is suggesting it to his own side, is taking them for fools.”

Caulfield went on to say:

What we can see from these results and it was consistent … is that people are not switching to Labour. Labour did not get the results in places like Teeside or Harlow that they were expecting, even though they threw the kitchen sink at some of those. Voters are tending at the moment to stay at home. They don’t want a Labour government.

Health minister Maria Caulfield has repeated prime minister Rishi Sunak’s assertion that the UK is on course for a hung parliament, and said that Conservative voters who stayed at home for last week’s elections will back the Government at the general election.

She told viewers of Sky News:

If you look at Blackpool South, for example, the vast majority of our voters that voted for us in 2019 stayed at home, they didn’t switch to Labour. They didn’t switch to Reform. They stayed at home and that shows that they haven’t really been tempted by other parties.

That isn’t a particularly accurate reading of the figures, as on a low turnout Labour’s vote share went from 38.3% to 58.9.%, rising by 20 points. The 32 points of share that the Conservatives lost appeared to have gone to them, with Reform UK getting a ten point boost from their performance as the Brexit party in 2019.

Speaking to the Times, Sunak has said that the projection by the elections expert Michael Thrasher that extrapolated the share of local council voting nationwide to a general election showed that the country was heading for “a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party”.

The fifth Conservative prime minister in the last eight years told the newspaper:

Keir Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens would be a disaster for Britain. The country doesn’t need more political horse trading, but action. We are the only party that has a plan to deliver on the priorities of the people.

John Swinney set to become next SNP leader and first minister

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