Sunak suffers poll blow as levelling-up cash-for-votes row erupts | Conservatives

THE Tory general election campaign hit more trouble on Saturday as Rishi Sunak faced accusations of using levelling up funds to win votes and Labour opened its biggest poll lead since the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss.

As Sunak tried to fire up his party’s campaign ahead of the first crucial TV debate with Keir Starmer on Tuesday, it emerged that more than half of 30 towns that were each promised £20m of regeneration funding on Saturday were in constituencies won by Tory MPs at the last election.

Some 17 of the £20m pots went to towns in areas won by the Conservatives in 2019, although two of those were no longer held by Conservative MPs when the general election was called.

Just eight awards were made to towns in Labour seats, although traditionally many of the party’s strongholds tend to be in more deprived areas in need of levelling up money.

The funding pledge led to accusations from Sunak’s political opponents of “pork barrel” politics, while those involved in regeneration of the north said the announcement was more about winning votes than levelling up.

The row came as the latest Opinium poll for the Observer today gives Labour a 20 point lead – the highest level Opinium has recorded since Liz Truss was running the country.

This is despite Labour having endured a torrid week on the election trail and days of bitter infighting over whether the veteran MP Diane Abbott should be allowed to stand again.

Labour is on 45% – up four points on last weekend, while the Conservatives are down 2 on 25%. Reform is up on one on 11%, the Lib Dems down 2 on 8%, and the Greens down one point on 6%.

The poll also showed more people (45%) thought the Tories big announcement last weekend – the reintroduction of a form of mandatory National Service for 18 year olds – was a bad idea than thought it was a good one (35%).

Some 28% of those polled said their opinion of Rishi Sunak had become more negative since the start of the campaign against 18% who said it had become more positive. By contrast 28% said their view of Keir Starmer had become more positive against 18% who said it was now more negative.

Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, an independent body representing major business and civic leaders across the north of England criticised the regeneration announcement. “This is nothing to do with raising prosperity. This is only about trying to win a few votes at election time,” he said.

Murison added that a separate announcement last weekend by the government to abolish the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which replaced EU structural funds, to help fund the National Service scheme had in reality been the last “nail in the coffin” for levelling up. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found the Conservative proposals would leave the UK’s poorest regions millions of pounds worse off.

Rishi Sunak said yesterday that the party had allocated more than £15bn to overlooked areas across the UK since 2019 and had used established methodology to select the areas which would benefit. A Tory spokesman said the party was “providing more funding to the most deprived towns in the areas with the highest need of levelling up.”

The towns in Tory areas include Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire. Sir Edward Leigh, the veteran Conservative MP and candidate for Gainsborough, said money had been pledged to the town “following our lobbying”. He said it would be “the greatest boost the town has ever had”.

Justin Madders, who retained the seat of Ellesmere Port and Bromborough in the north west of England for Labour in 2019, said “given their monumental failure to deliver on levelling up over the last four years, why would anyone believe this is going to make a difference now?”

The Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman Sarah Olney said: “It will take more than this desperate attempt at pork barrel politics to win over voters after years of failure on the NHS and cost of living.”

Keir Starmer, in an interview for the Observer with his biographer Tom Baldwin, attempted to draw a line under the row over Diane Abbott’s candidacy by lavishing praise on the veteran MP. “Although I disagree with some of what she says, in terms of the battles she has been through and the terrible insults she has had to rise above, I have actually got more respect for Diane than she probably realises,” the Labour leader said.

Referring to next Tuesday’s debate on ITV, Starmer suggested he will not be trying to land a knock out blow on Sunak but is going to “keep it calm and measured.” He said: “Having carried this ming vase around for a while now, I am going to avoid the temptation to start juggling it.”

Starmer said Donald Trump’s 34 convictions last week were “off the charts and more the kind of thing you would find in fictional books than real life.” But he said it will be necessary to work with whoever is in the White House. “When you are serious about being in power you have to work with whoever other countries have as their leader.”

Labour renewed the row between the two main parties over tax saying that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt must rule out increasing VAT on times including food and children’s clothes after he seemed to leave the door open to raising it. In a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph Hunt said the Tories would not raise “the main rate of VAT” for the duration of the next parliament. But the main rate does not apply to essential good and services that are currently taxed at the zero or reduced rates of VAT.