resa May is doing a Q&A with workers in West Yorkshire now.
Q: Given that the polls show your lead narrowing, and your personal ratings going down, is it the case that polling day cannot come quickly enough for you?
May says she is just focused on polling day.
Corbyn's Q& - Summary
At the start of the campaign journalists never asked Jeremy Corbyn
questions about what would happen in a hung parliament because the
prospect seemed so remote. Now they are starting to crop up regularly.
Here are the key points from the Q&A.
- Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, ruled out Labour doing deals with any other parties in a hung parliament. If it was the largest party, it would put forward a Queen’s speech and a budget and gamble on the progressive parties not daring to vote them down, she suggested. She said:
Thornberry may have been keen to clarify things because, in a Newsnight interview last night, she refused to rule out Labour forming a coalition with the SNP. Asked if he agreed with Thornberry, Corbyn did not contradict her, but did not endorse her comment either. He just said “Emily and I are of the same mind on this, that we are determined to win the election.”The truth is we’re fighting to win and we’re fighting to win with a majority and that’s what we’re fighting to do.
If we end up in a position where we’re in a minority, we will go ahead and we will put forward Queen’s speech and a budget and if people want to vote for it, then good, and if they don’t want to vote for it, they’re going to have to go back and speak to their constituents and explain to them why it is that we have a Tory government instead. If we are the largest party, we go ahead, no deals, with our manifesto, with our budget, and with our Queen’s speech. And that’s the conversations we’ve had. That’s it. That’s it. No deals.
- Corbyn suggested that he would offer an effective “amnesty” to his Labour critics after the election if, as some polls suggest, he does much better than expected. Asked what his attitude would be towards those in the party who had expected him to do very badly, and whether he would be offering them a “group hug”, he said:
I do a lot of group hugs with lots of people. I love a group hug myself. In our family, the Labour party family, people say stuff. Do you know what? Sometimes it’s best to forget it.
- He said he would not try to delay the Brexit talks, which are due to start a fortnight Monday, if Labour won the election. Labour was ready to get on with the negotiation, he said.
- Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said Labour would not set a target for reducing immigration.
- Corbyn said any government he led would not tolerate the “barbarity” of blood sports. He said the first speech he ever made, at school, was against hunting.
- A Times journalist was booed, and told by Thornberry his question was “stupid”, when he asked what Corbyn would do in a hung parliament. Francis Elliott, the Times’ political editor, asked if he would invite Sinn Féin MPs to take their seats to help prop up a Labour government. Labour activists in the audience booed loudly, and when Thornberry asked them to stop, she said reporters were entitled to ask questions, “however stupid”. Fellow journalists have hit back. This is from Channel 4 News’ Michael Crick.
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