Starmer warns against complacency as he wraps up election campaign

Sir Keir Starmer urged supporters to fight for every vote as he shuttled between events in Wales, Scotland and the Midlands in the final hours of Labour’s general election campaign. 

Over the past six weeks the Labour leader has toured the UK, from town halls to factory floors to football clubs, in an exhausting schedule buoyed by a seemingly unassailable poll lead. 

He has been pursued around the country by a media bus festooned with St George flags and packed with over-caffeinated journalists. 

Strikingly, some of his final visits were to seats with huge Conservative majorities — some approaching 20,000 — showing how Labour expectations have risen as Thursday’s election day drew closer. 

The Labour leader has been asked a thousand versions of the same questions: will he put up wealth taxes, how will he end the cost of living crisis, can he cut immigration and how will he save the NHS when the public finances are in dire straits?

But with his party avoiding major gaffes — in contrast to the Tories — the bequiffed 61-year-old has seemed consistently unruffled.

“We’ve been campaigning since day one with a smile on our face, a spring in our step with a very positive message about change,” Starmer said on Wednesday morning during a drizzly trip to a wedding venue overlooking the verdant fields and woods of Carmarthenshire in west Wales. 

Flanked by a dozen Welsh Labour candidates and first minister Vaughan Gething, Starmer criticised the negative Tory campaign and repeated his claim that the election was a two-horse race between himself and Rishi Sunak. 

He warned against Labour complacency: “People need convincing that change is possible,” he told the handpicked crowd at the newly-created four-way marginal seat of Carmarthen. He also shrugged off the pouring rain outside: “Vaughan assures me this is liquid sun,” he deadpanned. 

A few hours later Starmer and his entourage boarded a flight from Cardiff to Glasgow, on a Boeing 737 which had recently been used by the England football team to attend the Euros championship in Germany: “Sir Keir, you’re in the same seat as Gareth Southgate,” an air stewardess told him.

He landed nearly 400 miles further north, visiting the home of the Caledonian Gladiators basketball team within a new seat called East Kilbride and Strathaven, where Labour is locked in a battle with the Scottish National party.

Starmer was introduced by Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in Scotland, as a “man of decency and integrity” who had revived the party after 2019’s general election catastrophe. 

Starmer said it was time to end 14 years of division and failure under the Tories in England — and 17 years of SNP dominance in Scotland: “We are in the final few yards towards the start of a historic day tomorrow,” he told the assembled crowd. 

“I want a Labour government with Scotland at its heart,” he said. “I don’t want Scottish voters to send a message to Westminster, I want Scotland to send a government. A vote for any other party is a vote to continue with the Tories.”

The previous day Starmer’s tour had focused on the Midlands, and three constituencies previously occupied by the Tories with weighty majorities.

Starmer has visited countless non-league football clubs this year, enabling him to project man-of-the-people vibes in a controlled environment. 

At Hucknall Town FC in Nottinghamshire on Tuesday — in the constituency of Sherwood Forest, where the Tories obtained a 16,168 majority in 2019 — he promised a crowd of members in red T-shirts, red dresses and holding red placards that he would preside over a new government “in the service of working people”.

Starmer said the country did want change but insisted that in some seats the margin was only a few hundred votes. 

At his next stop, Global Brands in Chesterfield — in North East Derbyshire, with a Tory majority of 12,876 in 2019 — Starmer told warehouse workers in hard hats that this was “very much a change election”.

He was surrounded by pallets of VK, a brightly coloured alcopop most popular — it transpires — among Labour voters.

Starmer’s third visit on Tuesday was to Norton Canes village hall in Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. The fact that Cannock Chase is in contention at all is testament to Labour’s growing confidence of sweeping gains in Thursday’s election: it was held by the Conservatives with a majority of 19,879 in 2019.

“We can bring about really important change for our country . . . we get the opportunity to take our country forward,” he declared.