Keir Starmer And Rishi Sunak's Last Election Debate: Their Final Pitch Assessed By Experts

(MENAFN- The Conversation) The BBC has hosted the final head-to-head debate between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer with eight days to go until election day. Here, academic experts help us decipher the two men's claims about each other, defences of their own records – and the disputes that at times spilled over into angry exchanges between the two men.

The first question of the night came from audience member Sue, who wanted to talk about the gambling scandal that has seen both Sunak and Starmer suspend candidates.

Sunak withdrew support from two candidates because of an investigation launched by the Gambling Commission into bets that were placed on the timing of the election before Sunak publicly announced it. And now a Labour candidate has been suspended for betting against himself in a marginal constituency.

Read more: What does the law say about gambling on election dates with inside information?

Sue said people have been“dismayed” by the revelations and asks how both leaders would restore faith in politics.

Sunak says he was furious and has started an internal investigation. For Starmer, this story is about leadership and restoring public service.

Stefan Stern, from City, University of London, has studied leadership in organisations and he concurs . In an article warning that allowing a culture of this kind to infiltrate an institution is a sure fire way to destroy it, he noted:

Stern diagnoses a bad case of“group think” among Westminster Conservatives that did not necessarily begin with Sunak – but will potentially end him.

Read more: Election gambling scandal: bad culture will kill your organisation – you can bet on it

The men were asked how they would handle women's rights, including protecting single-sex spaces.

Sunak said that the Conservatives were committed to changing the Equality Act to recognise that“sex means biological sex”, and that this is the only way to protect women's spaces. Starmer agreed that protecting single-sex spaces and services is important, but claimed that the act in its current form already does so.

The evidence tells us that it's Starmer who is right on this one. Caterina Nirta has explained some of the confusion and conflict around this topic, noting that:

Read more: Gender recognition certificates: self-identification and the row over it explained

Starmer pledged to open up 40,000 NHS appointments a week to clear NHS waiting lists when asked about his proposals to get people back to work. This sounds like a lot but Paresh Wankhade, professor of leadership and management at Edge Hill University, looked more closely at the numbers as part of his assessment on how each party is proposing to reduce waiting times.

He said this overall figure“would roughly mean 2 million appointments per year, which would translate to an increase of just 2% compared with the year to March 2024”.

Currently“about 3.2 million people in England are now waiting more than 18 weeks for NHS treatment”. And Wankhade didn't find anything particularly reassuring in any party's plan to fix the problem. The hope of reducing waiting lists comes with a price and neither leader is giving quite enough information to make it clear how that price would be met:

Read more: Election 2024: which party's proposal to shorten NHS waiting times looks most credible?

At around the halfway point, the discussion turned towards a neglected but important topic: the wave of councils going bankrupt in recent years.

In a revelatory article by Mia Gray and Anna Barford, published as part of our series looking at the state of the nation, we learned that council bankruptcy has gone from being unthinkable to being commonplace in the 14 years since the Conservatives came to power:

The Department for Communities and Local Government had its budget cut by more than 50% in the first five years of austerity. And as the questioner who raised bankruptcies rightly observed, the results are cuts to vital services.

Properly funding councils will therefore quickly become a pressing matter for any government hoping to restore the UK's public services.

Read more: How 14 years of Conservative rule has made council bankruptcy commonplace

Sunak has said that he wants to lower the welfare bill, get people off benefits and into work. He has previously criticised Britain's“sicknote culture”, and wants to make eligibility criteria for receiving benefits stricter.

But there is evidence , as Elliott Johnson, Howard Reed and Matthew T. Johnson have found, that such reforms do not reduce the number of people claiming benefits.

There has been an increase in recent years of working-age people claiming disability benefits, spiking to 3.3 million in 2023-24.

Read more: Rishi Sunak wants to cut the cost of 'sicknote' Britain. But we've found a strong economic case for benefits

Meanwhile, Sharon Wright, at the University of Glasgow, has detailed how the welfare system has failed to tackle poverty over the last 14 years. She also notes the destructive nature of benefits sanctions, which became more extreme in 2012.

Read more: How the UK's social security system stopped tackling poverty

Sunak insisted the Rwanda deportation plan is a necessary deterrent to stop people with no right to be in the UK from trying to enter. Citing a recent report in the Telegraph , he claimed that migrants in the north of France are waiting until a Labour government overturns the Rwanda plan before they attempt to cross the channel.

Researcher Sophie Watt, University of Sheffield, explained in a long read about her time volunteering in a refugee camp, witnessing violence by police and smugglers in charge of crossings. Contrary to Sunak's claims, the people she spoke to were not put off by the Rwanda plan:

And much academic research on this topic has found that deterrent approaches don't work .

Read more: I've spent time with refugees in French coastal camps and they told me the government's Rwanda plan is not putting them off coming to the UK

Starmer's economic plan sounds simple: grow the economy. Over the last 50 years, the UK has seen weak productivity and poor public and private investment.

Labour has proposed several ways to fix this: a new industrial strategy, relaxing planning laws to encourage building and productivity, reforming business rates and raising investment through a national wealth fund, which will direct public investment in high-growth areas such as ports and green technologies.

But these ambitions still face barriers. One is Labour's commitment to the fiscal rules set by the current government. As Phil Tomlinson and David Bailey highlight:

And, chiming with another question posed tonight, they add:“Brexit has significantly hit UK goods trade and investment – estimates put the long term hit to UK GDP at 5-6%.”

Read more: Keir Starmer rejects 'tax and spend', so do Labour's plans for economic growth add up?

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