Live: Watch Starmer and Rayner at local election campaign launch and follow updates as Labor target Black Country

Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have accused the Conservatives of “preying on hopes” of working people as they launch Labour’s local election campaign on Thursday.

The Labor leader and his deputy are in the Black Country to mount a high-profile attack they hope will help define the campaign, claiming they are failing to deliver on their leveling up policy, as promised by former prime minister Boris Johnson.

Starmer said Labor was looking to win in Dudley, the West Midland and across the country “from Hastings to Hartlepool”, and promised a “future better for your children” – but warned there was no “magic money tree” to solve councils’ cash crunch.

You can watch and follow updates below from LabourList’s Tom Belger who is there at the Black Country & Marches Institute of Technology for the speeches – where former prime minister Boris Johnson vowed to level up in a 2020 speech of his own.

More than 2,600 council seats are up for election across 107 councils on May 2nd, along with elections for regional mayors and police and crime commissioners across England and Wales.

10.53am: Starmer against fire and re-hire

Keir Starmer was asked about whether his support for a ban on fire-and-rehire extended to Coventry city council.

The BBC reports councilors “approved a proposal to dismiss and re-engage” existing bin workers last December.

Starmer said he was against it “wherever it is”, but was not going to “wade into an industrial dispute”.

10.50am: Angela Rayner has Keir’s ‘full support’

Asked by journalists about the police looking into a Tory complaint involving Angela Rayner’s former council house, Starmer said Rayner had his “full support”.

He said Rayner had not broken any rules.

10.45am: No ‘magic money tree’

Starmer faces multiple questions from the media about the black hole in many local authorities’ finances, which feel likely to resurface throughout the campaign.

Labor would seek to “turn that around”. Of course he does “want to invest more”, and hopes there’ll be more to spend than under the Tories in the first year.

But that is only in so far as Labor can unlock existing leveling up funds that have not yet been spent, and shake up local authority funding settlements to cover three-year periods, not one.

He suggests he can’t “say there’s a magic money tree” Labor can shake on day one after the election, though, or “pretend we can turn the taps on” straightaway.

“The way out of that is to grow our economy,” he adds. Labor is going to have to “work hard” to be able to invest more, and ensure that private investment flows too.

Labor can also shake up the government’s “mindset” towards mayors, working in partnership rather than in conflict.

10.35am: Big swing needed to win

Starmer is asked about the general election, and highlights the fact Labor needs a bigger swing than even in its 1997 landslide even to get a tiny majority.

But Labor has gone from suffering its worst loss since 1935 in 2019, to being a “serious contender”, Starmer says.

He tells the shadow cabinet to “put the polls to one side”, as we need the “hard yards” of focus and discipline.

10.30am: ‘Madness’ of Tory unfunded tax cuts

Starmer attacks the Tories’ “madness” of unfunded tax cuts, their proposal to abolish national insurance, claiming there is “no way to fund it” other than “risky” borrowing or cutting pensions or the NHS.

It’s “like they think Liz Truss never happened”, he added.

10.25am: Communities are ‘not a charity case or political client’

Starmer highlights the pride of local areas, including in their football clubs, but says areas are “a little less sure of the ground beneath [their] feet”.

He says communities are ‘not a charity case or a political client”, but a “source of growth and dynamism ready to be unlocked”, rather than see politicians turn their back when votes have been counted.

10.20am: The Tories are ‘preying’ on the hopes of voters

Starmer said it was in some ways “just as bad” to be “praying on the hopes” of voters as praying on their fears, accusing the Tories of doing just that on leveling up.

He said that “of course” former prime minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to level up “struck a chord”, but the Tories did not have a “viable plan”. That is “unforgivable”, and Labor will seek to turn that around.

“Towns like Dudley wanted that hope to be real.”

10.13am: Starmer says we can win from ‘Hastings to Hartlepool’

Keir Starmer kicks off by saying Labor is not looking for a draw in the local elections, but “looking to win” in Dudley, in the West Midlands, right across the country “from Hastings to Hartlepool”.

He wishes he were launching another kind of election campaign but Sunak “bottled it” as he wants another summer with his “beloved helicopter”.

The choice now is stability or chaos, unity or division, renewal or decline, he says.

Labor will “tilt the economy back towards the interests of working people”, get Britain building again, to “unlock the pride and potential” of communities like Dudley, and Labor will be campaigning on that, he says to applause.

10.08am: Rayner says some feel a ‘twinge of skepticism’

Angela Rayner says some people will feel a “twinge of skepticism” politically, but “that can pass and be replaced by an everyday hope for the future” that once powered towns like Dudley.

“You have my word that we won’t make promises we can keep.”

She highlighted Labour’s devolution plans, promising to end the “hoarding of power”.

“We seek power so we can hand it back to the people.”

She also highlighted Labour’s New Deal for Working People package of employment reforms, and cited former Labor prime minister Harold Wilson’s dictum that Labor is a “moral crusade or it is nothing”.

She said: “My moral crusade is to fight for the working people that built this country, so that they will benefit from the wealth that they create.”

10.05am: Angela Rayner says people’s ambition has been ‘stolen’

The deputy leader is speaking, and starts by saying people here “know what it means to graft” in a town that was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution.

Labor empowered working people to secure better rights in towns like Dudley, and the post-war Labor government built council homes here on an unprecedented scale, she says, and good public services voters can rely on.

But people’s ambition has been “stolen”, through the “greed of a politics that centralize power and wealth”.

10am: Richard Parker launches event

7.45am: ‘Politics with communities, not to them’

Starmer is also expected to say: “If we want to change our economy, we must also change our politics and put an end to politics that is done to communities, not with them.

“No more political hero complexes, no more fantasies, no more easy answers that require nobody – politicians or people – to lift a finger. The Tory era of politicians as performance art is coming to an end.”

7.35am: ‘Levelling up a ‘good ambition’ but preyed on voters’ hopes’

Parts of Starmer’s speech have been released to the media in advance.

Starmer is expected to say: “People say to me the worst thing you can do in politics is prey on peoples’ fear. Yet in some ways, preying on their hopes is just as bad. That’s what the Tories did with levelling-up. It is a good ambition for Britain, but it requires not just a new plan, also a fundamental shift in how we govern.”

Starmer will also double down on a familiar narrative over the past year, casting the local elections as a choice for millions of voters at the ballot box May 2nd between continued decline after 14 years of Conservative rule, and national renewal with Labour.

7.30am: Local elections in focus

According to analysts Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings, the Conservatives could lose half of the council seats they are defending at the local elections if they repeat their poor performance at last year’s local elections.

The pair have said the Tories could lose as many as 500 seats across the country, with Labor expected to make around 300 gains.