Labour leader says it was ‘most efficient form of transport’ from Wales and party has offset the carbon

Keir Starmer has admitted he used a private jet to travel to a campaign rally in Scotland where he promised to create “tens of thousands” of clean energy jobs with a new publicly owned energy company in the country.

Responding to media questions after speaking to activists in Greenock, Inverclyde, Starmer said: “We did use a private jet because we did need to get very quickly to Scotland from Wales yesterday and it was the most efficient form of transport in the middle of a very busy general election campaign.”

Pretty Girls Walk by Big Boss Vette was used by the party as it promoted its policies on the platform

The Scottish National party has deleted an election campaign video on TikTok after it featured a sexually explicit song by the American rapper Big Boss Vette.

The track, Pretty Girls Walk, carries an explicit lyrics warning on streaming platforms and starts with an expletive-laden first verse.

Michael Matheson claimed the bill, incurred while on holiday in Morocco, as a parliamentary expense

Scotland’s former health secretary has been suspended as an MSP and docked 54 days’ pay for wrongly claiming an £11,000 iPad bill on expenses, after a bitter row at Holyrood.

MSPs voted by a large margin to suspend Michael Matheson for 27 days, as well as having his pay docked, after Scottish National party ministers and backbenchers abstained on the orders of John Swinney, the first minister and SNP leader.

Labour is posing as the great catalyst, but so far there is little evidence it has the bold policies to deliver on this pledge

In May 2015, as part of my newspaper’s general election coverage, I went out with Labour campaigners as they canvassed in one of the party’s heartlands: Airdrie and Shotts. The campaigners were in denial, but the signs of collapse were everywhere: in the many saltires, the “red Tories” graffiti, and the “I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me” line repeated in every vox pop. A few days later, Airdrie and Shotts was taken by the now Scottish secretary for health and social care, Neil Gray (one of 56 seats won by the SNP), and the party that had kept an iron grip on central Scotland was consigned to the political wilderness.

What goes around comes around, they say. Less than a decade on, the SNP are heading for, if not quite the wipeout Scottish Labour experienced, then an electoral humiliation on a scale that would have been unthinkable 18 months ago. More humiliating still is that the decline comes against a backdrop of sustained support for independence. Not only do polls suggest the party will lose 27 seats (with Labour gaining 28), they suggest two-fifths of 2019 SNP voters will back Labour, despite its continued stance on the union.

Barring miracles or disasters on the campaign trail, a change of government appears to be just weeks away

Here we go again. For the third time in a row, the general election starting gun has been fired early by a Conservative prime minister. Theresa May started well ahead and nearly lost it all. Boris Johnson started well ahead and took that lead to the bank. Rishi Sunak doesn’t start with his predecessors’ advantages – his is the gamble of a man with nothing to lose.

Victory requires an unprecedented turnaround. All the evidence suggests it is instead Sunak’s Labour opponent, Keir Starmer, who is about to make history. But he, too, faces a mammoth task in the coming weeks as he seeks to take Labour from its worst Commons defeat in 90 years to a governing majority in one big leap.

Given the state of the SNP and the economy, the question of independence will be less important than that of party credibility

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When Keir Starmer helped to launch Labour’s Scottish election campaign, he told effusive supporters in Glasgow: “There’s no change without Scotland, no Labour without Scotland ... Scotland is central to the mission of the next Labour government.”

Speaking to reporters afterwards, the party leader emphasised that the raw mathematics were just one reason why Scotland would play such an important role in this election. “Yes, it’s about the numbers,” he said. “We lost very badly in 2019, and we’ve got to get every single seat that we can possibly win … But this is also personal … I want to be the prime minister for the whole of the United Kingdom, and that includes Scotland.”

Tories say stick to the plan, Labour wants change and Lib Dems, SNP, Greens and Reform UK fight for attention

• UK politics live – latest updates

The general election machines are lurching into action, albeit with some initial grinding of gears as the parties respond to the unexpected summer election date. So what will they be saying? And how will they be saying it? Here is our guide to the six most prominent parties.

Lib Dems, Greens and SNP could lose out as broadcasters focus on head-to-heads between Sunak and Starmer

The Lib Dems, Greens and SNP face being cut out of televised leadership debates, as broadcasters plan to focus on two head-to-head contests between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer.

ITV is working on a debate featuring only the leaders of the Labour and Conservative parties, according to sources at the broadcaster, in line with the format demanded by Labour.

Campaign will be a test for two new first ministers and could put fresh pressure on Stormont power sharing

This general election will be fought in quite different ways across the UK’s four nations – the Scottish National party dominates in Scotland and Labour in Wales. Yet those contests will be defined by Labour’s resurgence just as in England. In Northern Ireland, increasingly isolated unionist parties are pitted against republican Sinn Féin.

Bills, including smoking ban for people born after 2009, unlikely to become law before 4 July vote

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• Questioners at Sunak warehouse speech turn out to be Tory councillors

Rishi Sunak is now speaking at an event in Ilkeston in Derbyshire. It is in the Erewash constituency, where the Tory MP Maggie Throup had a majority of 10,606 at the last election.

He repeats the claim that a Labour government would cost every family £2,000.

Labour’s spending promises cost £16 billion per year in 2028-29, or £58.9 billion over the next four years.

But their revenue raisers would only collect £6.2 billion per year in 2028-29, or £20.4 billion over the next four years.

I don’t really think the arrangements in Scotland for the school holidays have really been anywhere near the calculations made by the prime minister …

I think it would be respectful if that was the case but it’s pretty typical of the lack of respect shown to Scotland that we’re an afterthought from the Westminster establishment and particularly the Conservative establishment.

Standards committee says Michael Matheson should also lose salary for 54 days in most serious sanctions ever imposed on MSP

Michael Matheson, Scotland’s former health secretary, is expected to lose his salary for 54 days and be suspended as an MSP after wrongly claiming £11,000 in expenses for streaming football matches on holiday.

Holyrood’s standards committee said the sanctions – the most serious ever imposed on an MSP – were necessary because Matheson had breached a number of rules on expenses and parliamentary conduct.

Scottish government accused of missing deadlines to take action on overfishing and effects of climate breakdown

Fragile and damaged marine life around Scotland’s coasts is not being properly protected because ministers in Edinburgh have broken their promises, environment campaigners have warned.

Prominent charities including the Marine Conservation Society and the National Trust for Scotland accuse the Scottish government of repeatedly missing its deadlines to protect vulnerable marine life from overfishing and the effects of climate breakdown.