Angela Rayner says she’s preventing General Election for ‘my youngsters and your youngsters’

Labour’s Angela Rayner today says she’s fighting to win the General Election for the next generation.

In her first interview of the campaign, the party’s deputy leader declared it is time to call time on 14 years of Tory rule.

“I’m fighting this election for my kids and your kids,” she said. “We need to do this for the next generation. Most kids have only known life under the Tories.” She vowed ending the cost of living crisis will be at the top of her priorities if Labour wins in July – making sure working families can enjoy life as well as taking care of the essentials.

“Cultural experiences and places where people can have fun I think are really important,” she said: “The fun’s been taken out of life, lately. Working families should be able to enjoy their life. You should be able to go on holiday.

“It’s not about providing the essentials, is it? If you’re working in this country, you should be able to pay your bills, provide the essentials and – as long as you’re not picking your family car as a Ferrari – have fun as a family. How have we got in this situation where families can’t afford to go to the cinema? Or have one night as a family where you can do stuff together?”

Rishi Sunak’s surprise announcement on Wednesday forced the Deputy Labour Leader to cancel plans for a holiday with her own family.

“The kids were so good about it,” she said. “They said, ‘We can have more holidays. We’re so proud of you. Go get it. Just come home every now and again.’” As a youngster, Ms Rayner said she’d only been able to go on a foreign holiday thanks to the Mirror.

“My dad used to always get the Daily Mirror every day,” she said. “And you did this thing where you got tokens to go over to France. And that was the first holiday abroad I had. It was a bit frozen cold and wet, but that wasn’t your fault.”

Two days on from Rishi Sunak’s drippy announcement from Downing Street, Ms Rayner on Friday visited Llandudno to launch the party’s campaigning in Wales – kicking off six weeks on the road getting Labour’s message of “Change” out to voters. “I’m loving it,” she said with an eager grin. “I love being out and about. This is what I want and what the country wants.”

Labour, she said, “couldn’t have wished for a better start” than to see Rishi Sunak announce the election drenched, with the sound of her party’s 1997 anthem “Things Can Only Get Better” in the background. “I couldn’t concentrate on what Rishi was saying,” she said.

“I was desperately trying to listen to what he was saying, but just getting the feeling of that song and the memories of turning a page. In 1997 the country turned a page – we felt like we’re moving forward. I get the sense that that’s what people want again.”

Just minutes before the announcement, Ms Rayner had been in a private meeting with a group of doctors she’d helped find a safe route out of Rafah. “I was having a really really intense, really intense, really traumatic conversation with this surgeon about the situation over there,” she said. “And my phone just started going bzz bzz bzz. It was a massive gear change.”

But Ms Rayner is raring to go – and confirmed she will front the party’s battle bus in the coming weeks. She said: “I love a battle bus. I want to be out and about up and down the country talking to voters, telling them about the changes we’ve made in the Labour Party.

“We’re now for the service of the country, and we’re going to go out there and send that message that – you want change? We’ve got that change. And we’re going to be a government that works for working people. I can’t wait to get out there and meet people. I love it. It’s the best bit of the job.”

With the final deadline for candidate selections just days away, Ms Rayner said she wanted to see a “resolution” to veteran Labour MP Diane Abbot’s suspension from the party. Ms Abbot had been accused of anti-semitism over comments she made in a letter she sent to a newspaper, and for which she has since apologised. If she remains suspended, Ms Abbot won’t be allowed to stand in the election. Leader Keir Starmer said yesterday the decision would be reached before the June 4 deadline.

“Diane Abbott was our first black female MP for Labour and she’s been in our party for decades,” she said. “I would like to see a resolution, because I don’t think Diane Abbott’s career should end in that way. We’ve had our ding dongs between us, but there’s no question to me of her advocacy and her passion to make lives better.

“I think it’d be really regrettable if her career ends without this being resolved. That’s not something I’m in control of, I don’t have the full detail. There’s a full investigation and I’m not a part of that. I don’t get involved in complaints. But I would hope to see her career in a better place. I don’t want her career to end under those circumstances.”

If Labour are successful, Ms Rayner confirmed a number of bills that were lost in the end-of-term “wash-up” would re-appear in some form. They include the renters reform bill – which would ban no-fault evictions and revamp the UK’s “medieval” rent laws: “We wanted it to go through because we thought we could improve on it in government…we’ve got a medieval feudal system and we needed to see an end to that. We definitely want to move the agenda forward and we want to go further than the agenda was.”

And Ms Rayner indicated anti-tobacco laws, which would gradually increase the legal age for buying cigarettes to create a “smoke free generation” could return too.

But she was clear that one policy would definitely be axed – Rishi Sunak’s flagship Rwanda plan. “How many billions, how much money has already gone and all we’ve sent over is a few Home Secretaries so far,” she fumed. “That is so scandalous. It is so transparently a gimmick. Keir will not put the Rwanda scheme in place, because it is a gimmick.”

And she said the PM should make good on his bet with Piers Morgan over whether flights would leave before the election, and pay up the £1,000 to charity.

“What’s a grand to Rishi?” She joked. “He’s richer than the king now apparently. He should give it to charity. Just give some money to the Red Cross, it might help his ratings at the minute. That’s probably about 3 seconds of interest.”