'No magic money tree' Starmer tells voters Tories have broken the economy

Keir Starmer has told voters he cannot "turn the taps on" to fix the crisis in local authority funding as he was questioned on how Labour would plug councils' £4bn gap at the launch of its local election campaign.

- Jessica Murray , Peter Walker

"I can't pretend that we could turn the taps on, pretend the damage hasn't been done to the economyit has," he said. "There's no magic money tree that we can waggle the day after the election. No, they have broken the economy, they've done huge damage." 

Starmer was speaking from a podium in Dudley in the West Midlands, where Boris Johnson previously launched the Conservatives' levelling up pledge in 2020, a policy the Labour leader said had "unforgivably" failed.

"In saying levelling up, the government was tapping into something real that people yearn for.

But they didn't have a viable plan, and they didn't do the hard yards.

That's unforgivable," he said.

The choice of location was seen as a direct challenge to Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, who will be fighting Labour's Richard Parker for his third term as mayor in the region.

In his opening speech at the event, Parker accused Street of "working hard to pretend he's not a Tory", as he pledged to build more council homes and create 150,000 jobs in the region.