Our political correspondent Chris Mason is at the Liberal Democrat manifesto launch in Camden, north London.

You can see the party's central message - Stop Brexit - featured at the venue in balloon form behind him. They're also balloons beside him, not giant grapes...

Our correspondent says party leader Jo Swinson is expected there in the next hour.

On the manifesto, he says Brexit pretty much runs through all 96 pages.

Meanwhile, according to our political editor, there are also confetti canons at the ready.

We'll bring you updates from the launch as they happen - our political editor thinks there could be fireworks, of sorts.

Boris Johnson has told the BBC he will raise the threshold at which individuals pay national insurance to £12,500.

Mr Johnson said the first step would be to increase the threshold to £9,500 in the first Budget of a Tory government.

The timescale to reach £12,500 has not been set out.

The PM told the BBC the move would help drive consumption and stimulate the economy.

And from one candidate being suspended to another.

The Liberal Democrats have confirmed they are suspending their hopeful in Birmingham Hodge Hill, Waheed Rafiq, over anti-Semitic social media posts originally reported by Buzzfeed News, external.

Since the deadline for registering candidates has now passed, the party won't be able to put up a new candidate in the seat, where they came a distant fourth at the 2017 election.

A spokesperson said the party became aware of the issue earlier this afternoon and after "an investigation showed that the tweets and posts were genuine" the decision was taken to suspend him.

Image source, PA Media

The Conservative candidate for Leeds North East has been suspended by the party for making anti-Semitic comments.

Amjad Bashir, former UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and Humber, made the remarks during a European Parliament debate on Gaza in 2014.

A Conservative spokesman said he had been suspended pending an investigation and "election support" withdrawn.

Mr Bashir has apologised "unreservedly" and said he accepted the party's decision.

Reality Check

Taking part in an ITV interview last night, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said he wanted to halve the UK's foreign aid budget.

He said that over the last few years the UK has consistently been the highest spender on foreign aid.

But that's not what official figures show.

Last year, according to government data, external, the UK was the world's third largest overseas aid donor, spending a total of £14.6bn.

This was behind the US (£25.7bn) and Germany (£18.7bn). The UK was also the third highest donor in the previous year.

In terms of aid spending as a share of the economy, Sweden spent the highest, with 1.04% of national income going on overseas aid last year. The UK was in fifth place on this measure, with 0.7% of national income spent on foreign aid - an amount that meets the UN's target, external.

Tuesday night saw the first televised bout of the election campaign when Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn went head-to-head on ITV.

In case you missed it, here is our rundown of the five moments that caught our eye and a thorough fact-checking of the claims the two men made. Above is also a video that captures the best bits in three minutes.

But when is the next TV debate, we hear you ask?

Well, this piece explains it all in detail, but in a nutshell, this is the BBC big events schedule for the next few weeks:

• 22 November: A Question Time Leaders' Special at 19:00, hosted by Fiona Bruce. Conservative, Labour, SNP and the Lib Dem party leaders will take questions from the audience
• 29 November: A live debate from 19:00 with figures from the seven major political parties in the UK - Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems, Scottish National Party (SNP), Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Brexit Party
• 6 December: A live head-to-head debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. This will be hosted by Today presenter and former BBC political editor Nick Robinson from 20:30
• 9 December: Emma Barnett will host a Question Time Under 30 special, focused on an audience made up of young voters. It will be broadcast from 20:30

We heard from Nicola Sturgeon on the campaign trail this morning, but who is she really and what drives her?

In the latest in a series of long reads on the party leaders, the BBC's James Cook looks closely at her life and political times.

Here, you can read the equivalent pieces on Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

We've seen the Liberal Democrat manifesto - more on what's in it here - but its official launch is later.

Our political correspondent has got his hands on a hard copy of the manifesto, which has come wrapped with a particularly festive note.

It hints - fairly strongly - at the anti-Brexit message within...

So we have heard Conservatives' pledge on National Insurance - albeit without much detail yet.

Here's where other political parties stand on the issue.

Labour has pledged, external not to raise income tax or national insurance contributions for the bottom 95% of earners.

The party is due to unveil its manifesto on Thursday, but the 2017 version said: “A Labour government will guarantee no rises in income tax for those earning below £80,000 a year, and no increases in personal National Insurance contributions or the rate of VAT.”

In their manifesto, published today, external, the Liberal Democrats have said they will modernise workers' rights to make them fit for the age of the gig economy by “reviewing the tax and National Insurance status of employees, dependent contractors and freelancers to ensure fair and comparable treatment".

On its website, the SNP says , externalit will "oppose any proposed increase in National Insurance".

In the Green Party manifesto, external, the party says it will “merge employees' National Insurance, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, dividend tax and income tax into a single consolidated income tax".

"This closing of loopholes will bring in an estimated £20bn extra per year into the public purse. It will mean that all income is treated the same way for tax purposes," it says.

You might remember that just the other day, Boris Johnson announced plans to shelve a planned cut in corporation tax.

Well, the BBC's economics editor, Faisal Islam, says today's reveal - on National Insurance, "is where the £6bn saved on not cutting corporation tax - and more - is heading... equalising NI starting point with income tax".

The threshold at which people begin paying income tax is, as Faisal says, £12,500.

James McDonald, from Doncaster, has used the BBC's Your Questions Answered - something you can do as well via that link.

A - In general elections, we use the first-past-the-post voting system whereby the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins.

This system means there is no “majority amount” of votes a candidate needs to win a seat.

All a candidate needs to be elected is to get more votes than any other candidate in their constituency.

In some constituencies, an MP can be elected by just a few votes.

The most marginal constituency in the 2017 election, for example, was North East Fife which had an SNP majority over the Liberal Democrats of just two votes.

If you’re interested in finding out more, there's more information about about marginal constituencies here.

BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith says Team Johnson now have a big decision to make.

Do they just go full steam ahead with Boris Johnson's tax giveaway announcement now the cat is out of the bag? Or do they try to hang onto the details until manifesto day?

Nick Eardley
Political correspondent

Has Boris Johnson just accidentally revealed his big election tax pledge?

It sounds like it.

Mr Johnson was asked an awkward question about whether tax cuts would be for people like him while on a visit in Teesside.

And he blurted out that he was going to cut National Insurance payments so people didn’t have to pay until they reach £12,000. Cue a lot of excited hacks and less excited advisers.

We still don’t have the full details. But it looks like the threshold would go up to £9,500 next year - with the ultimate ambition over time to raise it to £12,500.

That’s big saving for most of us - more than £400 a year - if it's true.

And here is Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson earlier today, asked why she insists her party is "on the up" despite a dip in recent polls.

As we're on the subject of the Lib Dems, here's a profile of the party, what it stands for and what its policies are.

Tom Burridge
Transport correspondent, BBC News

The Lib Dems want to impose a tax rise on the fares of people who take the most international flights annually.

However, costs would come down for people who only make one or two international return flights a year.

The statistics suggest a frequent flyer levy is justified. More than half of those surveyed by the Department for Transport in 2014 said they had not taken any flights in the previous 12 months.

The Lib Dems' policy becomes less radical when you consider that people only taking one or two return flights a year would pay less tax.

If so many flights are taken by so few, a tax hike on frequent flyers could increase the total amount of tax paid per flight.

The UK already has one of the highest rates of Airport Passenger Duty in the world. Unsurprisingly airline bosses are against a rise.

Ultimately they could pass any additional cost on to passengers. Then it comes down to whether their customers are prepared to pay a little more.

With aviation's impact on the climate in sharp focus, some type of tax reform feels inevitable.

The boss of EasyJet, Johan Lundgren, wants a tax system which "incentivises good behaviour", such as investing in schemes to offset CO2 emissions.

Read more: 10 key policies of the Liberal Democrat manifesto explained

When Boris Johnson floated the idea of raising the point at which workers start to pay National Insurance during the Conservative leadership election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies - an independent think tank we often turn to for this sort of analysis - said it would help low-earning individuals.

But it said a policy like that would benefit higher earners as well.

In a briefing note, external from earlier this year, the IFS said raising the threshold to £12,500 "would cost £11bn per year if just the employee and self-employed thresholds are raised, or £17bn if employer ones are as well, and would take 2.4 million workers out of NICs (National Insurance contributions)".

However, the IFS also said increases to tax credits would be a more effective way to help low income households.

Was Boris Johnson's announcement on National Insurance a slip of the tongue or a deliberate big reveal?

Our own assistant political editor and the Guardian's Rowena Mason, whom he retweets, see an "oops" moment.

But the Times' Matt Chorley seems more sceptical as to whether the prime minister really did blurt it out by mistake...

The World at One
BBC Radio 4

As their manifesto was unveiled and the analysing of it began, Liberal Democrat deputy leader Sir Ed Davey was asked on The World at One about possible scenarios in a hung Parliament - that is, if no one party wins enough seats to have a majority in the Commons.

Sir Ed said there were ways to work with other parties short of a coalition.

"The reality is you can vote issue by issue, you don't have to form coalitions, you don't have to have supply and confidence arrangements.

"If you look at other parliaments around the world, people do vote issue by issue and that's what we do because we find it very difficult to find things that we've got in common with either Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson.

"Both because of their position on Brexit, because they both support it, and because of their position on the economy."

Remember, the Lib Dems were in a coalition with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015 and both Sir Ed and Jo Swinson served in it.

• National Insurance contributions go into a fund that pays for the state pension and some other benefits
• They also help pay for the NHS
• National Insurance is deducted automatically from employees' salaries
• There are different classes of National Insurance payments, depending on people's employment status and how much they earn