Winter is coming. That’s the message from Keir Starmer’s set-piece speech this morning from the No. 10 rose garden. After a tricky few weeks for the new Prime Minister on cronyism claims and anxiety about cuts to the winter fuel allowance, Starmer and his team attempted seize the agenda with a speech looking ahead to the months to come. However, anyone hoping for optimism will be disappointed. While Tony Blair was associated with the D:Ream anthem of ‘things can only get better’, Starmer warned that things can only get worse – at least in the short term:
Frankly – things will get worse before we get better. I didn’t want to release prisoners early. I was chief prosecutor for five years, it goes against the grain of everything I’ve ever done. But to be blunt, if we hadn’t taken that difficult decision immediately, we wouldn’t have been able to respond to the riots as we did.
Starmer also mentioned the decision to means test the winter fuel allowance as something he did not want to do but had to do reluctantly. Why? That pesky Tory inheritance. He said his government had done more in six weeks than the Tories had in seven years. The Prime Minister repeatedly sought to talk up the bad state in which the Conservative government left the country – attempting to use it as justification for the unpalatable choices he has made so far and those he will take between now and Christmas:
So, when I talk about the inheritance the last government left us – the £22 billion black hole in our finances – this isn’t about lines on a graph, this is about people’s lives. And the Tories are still not being honest about it. They haven’t recognised what they’ve cost the country and they haven’t apologised for what they’ve cost you.
He also defended his government’s decisions to offer generous salary increases to the unions in order to settle pay disputes, arguing that the economy won’t grow if people can’t see a doctor or get to work.
What was the point of the speech? Starmer’s claim that he was bringing an end to ‘performance politics’ was slightly undermined by the clear PR stunt of holding it in the Downing Street rose garden in a bid to favourably cast himself against the Boris Johnson regime (the garden was used for Dominic Cummings’ infamous Barnard Castle press conference). But the purpose of the speech is clear: to lay the groundwork for a series of potentially unpopular decisions in the coming months.
The new buzz phrase among ministers is ‘fixing the foundations’. Starmer said that the 30 October Budget would be ‘painful’: ‘There is a Budget coming in October and it is going to be painful. We have no other choice given the situation we are in’. This includes making ‘big asks’ of ordinary people. Notably during the election, Starmer and Reeves said they would nor raise taxes on working people.
Starmer and his aides hope that by levelling with the public, they will have buy-in for potential tax rises and other hard sells. However, the risk is that for all the talk of honesty in politics, voters feel it is all a little too late given Starmer did not mention any of this in the election campaign – despite warnings from the Tories. There’s also a party management problem. Starmer needs to convince his MPs to hold their nerve in the face of a potential voter backlash. Starmer’s warning that things are likely to get worse before they get better applies to his premiership – as well as the country.
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