Keir Starmer still clearly misses opposition. He spent almost as much of his reset speech complaining about the Tories and the mess he feels they made of things as he did talking about what he is actually doing. It’s almost as though government has turned out to be harder and less enjoyable than even he had predicted. He spent the first few minutes of his speech listing in his usual exasperated tones the ways in which the Conservatives had failed the country, deploying his analogy about tackling damp in a household by using a hairdryer, before saying: ‘Stabilising the economy, fixing the foundations, clearing up the mess – so we can take the country forward with our missions.’
What the Prime Minister actually wants to do is ‘challenging’, he claimed. He announced six ‘measurable milestones’ which he said his government is now able to focus on, having built a ‘strong foundation’. They are: raising living standards in every part of the UK; rebuilding Britain with 1.5 million homes and fast-tracking planning decisions on major infrastructure projects; ending hospital backlogs and meeting the standard of 92 per cent of patients being treated within 18 weeks; putting police back on the beat; giving children the best start in life; and securing homegrown energy and putting the UK on track to 95 per cent clean power by 2030. The problem, of course, with setting out any list of priorities is that others are conspicuous by their absence, which is why Starmer was immediately asked why immigration wasn’t on the list. In the speech he had insisted that ‘ border security’ was one of the ‘fundamentals’ that would never change, promising ‘this government will reduce immigration – legal and illegal – because that is what working people want and not just on migration itself’. But even in that, he sounded more energised by his critique of the ‘absolutely unforgivable’ way the Tories had ‘lost control of migration’ than he did by what he plans to do differently.
What does Starmer actually mean when he describes these priorities as ‘measurable milestones’? It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense given milestones are in fact a marker of a measurement, so well done to whoever came up with that phrase. He said: ‘The job of these milestones is to take our country forward, drive reform through the public sector, it’s not about making the government look good. So yes – they are risky for us. Country first, party second, because this is something we’ve totally lost sight of in British politics and, to be honest, across Whitehall as well.’ He claimed that Westminster culture meant that people confused being careful about making promises you can’t keep with setting ‘targets that will happen anyway’, and that the pledge on the NHS, for instance, was going to be really difficult to meet. Again he detailed the problems with the previous Tory administrations, saying ‘our plan for a change is a break, both with the unrealistic bluster of Boris Johnson and the acceptance of decline that was Rishi Sunak’s five pledges’. Starmer has long been more comfortable with defining himself as what he isn’t, rather than what he is, and today’s speech didn’t change that either.
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