The sun shone, the birds chirped and the breeze gently ruffled the trees leaning over the rose garden of 10 Downing Street as Keir Starmer gave his first big speech as UK prime minister on Tuesday.
The scene, reminiscent of an English country garden in the administrative heart of London, seemed almost bucolic as he stood there in the dappled morning light.
Yet why had Starmer chosen such a bright, idyllic location to deliver his dark message that there is fiscal and political “pain” on the horizon for Britain, and a £22 billion “black hole” in its finances?
Why did he not choose instead to deliver the bad news – that his new Labour government has apparently discovered that the nation is blighted by institutional “rot” – from some suitably nondescript government office? It would have chimed better with his speech.
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Then Starmer pointed at the raised terrace overlooking the garden – the terrace where former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson and his advisers including Dominic Cummings looked on in now-infamous photos as his staff held yet another lockdown-busting garden party during the Covid pandemic. The garden where Cummings later held a bizarre press conference as he tried to explain away his flagrant breaches of Covid rules by claiming that he drove nearly 50km to test his eyesight.
“That’s why I wanted to invite you here today,” Starmer told his handpicked audience of assorted frontline workers and ordinary members of the public, as journalists watched on from the lawn.
“To show [you] that decent, hard-working people who make up the backbone of this country belong here. This is a government for you. A garden and a building that were once used for lockdown parties; remember the pictures just over there, of the wine and the food. Well, this garden and this building are now back in your service.”
He contrasted what he said would be the approach to government of his 53-day-old Labour administration with the “recklessness” that he accused the Tories of perpetrating. A new approach to government, perhaps, but the whiff of familiar old problems for Britain, a nation that has seemed to grow weary in recent years amid a surfeit of political division, strife and despair, and the economic and moral sluggishness that enveloped it as a result.
Starmer warned that the upcoming budget in October, the first in British history to be delivered by a woman chancellor in Rachel Reeves, would be “painful”. He said Labour would have to pare back the nation’s finances to fill the £22 billion hole in Britain’s books that he claimed the Tories had “hidden” from everybody, including the independent watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
[ Belfast riots were ‘intolerable’ and the actions of racists, says Keir StarmerOpens in new window ]
There was, of course, a contrast between the hard times Starmer insisted Britain must endure for long-term gain and the bumper pay deals his government has concluded with doctors, train drivers and other public sector workers in the weeks since Labour routed the Tories in the general election.
The journalists on the lawn soon reminded the prime minister of this seemingly glaring contradiction. Starmer retorted that his government’s “number one priority” was to drive economic growth and “wealth creation” and that it would be impossible to grow the economy while train drivers were striking, or to reform the National Health Service while medical workers walked off the job.
He also addressed the recent anti-immigration riots that engulfed parts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland earlier in the summer, and which provided the first test of his premiership. Starmer had been the UK’s director of public prosecutions in 2011, the last time there had been widespread riots and civil disorder. He said the situation was much more difficult to manage this time round because, unlike in 2011, Britain now has a dire shortage of prison spaces. This, he alleged, was another problem that the Tories had swept beneath the carpet.
Britain didn’t just have an economic black hole, said Starmer, but a “societal black hole” too.
“These riots didn’t happen in a vacuum. They exposed the state of our country. [They] revealed a deeply unhealthy society, the cracks in our foundation laid bare [and] weakened by a decade of division and decline. We can’t go on like this any more,” he said.
“Things will get worse before they get better,” added Starmer, in a departure from the last election-winning Labour leader, Tony Blair, who promised – in the words of the hit song by D:Ream – that “things can only get better”.
Starmer, having warned of tough times ahead, tried to end on a positive note. He said the riots “didn’t just betray the sickness, they also revealed the cure”. He suggested he had been inspired by the people who, on the mornings after the unrest, had cleared up their communities.
“I felt real pride in those people who cleaned up the streets. Imagine the pride we will feel as a nation when, after the hard work of clearing up the mess is done, we have a country that we have built together. Built to last,” he said.
Easy to say. Harder to deliver. Westminster returns from recess next week with much to do.
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