Britain’s prime minister Keir Starmer has warned that his new Labour government’s first budget in October will be “painful”, as it seeks to fill a £22 billion fiscal “black hole” that he says the Tories had hidden and bequeathed to the incoming administration.
Mr Starmer used a landmark address in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street to flag that “tough choices” will be made by the new chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves. He also said his government will front-load difficult decisions to reform Britain’s finances and public services.
“When there is a deep rot deep in the heart of a structure, you can’t just cover it up. You can’t tinker or rely on quick fixes,” said the prime minister, as he stood in the late August sunshine to warn Britain that darker days lay immediately ahead.
“You have to overhaul the entire thing. Otherwise the rot returns,” said Mr Starmer, who added that things would “get worse before they get better” for the UK.
He used Britain’s shortage of prison places as an example of the “rot” that he says has set into the country’s infrastructure and services. The prime minister said that each day during the recent anti-immigration riots that swept the UK, he had to scour lists of available prison places to see if there were enough spots to arrest and hold violent protesters.
It was “not good enough,” he said, and made this summer’s riots harder to manage than the civil unrest of 2011, when he was director of public prosecutions.
“They [the rioter] saw the cracks in our society after 14 years of [Tory government] failure, and they exploited them. That’s what we’ve inherited: not just an economic black hole, a societal black hole, and that’s why we have to take action and do things differently.”
He said “populism” pursued by the previous Tory government across a range of policy areas had contributed to the social unrest, as he promised to “fix the foundations” of Britain.
“I won’t lose sight of what we were elected to do. And most importantly, I won’t lose sight of the people we were elected to do it for,” he said, almost eight weeks after Labour’s thumping election victory over the Tories.
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