Keir Starmer is betting that the same formula with which he easily won the elections at the beginning of July will now be enough for him to get the British people to accept the economic sacrifices he proposes. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has anticipated this Tuesday to his fellow citizens that the next budget, whose presentation is scheduled for October 30, will be “painful”, and that “things will get worse before they start to get better”. The new tenant of Downing Street has chosen the Rose Garden of the official residence, next to where Boris Johnson and his team gorged themselves on wine and cheese during the confinement, to remind voters of the reason why they decided to put an end to more than a decade of Conservative governments.
“Do you remember those photos, there next door, with the wine and all that food? Well, this garden, and this whole building, is at your service again,” Starmer told the 50 Labour voters and volunteers gathered with journalists to hear his speech to kick off the new political year.
“When the heart of the structure is deeply rotten, it is not enough to cover it up a bit. You cannot do a botched job or get on with easy fixes. You must reform everything and focus on the root of the problem, even if it takes more time and effort,” warned Starmer, to justify the tough decisions that lie ahead. The lectern from which he spoke bears a sign with the slogan Fixing the foundations(Fixing the foundations).
The Prime Minister has avoided going into details that would have distracted attention from the central message of his speech. He has not specified what kind of cuts or new taxes will be announced in two months. But he has recalled the hole of more than 22 billion pounds (about 26 billion euros) in the public accounts that his government detected as soon as it came to power, which it attributes to the poor management of the Conservatives.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has been predicting increases in inheritance tax and capital gains tax for several weeks now. And she has already made it clear, to the irritation of many Labour MPs who have begun to receive complaints and warnings from voters, that she will abolish the universal electricity and gas allowance that all British pensioners received. The initiative, one of the first decisions taken by Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997, was extremely popular, and meant that almost 12 million pensioners had a big relief on their energy bills. Of almost 240 euros per year, in the case of those under 80, and around 355 euros for those over that age.
Reeves wants to focus aid on the most vulnerable pensioners – approximately 1.5 million – for whom he will increase aid, but promises to leave the other 10 million deeply angry.
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The metaphor of the vandals
Starmer has used this summer’s episodes of violence, racism and xenophobia across the UK, which saw nearly 1,000 people arrested, to explain the contrast between a decade of Tory populism and the response of thousands of other Britons who cried out against this radicalism.
“All these riots did not come out of nowhere,” he said. “They exposed the state of our country. They revealed a deeply sick society. They exposed the cracks in our foundations, after a decade of division and decline, infected by a spiral of populism.”
Starmer has reminded the British people that each of those days in which his Government responded to the episodes of violence, with arrests and express trials, it had to check first if it had cells in prisons to lock them up, because the ToriesThey left behind a prison system on the verge of overflowing. “And all these people who were throwing stones, setting fire to vehicles and making threats were not only aware that the system was broken: they were betting that it would not be able to cope. They saw the cracks in our society after 14 years of failure and they tried to exploit them,” the prime minister charged.
At the end of that week of hatred towards immigrants, rampant xenophobia and uncontrolled violence, hundreds of volunteers went out to clean up the streets, and tens of thousands of British citizens expressed their repudiation of everything that had happened. Starmer has used that example to justify the economic sacrifices he announced. “I couldn’t help but think of the parallel. Imagine the pride we would feel as a nation if, after the hard work it will take to clean up and put in order all the damage they have left behind, we are able to rebuild a country that belongs to each and every one of us,” he said.
Starmer never tired of repeating during the election campaign that, if elected Prime Minister, he would launch a “decade of national renewal”. The legitimacy obtained with an overwhelming electoral result, and the prompt and firm response to the wave of violence, have now allowed him to construct a discourse kennedyano in which he calls for sacrifices and help from his compatriots, convinced that any tax increase, any cut, will be seen as the consequence and the fault of the negligence of the conservatives.
In return, the Toriesimmersed in their internal fight to find a new leader to navigate their inevitable journey through the desert, have barely been able to articulate a forceful response from the opposition: “Today’s speech [por el martes] “Keir Starmer’s Brexit is the clearest sign yet that Labour has planned to raise taxes all along,” former Prime Minister and current Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
It was the same argument used by the candidates who now aspire to lead the party, more concerned with avoiding blows from their own colleagues, and also aware that their legacy is a United Kingdom with the highest tax pressure in recent decades and an economy that has languished for years.
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