Keir Starmer is not a fan of shocks or surprises. But now he is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The head of government of the sixth richest nation in the world. And every decision, statement or gesture is viewed in a different light. It grabs headlines. Even if it is not something new. When he declared this Saturday that the plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda, to which his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, dedicated so much effort, was “dead and buried”, the beginning of a new political cycle became clear. “That plan never achieved the deterrent effect it was intended to achieve. You only need to look at the figures for these first six months. [13.500 inmigrantes han cruzado ya en 2024 el canal de la Mancha] “to understand the problem we have inherited (…); I am not prepared to continue with measures that are more gimmicky and artificial than effective,” Starmer made clear.
The Labour leader has announced the creation of a Joint Border Security Command to crack down on the mafias transporting migrants.
The new Labour Cabinet met for the first time on Saturday morning. Smiling faces, an optimistic spirit and plenty of jokes were on display to celebrate the return to Downing Street after a 14-year desert journey.
Starmer knows that his mandate, however comfortable the parliamentary majority achieved in Thursday’s elections, is more due to the punishment inflicted by voters on the Conservative Party than to the enthusiasm generated by Labour. And that the decisions and gestures of the first 100 days of government are going to be key. “We are going to have to make tough decisions, and we are going to have to make them soon. We will do so with the crudest possible sincerity,” said the Prime Minister at the press conference following his inaugural Cabinet meeting.
He thus backed the strategy of his new health minister, Wes Streeting, in the face of the urgent need to rescue the National Health Service (NHS), which has waiting lists of up to eight million patients. “The NHS is broken,” said Streeting, avoiding any half-hearted treatment from the start. “We are not going to operate with language or simulation that tries to camouflage the true nature of the problems, because that is not how they can be solved,” said Starmer.
The most urgent and serious
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The expression has been circulating for months now shit list (shit list) to refer to the most serious and urgent problems that the new Labour government will have to face. It was drawn up by Sue Gray, the senior civil servant who agreed to be Starmer’s chief of staff, and who has a knowledge and control of the internal machinery of the United Kingdom’s civil service like few others have.
The public water company, Thames Water, is saddled with a debt of more than 18 billion euros and its managers are clamoring for nationalisation or a rise in consumer bills of more than 40%, for example. The UK’s prisons are overflowing. Universities are on the verge of bankruptcy. The health system is in crisis. All that, for a start.
Civil servants are already demanding – and expecting – a pay rise from the new left-wing government. And most of England’s town councils and municipal corporations (which depend on central government funding) are up to their necks in water.
“I will be meeting with the mayors of the main cities next Tuesday to discuss how to achieve the economic growth that the United Kingdom so desperately needs,” Starmer announced. “That includes all mayors. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, and I do not consider myself a tribal prime minister. My government will always work with any local official, whatever party they belong to, when they care about their region,” he added.
Tour of the “four nations”
Starmer has the legitimacy that his predecessor lacked, as his party has received the most votes in England, Wales and Scotland. In the latter, he has practically managed to sweep away the pro-independence SNP. Northern Ireland is another matter, with its own political keys, where the republicans of Sinn Féin received the most votes on Thursday. Even so, the Prime Minister wants to recover the relevance that Tony Blair once gave to autonomous governments, and has announced that on Monday he will undertake a quick tour of the four nations of the United Kingdom. “I operate under the principle that those who give their all for their community know what is best for it. And that requires us to take firm decisions to take power and resources out of Whitehall.” [como se llama en la jerga política británica al poder central, porque en esa calle de Londres están los principales ministerios]”, he assured.
Starmer will also travel to Washington next week to attend the NATO summit. It will be his first international meeting with leaders who have already called to congratulate him. But above all, he said, to express the continuity of his government with regard to the United Kingdom’s greater foreign commitment today: “I am going to make clear our firm support, together with our allies, for Ukraine,” he announced.
The new prime minister knows that public opinion will be under pressure from day one, demanding the “change” that he used as a campaign slogan and has not stopped promising. “Change does not come overnight,” he said, but “we have been working on the next decisions for months and we are going to land without stopping moving forward,” he assured.
The clearest signal that Starmer has wanted to send, conscious of the legacy tory scandals, banned parties during lockdown and influence peddling, has been to meet in the early hours of Downing Street with Laurie Magnus, the Government’s chief adviser on Ministerial Ethics matters, and to convey to the members of his Cabinet “what he expects of them, of their behaviour, of their effectiveness, and of their response to the trust that citizens have placed in them.”
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