Keir Starmer on Saturday, in his first full day as prime minister, launched an ambitious programme to reform the country’s creaking public services and repair damaged foreign relations.
After an extraordinary 48 hours in which Labour won a landslide general election victory with a huge majority of 174 seats in the House of Commons, while the Tories were defeated, Starmer said he was “restless for change” and determined to deliver on his campaign promises.
The Prime Minister gave a strong explanation during the first cabinet meeting. He stressed the importance of every minister fulfilling the party’s promises and maintaining the highest standards of integrity.
“I have had the opportunity to explain to my cabinet exactly what I expect from them in terms of standards, implementation and the trust the country places in them,” he said.
Starmer made it clear that under his leadership politics would once again become a conscription, unlike the last 14 years of Tory government. “Self-interest is yesterday’s politics,” he said.
Shortly after the Cabinet meeting, he went straight into the first press conference of his premiership, in which he was adamant that while Labour could not change the country by ‘flipping a switch’, no time would be lost in beginning the task of national renewal.
He said there needed to be “pure honesty” about the state of the health service, agreeing with his Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, who said on Friday that the NHS was fundamentally “broken”.
Work to deliver Labour’s pledge of 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week “starts immediately”, Starmer said, adding that ministers were looking at how St Thomas’ Hospital in central London and other hospitals around the country, including Leeds, had already increased appointments “of their own accord” by setting up schemes under which staff were given incentives to work later evenings and weekends.
“We’ve talked to them about how they’ve done it … they’re going to be deployed around the country to get the model up and running in other hospitals as quickly as possible,” he said. “So I can’t say it’s going to happen on day X, but we’ve had quite a few conversations about how that’s going to be rolled out from day one.”
Starmer said urgent action was needed over the overcrowding in the country’s prisons.
“We have too many prisoners, too few prisons. That is a monumental failure of the previous government, from every fundamental point of view of government, to get to a situation where you don’t have enough prison spaces for prisoners – regardless of your political colour, that is a failure of government.”
His government would look at ways to relax planning rules to allow more prisons to be built more quickly, he said, and to intervene early to ensure that young boys in particular are not involved in crimes such as knife crime.
A source at the Ministry of Justice said on Saturday night: “As the Prime Minister said yesterday, our prisons are broken. After 14 years of neglect they are unsafe and bursting at the seams.
“This is not an unforeseen crisis, but one caused by irresponsible stewardship. We have no choice but to make difficult short- and long-term decisions to defuse this ticking time bomb.”
On Friday evening, Starmer appointed businessman and prison reform campaigner James Timpson as his new prisons minister.
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When asked about Timpson’s recent claim that a third of prisoners should not be there, he cited his experience as Director of Public Prosecutions, where he had seen young offenders who could have been prevented from becoming criminals.
“I’ve sat in the back of I don’t know how many criminal courts and seen people go through the system on an escalator to go to prison,” the prime minister said.
In a complete departure from the previous government’s immigration policy, Starmer said the Rwanda plan was now “dead and buried” and he was not prepared to continue with such “tricks”.
“It’s never been a deterrent,” he said. “You look at the numbers that have come in the first six and a half months of this year; they’re record numbers — that’s the problem we’re inheriting.”
MPs return to the House of Commons on Tuesday, including the 334 new MPs. Their first task is to elect a speaker, and then they will be sworn in over several days.
Starmer suggested his new government would make a series of announcements in the coming days to maintain the momentum for change. The prime minister will tour Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on Sunday before attending a NATO summit starting in Washington DC on Tuesday.
New Foreign Secretary David Lammy has already embarked on his first foreign trip, which will take him to Germany, Poland and Sweden to meet his counterparts in each country, signalling his commitment to close cooperation with key European partners. He will then join the prime minister at the NATO meeting in Washington. Lammy has already said he plans to “reset” the UK-EU relationship damaged by Brexit.
In a further signal of the desire to improve relations with European countries, Starmer held a phone call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday in which he advocated “building greater economic cooperation”. In a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, the leaders discussed “further advancing the close cooperation between the UK and France”.