Keir Starmer has said he will tour the UK’s four nations in the coming days, meeting city mayors, and said he wants to turn his back on “tribal politics” by talking across party lines.
The Prime Minister said he wanted to meet with the prime ministers and mayors of major cities across the UK to implement change as quickly as possible.
Starmer said from Number 10 that he was not a “tribal politician” and had a “mandate to do politics differently”, and that self-interest was now a thing of the past.
The Labour leader said he had already spoken to Laurie Magnus, the government’s ethics adviser, about introducing tougher standards of conduct and had made it clear to his cabinet what was expected of them.
Starmer stressed the delivery of his missions, saying “mission boards” would be set up to drive change in growth, the NHS, education and other areas, with him chairing the overarching structure.
He said he was “restless for change” but warned it would take time, citing the “mess the government has created in the prisons” and that he could not build a new prison in 24 hours.
“On early release, we’ve got to address the prison problem. Too many prisoners and too few prisons… that’s a failure of government. We’ll fix that, but we can’t fix it overnight,” Starmer said.
He also said he had sat in the back of the criminal courts and often thought that many people could have been taken out of the system sooner if they had gotten help. “I want to reduce crime. There is a window of intervention in the early teens, particularly boys in my experience, to intervene and make sure that some of those people don’t end up on that escalator that ends in prison.”
He said reducing knife crime was a clear priority and one way to do that was to tackle and prevent people from committing knife crime in the first place.
Starmer said the new prisons minister, James Timpson, has “huge experience” but he avoided his position that only a third of people in prison should actually be there.
He also said he wanted to move forward with “pure honesty” about the way the NHS was not working. “It’s broken and our job now is not just to say who broke it – the previous government – but to get on with fixing it,” he said.
The Prime Minister was also asked whether Labour would abolish the two-child limit on child benefit. He would not commit to changing this limit, but stressed that his government would be clear on tackling child poverty.
Starmer also said the Rwanda plan was “dead and buried before it started” – and confirmed his government would cancel flights planned by Rishi Sunak for migrants who had crossed the Channel illegally.