Prime Minister Keir Starmer appealed directly to working-class voters yesterday, calling on Labour’s traditional supporters to reject the ‘snake oil’ peddled by the populist Reform UK party and back his vision of ‘a Britain built for all’.
In the most passionate defence of his premiership since he won a landslide election in July last year, Starmer called for unity, attacking Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage and his Reform party for only being interested in fomenting division.
Under threat from Reform on the right and a nascent leftist party under his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer called on voters to be patient with his Labour government, which he said was taking its first steps along the path to ‘renew Britain’.
And he appealed directly to Britain’s working people, saying he understood their frustrations of being ‘patronised’ by politicians, referring to his late father feeling disrespected for having a manual job rather than a university education – something he pledged to change by promoting technical colleges.
“No matter how many people tell me it can’t be done, I believe Britain can come together,” he told his party’s second annual conference in the northern English city of Liverpool since winning power last year.
“We can all see our country faces a choice, a defining choice. Britain stands at a fork in the road. We can choose decency, or we can choose division. Renewal or decline,” he said in a challenge to increasingly restive legislators who question his leadership after falling behind Reform in the polls.
In a nod to the difficulties he has faced in the first year of his premiership with his personal poll ratings the worst for a British leader since at least 1977, Starmer again committed to raising living standards and putting money in voters’ pockets.
He repeated that his government would tackle the high rates of illegal immigration into Britain but would fight racism and those who ‘say or imply the people cannot be English or British because of the colour of their skin’.
Finance minister Rachel Reeves used her speech to warn those in the party who want her to ease her fiscal rules to spend more on the nation’s ailing economy that they were ‘wrong, dangerously so’, keeping the door open to tax rises.
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