British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has assembled his new cabinet to discuss an ambitious agenda to reform public services and repair damaged relationships abroad.
At his first meeting following officially taking up the post, Starmer stressed the importance of each minister fulfilling party promises and maintaining the highest standards of honesty.
After an extraordinary 48 hours, which saw Labour secure a landslide victory in the general election with a House majority of 174 votes while the Conservatives were soundly defeated, Starmer said he was looking forward to change and was determined to deliver on his campaign promises.
“I had the opportunity to convey to my cabinet exactly what I expect from them in terms of standards, delivery, and the trust that the country gives them,” he said, as reported by the Guardian, Sunday (7/7).
Starmer stressed that under his leadership, politics would be returned to the task of service, unlike the last 14 years of Conservative Party government.
“Self-interest is the politics of the past,” Starmer said.
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Shortly following the cabinet meeting, he went straight to his first press conference as prime minister and said Labour might not change the country easily. He said the NHS was in a state of disrepair.
He explained his campaign promise would start with delivering on an additional 40,000 new NHS claims.
He added ministers were looking closely at how St Thomas’ Hospital in central London and other hospitals across the country, including Leeds, were running the programme.
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“We’ve had discussions with them regarding how they’re going to do it, they’re going to be going around the country to deploy to help set up that model in other hospitals as quickly as possible. So I can’t say on day X that it’s going to happen, but we’ve had discussions regarding how that’s going to be done from day one,” he said.
Regarding the country’s overcrowded prison conditions, Starmer said action must be taken immediately.
“We have too many prisoners, but not enough prisons. That was a huge failure of the previous administration, from a fundamental governance point of view, to get to a situation where you don’t have enough prison space for prisoners no matter what your political background, that is a failure of governance,” he added.
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The government would consider ways to relax planning rules so more prisons might be built more quickly, he said, as well as early intervention to ensure boys in particular did not become involved in offences such as knife crime.
On Friday (5/70) evening, Starmer appointed businessman and prison reform activist James Timpson as his new prisons minister.
When asked regarding Timpson’s recent assertion that a third of prisoners should not be in prison, he cited his experience as director of public prosecutions, where he saw many young offenders who might have been prevented from falling into crime.
“I’ve sat in the back of countless criminal courts, watching people being processed through the escalator system to go to jail,” he said.
Marking a complete change from the government’s previous immigration policy, Starmer said its Rwanda scheme was now dead and buried and he was not prepared to push ahead with what he called a “gimmick”.
Lawmakers will return to the House of Representatives on Tuesday (July 9), including 334 new lawmakers. Their first task will be to elect a speaker, then they will be sworn in for several days.
Starmer has hinted his new government will make a series of announcements over the coming days to maintain the momentum of change. The prime minister will embark on a tour of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland before heading to a NATO summit starting in Washington DC.
New foreign minister David Lammy has embarked on his first overseas trip, which will take him to Germany, Poland and Sweden, signalling his commitment to working closely with key European partners.
He will then join prime ministers at a NATO summit in Washington. Lammy has said he aims to reset the relationship between Britain and the European Union that has been damaged by Brexit.
In a further signal of a desire to improve ties with European countries, Starmer held a phone call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in which he floated the idea of building greater economic cooperation.
In a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, the leaders discussed advancing close cooperation between the UK and France. (Z-1)
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