Change begins here – but it won’t happen overnight
Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the garden of 10 Downing Street (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
3 min read
This will be a historic Labour Party Conference. For the first time in 15 years, we will come together as the governing party of this great nation.
After more than a decade of Tory chaos and division, we finally have a Labour government committed to fixing the foundations and rebuilding the country so that it works for everyone.
When I made my first in-person Conference speech three years ago, I said that the party would have to change if we wanted the chance to win an election. I knew that would be difficult, but I also knew it was essential if we wanted to return our party, and politics, to public service and win back people’s trust.
We’ll be led by what’s right for the country, not what’s good for our party
We did change our party – but we didn’t do it as an end in itself. We did it so we could change our country and transform the lives of working people. Now we have that opportunity, we’re not going to waste it.
Change begins here. We are doing things differently, as a mission-driven government that believes in working with people, not doing things to them. We are laser-focused on those missions: the higher growth that improves people’s living standards, cheaper bills, getting the NHS back on its feet and fit for the future, safer streets and making sure our children have the opportunities they deserve.
In just a few months, we’ve achieved more than the Tories achieved in years. We’ve set up a National Wealth Fund to invest in key industries, we’ve launched Great British Energy to create good jobs and cheaper bills, we’ve scrapped the Rwanda plan and set up a Border Security Command to tackle the criminal gangs, we’ve begun the reform the NHS desperately needs, and we’ve ended the tax break on private schools to break down the barriers to opportunity.
But as I’ve said all along, the change we need will not happen overnight. The Tories ran down public services, tanked the economy, and their self-service eroded people’s trust in politics and politicians. We knew that we would have to clear up the mess the Tories had left, but we didn’t know they had hidden a £22bn black hole in the public finances and ignored advice that prisons were dangerously overcrowded.
That means that there have been tough decisions to make, and there are more tough decisions ahead. Unlike the Tories, we won’t shirk our responsibilities or kick the can down the road. We’ll be led by what’s right for the country, not what’s good for our party. If that means we have to release prisoners early, because of the state they left the prisons in, that is what we’ll do. If we have to make tough decisions on winter fuel benefits, because they crashed the economy, that is what we will do.
Never again will we allow people to suffer the chaos inflicted by Tory recklessness under a Labour government. Never again will politics be seen as an excuse for self-service, rather than the privilege of public service. And never again will the Labour Party abandon the working people of this country who we were elected to serve.
In July, the country turned the page on the Tory politics of performance. At Conference, we’ll be writing a new chapter.
Now is the time to begin a new national story of a confident, prosperous nation, and tell a new tale of a people that, when times were hard, came together to build a new Britain. A country that belongs to all of us, with a government, a party, and a politics of service.
Keir Starmer is Prime Minister and Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras
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