Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says he and his party are ready for an election next May, adding that he does not believe current government "has got a record to stand on", while his party has "completely changed" since he became leader. Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 if you're going to have a mission,
00:01 how are you going to carry it out?
00:05 Because the how is not always thought through,
00:07 in my view, in government.
00:08 So the how is, first, we're not going to suck it up
00:12 to the center.
00:13 We're not going to run it from Westminster and Whitehall,
00:16 trying to run things through government.
00:19 I don't think government can do your job
00:21 better than you can, and I don't think we should try.
00:24 I think that's a big mistake.
00:26 Equally, I think that if a government just sits it out
00:30 and says, well, we've made our mission clear,
00:34 the markets usually react, business knows what to do,
00:37 we just sit back now.
00:39 I don't think that's going to work,
00:40 because you don't have a driving sense of purpose.
00:42 Therefore, it's got to be a partnership,
00:45 and it's got to be a partnership between business,
00:48 between you, and an incoming government.
00:52 And therefore, if we do come into government,
00:55 you will be coming into government with us,
00:59 because we will be saying, this is what we want to achieve.
01:02 We set that out, and we ask you to partner with us
01:06 to achieve that.
01:07 The big question on everybody's mind will be
01:10 what's going to happen in the election,
01:12 and I'm not going to predict that.
01:14 There's a long way to go, and my job was to get
01:18 the Labour Party from the worst election victory,
01:21 a defeat, since 1935, which is what happened last time,
01:25 back to a position where we can win an election,
01:28 and to change the Labour Party.
01:30 The Labour Party you see today is completely changed.
01:33 I hope you can see that and feel that.
01:36 So I'm not going to predict the outcome
01:37 of the general election, nor when it'll be,
01:41 although it'll obviously be the May or October,
01:44 and our team is ready for May,
01:47 because I don't think anybody would rule out May.
01:51 I honestly don't think this government has got a record
01:55 to stand on.
01:56 At the end of the last government,
01:59 we've had 13 years now of this government,
02:00 we've had 13 years of a Labour government.
02:03 At the end of the last Labour government,
02:04 at conferences like this, literally,
02:08 Gordon Brown as Prime Minister could stand up on stage
02:11 for his conference speech and list at some length
02:15 the achievements of the last Labour government.
02:17 There's a clip of it, you may say it goes on and on,
02:20 it goes from side to side.
02:21 Now you may agree with everything that was done,
02:23 or nothing that was done, or some of what was done,
02:26 but you can't argue there was a long list of things
02:28 that the last Labour government was done.
02:30 There is no equivalent list.
02:32 There isn't a list.
02:34 My worry is, this is net zero,
02:38 there are other examples of this,
02:40 that instead of making decisions
02:43 in the long-term interests of the UK,
02:46 the government is in danger of making decisions
02:49 in the short-term interests of opening up divides
02:52 for the purpose of an election.
02:54 And when a government gets into that place,
02:56 whatever political party it is,
02:58 that's a bad place for the country,
03:00 because it ought to be decisions
03:02 about the long-term of the country.
03:03 So I'm predicting, I'm afraid,
03:05 that the election campaign will descend into that place,
03:10 rather than on the sort of principles and values
03:12 that it ought to be about.
03:13 Now I hope, my other predictions
03:15 have been reasonably accurate.
03:17 I hope on this one I'm wrong,
03:19 because I think the country deserves
03:24 a really good debate and argument
03:27 about our future direction over the next 10 or 20 years,
03:31 and I hope we can have that.