UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer Addresses Necessary Government 'Reset' During First Press Briefing

3 months ago

On Saturday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer answered reporter questions on the Labour Party's policy plans during a press briefing.

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00:00Prime Minister, you talk about the need for a reset. One of the lessons of Labour

00:06governments is the need to take the tough decisions early. We've already

00:12heard from Wes Streeting that in his view the policy now of the NHS is that

00:18it is broken. If in the coming weeks as you go through department by department

00:25you find that things are worse than you expected, are you prepared to take tough

00:34decisions early, including possibly raising more from taxation? And then

00:42secondly, just on Beth's point about how you've won the biggest majority relative

00:51to the size of the vote in history, in history. You said yesterday that your

00:56priority would be to govern for those who didn't vote for you. Some 80% of

01:01British voters didn't vote for you, that's including those who didn't vote at all.

01:08What does that mean in practice in a sense for the culture of the government

01:14and how you'll govern? Thank you Robert. Look, in relation to the tough decisions

01:20we're going to have to take the tough decisions and take them early and we

01:24will. We will do that with a raw honesty and that's really what sat behind Wes

01:30Streeting's description yesterday of the NHS as being broken. It is, everybody who

01:36uses it and works in it knows that it is broken and we're not going to operate

01:40under the pretense or language that doesn't express the problem as it is

01:45because otherwise we won't be able to fix the problem as quickly as we need to

01:48and we'll continue in that vein. There are other issues, prisons would be an

01:52obvious example, where other parts of the system are broken and we're going to

01:57have to approach that with a raw honesty as well and we will take the tough

02:02decisions but that is not a sort of prelude to saying there's some tax

02:08decision that we didn't speak about before we're about to announce now. It's

02:12about the tough decisions to fix the problem of being honest about what they

02:15are. On the second part of your question it was very important to me to say what

02:20I said on the steps yesterday about those that didn't vote for us because

02:25we're a government of service to all people whether they voted for us or not

02:30and I include within that people who voted Labour for the first time on

02:34Thursday because across the country in many places people will have voted

02:39Labour for the first time perhaps never having voted Labour before and I

02:42recognise that and that they put their trust and confidence in us and we have

02:48to repay that so we hold them in our minds eye. People who didn't vote for us

02:52need to know that we will serve them, that we will not turn our back on people

02:57just because we don't think they voted for us. We'll govern for the whole

03:00country and that's what I meant by what I said yesterday it's about taking the

03:05country forward and doing that you know in conjunction with our First Ministers

03:10doing that in conjunction with our mayors and other elected representatives

03:14across the areas so that we can govern for the whole of the country and take

03:18the country forward and turn our back on tribal politics and simply picking

03:23issues we want to fight just for the party politics of it that's what's gone

03:27wrong in my view in the last few years where priorities are simply set by party

03:31advantage rather than country first and that's an example of what I mean by

03:37country first party second and that's the approach we'll take. Thank you Robert

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer Addresses Necessary Government 'Reset' During First Press Briefing

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