Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister
The Downing Street Rose Garden
25 August 2024
HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY
I have to be honest with you. Things are worse than we ever imagined. In the first few weeks, we discovered a 22 billion pound black hole in the public finances. And before anyone says oh this is just performative… Or playing politics. Let’s remember. The OBR did not know about it. They wrote a letter setting that out. And they didn’t know – because the last government hid it. Even just last Wednesday… We found out that – thanks to the last government’s recklessness – We borrowed almost 5 billion pounds more than the OBR expected in the last three months alone.
The first sentence here economically establishes the two themes of the speech in a single phrase. I have to be honest with you because there is bad news to impart. But also I have to be honest with you because that is the sort of politician I am, in obvious contrast to some who went before. This claim to honesty thus contains the insult that we, the people, have been lied to and that the legacy left by the previous government is worse than anyone thought. This is how the two themes of the speech join up, in this sentence. The purpose of this speech is to win time. Every government – especially one that has a genuinely poor inheritance as this one does – needs to be able to blame its predecessor for a while. It takes time to make the world better and you need a victim in the meantime. The claim that things are much worse than they looked is therefore a reminder that we didn’t make the mess we are clearing up. It’s a request for a period of patience and goodwill.
READING THE RIOT ACT
But as well as the things we’ve discovered, we’ve also seen shocking scenes across the nation. A mindless minority of thugs – who thought they could get away with causing chaos… Now they’re learning that crime has consequences. I will not tolerate a break down in law and order under any circumstances. And I will not listen to those who exploit grieving families, and disrespect communities… But these riots didn’t happen in a vacuum. They exposed the state of our country. Revealed a deeply unhealthy society…. And I saw the beginning of that downward spiral firsthand. In 2011. When riots ripped through London and across the country. I was then Director of Public Prosecutions. And when I think back to that time… I see just how far we have fallen. Because responding to those riots was hard – of course. But dealing with the riots this summer was much harder. Not having enough prison places is about as fundamental a failure as you can get.
The summer riots were a reminder of the perennial principle of political life that you are rarely remembered for what you wanted. You tend to be remembered for what happened on your watch and how you reacted. Starmer here is trying to bend the riots into his general theme. The logic is a bit stretched here because his strong condemnation of the violence means he brooks no excuses and yet the desire to blame the Tories means that the riots need to have social roots which shifts the causation. But the political point at the end is fair enough and nobody is better placed than Starner – once upon a time the chief prosecutor – to make it. It really is a major failure of statecraft if a country has nowhere to place criminals. It really is an indictment of the previous government and this effective passage reminds us that the objective of blaming the Conservatives is not just political playfulness. There is more than a little truth in it.
FORTUNE’S HOSTAGES
That’s what we have inherited. Not just an economic black hole. A societal black hole. And that is why we have to take action and do things differently. Part of that is being honest with people – about the choices we face. And how tough this will be. Frankly – things will get worse before they get better.
Beware this passage and its two hostages to fortune. The first is the claim – all new governments make it = that we will do things differently. Not just that we will do different things but that we will do them differently. The danger in such a claim should already be clear. Indeed, Sir Keir had to take questions after his speech about Lord Alli’s pass to get into Downing Street. He can expect a lot more of that if he pushes too piously on the claim that Labour people are somehow intrinsically better than Conservative people. It may be true, it may be false but it is better off not said. The second hostage to fortune here will be the story in the months to come. Plenty of people will have no trouble believing that things will get worse. They might be a bit sceptical about the second part of the slogan though – “before they get better”. Will they get better? When and how? Once the patience and goodwill run out, those will be the defining questions.
THE PASSAGE WE DIDN’T TAKE
A garden and a building that were once used for lockdown parties… Remember the pictures just over there, of the wine and the food. Well this garden… And this building… are now back in your service.
“Footfalls echo in the memory” wrote Eliot in Four Quartets, “Down the passage which we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose-garden”. Starmer goes into the rose garden to make a sober speech in praise of public service rather than to make a non-apology about a trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown. He is looking up at the terrace, made famous by pictures of Downing Street parties. It was an effective reminder of the immediate past, all the better for being dramatized rather than merely asserted.
THE HOUSE RETURNS
Now, next week, parliament returns. The business of politics will resume. But it won’t be business as usual. Because we can’t go on like this anymore. Things will have to be done differently. We will do the hard work to root out 14 years of rot. Reverse a decade of decline. And fix the foundations…I won’t lose sight of what we were elected to do. And most importantly – I won’t lose sight of the people we were elected to do it for. You. This is our country. Let’s fix it – together.
The house is a common political metaphor. George Osborne accused Labour of not fixing the roof while the sun was shining. Now, maintenance having been sorely neglected for a long time, rot has set in and the very foundations need attention. It sounds like the house might have to be entirely rebuilt. Foundations are not things it is easy to fix. Alliteration can easily lead you astray. Foundations are laid and if they are not supporting the structure then we will have to start again. And that might in fact be true. The obvious critique of this speech would be to say that embodies a deliberate exaggeration for political purposes. The best defence might be that, sadly, it is worse than that. It might just be true. Things really are as bad as all that.
There is too much emphasis on the failures of the previous government and not enough actual information about the way forward. The remarks about the venue having been used for parties during Covid really detracted from the speech. That's the way American politics go, I had hoped that the new Government would have been more concerned about what needs to happen rather than digging up what did happen which is, as it is history, is unchangeable. Sorry Sir Starmer, I am disappointed in your lack of forward planning and your reliance upon highlighting the failures of your predecessors to buttress your own Government.