Beleaguered Sir Keir Starmer will today make a final attempt to save his failing premiership.
Rocked by growing calls by his own MPs to quit following Labour’s drubbing in the local elections, the Prime Minister is to deliver a make-or-break speech.
He will attempt to set out an optimistic vision for Britain after acknowledging the Government has so far been too gloomy.
Sir Keir is expected to pitch Labour as a party for young voters after losing ground to the Greens and will make the case for the UK to again seek closer ties with the European Union to secure elusive economic growth.
Sir Keir will say: ‘On growth, defence, Europe, energy – we need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times.
‘Strength through fairness. It’s a core Labour argument. And you will see those values writ large in the King’s Speech [on Wednesday]. And you will see hope, urgency and exactly whose side we are on…
‘People need hope. We will face up to the big challenges and we will make the big arguments.’
In an interview with The Observer, Sir Keir said he wanted a decade in No 10, describing his government as a ‘ten-year project of renewal’ and vowing to lead Labour into the next General Election then serve a full second term.
Sir Keir is expected to pitch Labour as a party for young voters after losing ground to the Greens
Former Keir Starmer loyalist and MP Josh Simons publicly called for his resignation
What should Labour do to win back trust after their local election blow and calls for Starmer to quit?
‘I’m not going to walk away from the job I was elected to do in July 2024,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not going to plunge the country into chaos.’
Sir Keir said support for Reform UK and the Greens was shallow despite them trouncing Labour in last week’s local elections. ‘I have a strong belief that there aren’t many people who actually want Zack Polanski or Nigel Farage as prime minister,’ he said.
‘I think that the mainstream majority actually want to know that we, the Government, have progressive answers to the challenges that they face on a daily basis, and we need to spell out in terms and with conviction that we do have those progressive answers.’
He said he and his ministers had been ‘right to level with the public about the challenges that we faced as a country’ but admitted that ‘what we didn’t do was convince them about the future and how things can be better.’
Sir Keir also claimed that ‘Brexit has held back our young people’ as he revealed that the UK was close to agreeing a ‘youth experience visa’ with Brussels which will allow under-30s to live and work in the EU for two to three years.
He added: ‘We have to be closer to Europe. I want to be full-throated about this, not holding back, no half measures in what I’m saying. We have to be bolder in the arguments that we are making.’
However, it is understood that Sir Keir will maintain the ‘red lines’ set out in Labour’s election manifesto, meaning there will be no return to the single market, customs union or free movement.
New Labour grandee Lord Blunkett said Sir Keir had to deliver an ‘earthquake’ in his speech, and in the plan for the next Parliamentary session to be unveiled in the King’s Speech, to survive. He warned that without major change in how the party reconnected with voters ‘there won’t be a second term, there won’t be a decade of his leadership, there won’t be anything else for us except opposition for a very long time’.
Lord Blunkett told Times Radio: ‘I think either Keir pulls out the stops and there’s a massive transformation in how we relate to the public. Or he and Victoria will have to talk about the best way of doing it in a seemly fashion and someone else will take over… The jury’s well and truly out.’
But in an article for The Times, MP Josh Simons, a former close ally of Sir Keir, said the Prime Minister had ‘lost the country’ and called for him to ‘take control of the situation by overseeing an orderly transition to a new PM’.
Mr Simons warned that the party must stop ‘doubling down on a status quo that voters are crying out to change’.
