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Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer positioned himself as an antidote to “populist charades” on Wednesday and unveiled ambitious plans to tackle housing, crime, illegal immigration and public trust in his government’s first King’s Speech.
King Charles III formally announced Starmer’s agenda at a grand event that brought together Britain’s royal and political worlds, opening the new parliament just two weeks after Starmer won an election in a landslide, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.
Starmer’s speech revolved around the central theme of “national renewal”, with promises to nationalise Britain’s railways, tackle the housing crisis by reforming planning laws and step up efforts to crack down on illegal immigration.
In his speech, Starmer criticized the Conservative government in power since 2010 and the rise of populism in Britain and across Europe, hoping to win Britain’s middle ground with a pragmatic attitude.
“No more divisive issues, no more gimmicks,” Starmer declared to Commons MPs, stressing that his government would “solve problems, not exploit them”.
“The fight for trust is the fight that will define our political era,” he insisted.
Starmer’s 40 bills include measures designed to appeal to both older and younger generations, seeking to maintain the broad coalition of voters that brought him to Downing Street. He also aims to resist the rise of populism in Britain and Europe. “The snake-oil charm of populism sounds tempting, but it will lead us into a dead end of further division and greater disappointment,” he said.
While the speech detailed some aspects of the growth-oriented vision Starmer championed during the election campaign, it lacked detail in other areas, such as how to bolster Britain’s border security amid public concerns about small boat transit through the country.
Starmer has avoided some of the controversial constitutional and voting reforms he promised during the election campaign, including an age cap on peerage membership in the House of Lords and lowering the voting age to 16.
The ceremony began with King Charles III and his wife Camilla riding in a carriage from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament, after which MPs were summoned to the House of Lords chamber by the black rod to hear a speech.
Starmer and his defeated rival, Conservative leader Rishi Sunak, exchanged passionate words before and after the speech, following a dramatic reversal of roles following the July 4 election in which Labour won a landslide victory despite a small share of the vote.
As soon as the speech began, attention turned to Labour’s first legislative programme in 15 years, which will focus on construction as stagnant growth over the past decade has hampered housing and infrastructure projects across the UK.
Starmer formally laid out plans to renationalise Britain’s rail network and create a publicly owned renewable energy company.
Other parts of the speech were aimed at appealing to traditional Conservative voters who have become disillusioned with the Tories after a turbulent period in government.
Starmer has pledged to crack down on illegal immigration and small boat crossings of the English Channel, a problem that has plagued successive Conservative governments and galvanized support for Reform UK, a populist, anti-immigration group that won more than 4 million votes in the election.
The speech promised to give law enforcement more powers to investigate people smuggling, including stop and search at the border and the creation of a new Border Security Command. It also promised to address the UK’s massive backlog of asylum applications, which has swelled to nearly 100,000 in recent years, forcing the government to house asylum seekers in hotels and detention centres for months while they await a decision on their applications.
At home, the government plans to modernise several institutions, including the House of Lords, where Charles delivers his speeches. Hereditary peers will no longer have the right to sit and vote, marking the “first step in a wider reform” of parliament, according to the government’s plans.
The new draft Race Equality Bill would make it mandatory for large employers to report race and disability wages in the same way they currently report gender wages.
In addition, long-awaited legislation to ban gay and transgender conversion therapy was also published, a bill first proposed by Theresa May in 2018 but never enacted.
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