Labour Party leader Keir Starmer makes his pitch to UK voters with a speech vowing national renewal
U.K. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is delivering what amounts to a public job interview for the post of prime minister
LIVERPOOL, England — U.K. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer delivers a speech on Tuesday that amounts to a public job interview for the post of prime minister. He'll set out to answer the question in many voters’ minds: Why Labour?
Starmer is addressing the opposition party's annual conference, likely the last before a national election next year. He needs to persuade voters fed up with economic stagnation and political turmoil to switch allegiance to his party, which has been out of office since 2010.
He plans to pledge “a decade of national renewal,” after what he depicts as 13 years of decline under the Conservative Party.
“What is broken can be repaired, what is ruined can be rebuilt,” Starmer will say, according to the party.
Starmer’s speech in Liverpool at a conference that has been overshadowed by violence in Israel and Gaza is a key moment for a politician who has managed to unite a fractious party and gain a substantial lead in opinion polls but remains a blank slate to many voters. A barrister and former head of the national prosecution service, he’s widely seen as managerial and a bit dull.
Labour has lost four straight national elections. Its landslide 1997 election victory under Tony Blair — the peak of its popularity — was a quarter-century ago and in the last election, in 2019, voters handed Labour its worst drubbing since 1935.
Since then, Britain has been through the COVID-19 pandemic, left the European Union and absorbed the economic shock of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, all of which pushed U.K. inflation above 11% late last year.
Voters are weary from a cost-of-living crisis, a
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