Kemi Badenoch today accuses Keir Starmer of a ‘year of lies and U-turns’ which have left Britain poorer and less secure.
As the Prime Minister marks his first anniversary in power, the Tory leader says he has ‘taken a wrecking ball to the economy’ and presided over a record surge in Channel crossings.
Sir Keir said he was ‘as proud as hell’ of Labour’s first year in office, despite a series of setbacks which have seen his party plummet in the polls.
But writing in the Mail, Mrs Badenoch accuses him of breaking promises on everything from tax to border control.
Citing figures this week showing a 48 per cent rise in the number of migrants crossing the Channel illegally, she writes: ‘Starmer promised to smash the gangs and so far all he’s done is smash records for new arrivals.’
Mrs Badenoch notes that, despite Labour’s pledge not to raise taxes on working people, the tax burden has already risen to the highest level since the Second World War following the £40billion raid by Rachel Reeves at Labour’s first Budget.
‘Worryingly, the farcical events of the past week have blown an even bigger hole in the public finances,’ she says. ‘Further tax rises in the autumn now look inevitable. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have shown themselves to be serially incompetent and it’s working families who are set to pay the price.’
The Tory leader seizes on the collapse in the PM’s authority following a series of recent U-turns on winter fuel payments, grooming gangs and welfare reform.
Kemi Badenoch today accuses Keir Starmer of a ‘year of lies and U-turns’ which have left Britain poorer and less secure
She echoes Norman Lamont’s withering 1993 verdict on the then PM John Major, warning that Sir Keir is now ‘in office but not in power’ after ‘capitulating’ to his own MPs.
‘Left-wing Labour MPs can now smell blood, and the Government’s authority has all but drained away,’ she writes.
Mrs Badenoch says swing voters are ‘absolutely aghast’ at the events of the last year, adding: ‘They thought they would be getting Tony Blair’s Labour… instead, they got Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour with Keir Starmer at the helm.’
Saturday marks the first anniversary of Sir Keir’s landslide election victory, which saw Labour sweep to power for the first time in 14 years – and the Conservatives reduced to a rump of just 121 MPs.
Speaking on the steps of No 10 he said Labour would show ‘politics can be a force for good’ and vowed to put ‘country first, party second’. He said Labour has a clear mandate to ‘deliver change’ and pledged to ‘end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country’.
But 12 months on, Labour’s lead in the opinion polls is gone, official growth forecasts for this year have been halved and the PM has chosen to put Labour Party unity ahead of the ‘moral imperative’ of welfare reform by abandoning plans to rein in the runaway benefits bill.
In May’s local elections Labour lost two-thirds of the seats it was defending and surrendered the previously safe seat of Runcorn and Helsby to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in a by-election.
A YouGov poll today found voters are now split evenly on the question of whether it would have been better for Labour or the Tories to win the last election. Among working class voters, people say by a margin of 28:27 that they now wish the Tories had won.
‘Left-wing Labour MPs can now smell blood, and the government’s authority has all but drained away,’ writes Mrs Badenoch
Labour peer Maurice Glasman, who founded the influential Blue Labour group, yesterday warned that Sir Keir had become a ‘tragic figure’ who would have to ‘turn against fundamental things’ he believes in to reconnect with the voters.
Lord Glasman, who is close to Sir Keir’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, told Politico’s Westminster Insider podcast that Sir Keir would have to make ‘very significant’ changes to turn around Labour’s fortunes, adding: ‘We’re going to find out in the next six months whether he’s got it or not — and he’s got to make decisions over the summer about the Cabinet and the direction of policy.’
Downing Street said the PM spent Friday working in No 10 and had no plans to celebrate hist first anniversary in power.
But, in an interview to mark the anniversary of his landslide win, he insisted that Labour had made a good start, saying the government had ‘done some fantastic things’ and ‘driven through so much change’.
He told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast that achievements included bringing down waiting lists in the NHS, as well as ‘loads of improvements in schools and stuff that we can do for children’.
Sir Keir went on: ‘Whether that’s rolling out school uniform projects, whether it’s school meals, breakfast clubs, you name it – and also [bringing in] a huge amount of investment into the country.
‘And of course we’ve been busy getting three trade deals.’
He defended recent U-turns as ‘common sense’, saying he was ‘not one of these ideological thinkers… I’m a pragmatist’.
Despite this week’s splits over welfare he insisted Labour remains united and denied ‘losing the dressing room’.
‘The Labour dressing room, the Parliamentary Labour Party, is proud as hell of what we’ve done,’ he said. ‘Their frustration – my frustration – is that sometimes the other stuff, welfare would be an example, can obscure us being able to get that out there.’
