King’s Speech: Charles unveils Keir Starmer’s plans for Britain at State Opening of Parliament

CNN
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Britain’s new Labour government vowed to end an “era of politics as performance” in its royal speech on Wednesday, unveiling a sweeping programme that targets housebuilding, crime and illegal immigration and tackles a breakdown in trust exposed in the country’s general election.

In a grand event bringing together Britain’s royals and politicians, King Charles III officially opened a new parliament by reading out the plans of his new prime minister, Keir Starmer, whose landslide election victory earlier this month brought an emphatic end to a 14-year era of Conservative rule.

They focused on Starmer’s central theme of “national renewal”, and included a promise to nationalise Britain’s railways and tackle the housing crisis by changing planning laws to build more affordable homes.

Starmer also made tough new promises to tackle illegal immigration and, more generally, attacked the Conservative governments that have ruled Britain since 2010, as well as the wave of populism that has spread across the UK and Europe.

“The era of performance-driven politics and self-interest over service is over,” Starmer said in an introduction to the manifesto, which includes 40 new bills his government will seek to pass. “The fight for trust is the defining battle of our political era.”

His platform cuts to the heart of the British politics that Starmer has sought to reclaim, urging the public to be pragmatic and including measures designed to appeal to both older and younger generations. “The allure of populism may seem seductive, but it leads us down a blind alley of further division and disappointment,” Starmer wrote.

But while the speech delivered on much of the growth-focused vision Starmer outlined during the summer election campaign, the question remains how quickly Britons can expect to see a boost to their struggling public services.

Pomp and politics collide

The State Opening of Parliament is a rare collision of pomp and politics, with a series of centuries-old flourishes and conventions that catch even many British lawmakers off guard.

The production began when King Charles III and his wife, Camilla, travelled by carriage from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament, before MPs were summoned by Black Rod – a role established in the 1300s – to attend his speech in the House of Lords chamber.

Starmer and his defeated rival, Conservative leader Rishi Sunak, had a warm chat before and after the speech, their roles having been dramatically reversed after the July 4 election which saw Labour win a landslide victory in parliament, albeit with a modest share of the vote.

Once the speech began, attention turned to Labour’s first legislative bill in a decade and a half. It outlined a construction drive, following a decade of stagnant growth that had seen housing and infrastructure projects collapse across Britain.

Starmer also formalised his plans to renationalise Britain’s rail network in the coming years and create a state-owned renewable energy company.

Other parts of the speech are part of Labour’s efforts to appeal to traditionally conservative voters who have lost faith in the Conservative Party after a tumultuous period in government.

Starmer has notably promised to tackle illegal immigration and small boat crossings of the Channel – an issue that has plagued successive Conservative governments and sparked a wave of support for Reform UK, a populist anti-migrant bloc that won more than 4 million votes in the election.

The speech promised to give law enforcement more powers to investigate people smuggling, including through stop and search at the border, and to create a new Border Security Command. He also promised to tackle Britain’s huge backlog of asylum applications.

In the United States, several institutions have been targeted for modernization, including the chamber in which Charles delivered his speech. Under the government’s plans, hereditary peers will no longer be able to sit and vote in the House of Lords, which will be a “first step in a wider reform” of the chamber.

A new Race Equality Bill will meanwhile require large employers to report ethnicity and disability-related pay in the same way they currently report gender-related pay.

A long-awaited law to ban gay and transgender conversion therapy – efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – was also announced, after first being proposed by Theresa May in 2018 but never brought to light.

Starmer acknowledged that the British public’s belief that politics can be a force for good had collapsed: trust in politics is at an all-time low, studies suggest, after a long period dominated by scandals in Westminster.

But his programme will be underpinned by a healthy dose of scepticism about whether Britain’s public services can be revived without a much bigger cash injection than the government has proposed.

The speech said little about Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) or its social care sector, where the priority will be management rather than new legislation.

Later Wednesday, the plan will be debated in the House of Commons, the first formal session of the new parliament. Sunak, in his new role as opposition leader, will press Starmer to deliver on his promises. He is expected to frame his party’s unusual role as an effort to provide constructive opposition on behalf of the country while acknowledging that the public feels a desire for change.