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

CNN
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Keir Starmer, Britain’s new prime minister, presented himself on Wednesday as an antidote to the “snake charm of populism”, unveiling ambitious plans to target housebuilding, crime, illegal immigration and the breakdown of public trust in his government’s first royal address.

King Charles III officially opened a new session of parliament by reading out Starmer’s agenda at a grand event that brought together Britain’s royal and political elite, two weeks after his landslide election victory ended a 14-year era of Conservative rule.

The speech focused on Starmer’s central slogan of “national renewal” and included promises to nationalise Britain’s railways, tackle the housing crisis by changing planning laws to build more affordable homes and step up efforts to tackle illegal immigration.

Starmer has taken broader aim at the Conservative governments that have ruled Britain since 2010, as well as the wave of populism that has spread across the UK and Europe, attempting to reclaim Britain’s centre with a public appeal to pragmatism.

“No more controversial issues. No more tricks,” Starmer told MPs in the House of Commons as debate on his manifesto began, insisting that his government would “solve problems, not exploit them”.

“The fight for trust is the defining battle of our political era,” Starmer said.

His 40-bill agenda includes measures designed to appeal to both older and younger generations, as Starmer seeks to retain the broad coalition of voters that carried him to Downing Street earlier this month. But his introduction to the agenda also contained an effort to counter rising populism in the U.K. and Europe. “The allure of populism may seem seductive, but it is leading us into a dead end of further division and greater disappointment,” Starmer said.

While the speech expanded on some of the growth-focused vision Starmer outlined during the summer election campaign, it was light on other details, including how Starmer would significantly strengthen UK border security after an election campaign roiled by public concern about small boat crossings to the UK.

And Starmer has chosen to sideline some of the thorniest constitutional and electoral changes he had pledged to make during the campaign, including a higher age limit for peers allowed to sit in the House of Lords and lowering the voting age to 16.

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 operations at the border, and to create a new Border Security Command. He also promised to tackle Britain’s vast asylum backlog, which has swelled to nearly 100,000 people in recent years and forced the government to house asylum seekers in hotels and detention centres for months while they wait for news of their claims.

In the United States, a number of institutions have been targeted for modernisation, 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, in what will be a “first step in 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.

After the king read Starmer’s speech, MPs gathered in the House of Commons to debate Labour’s manifesto, with former prime minister Rishi Sunak promising to lead the opposition constructively as a long contest to replace him as Conservative leader unfolds.

“The party opposite has successfully exploited the public’s desire for change, but now it needs to deliver change,” Sunak said.

He and Starmer had shared a warm exchange earlier in the day – which Starmer said had focused partly on the England football team – but the rigour of British politics returned and tension resurfaced in the chamber as Sunak criticised the abandonment of his plan to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda, and claimed that Labour had inherited an economy on an upward trajectory thanks to his work.

And Sunak urged Starmer to stick to his pledge to increase UK defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, saying it would “show the Americans that we don’t expect them to carry the whole burden” in Nato.

These debates will intensify in the coming weeks as Labour introduces its first bills to Parliament, starting with three priority measures set out in the speech later this week.