Sir Keir Starmer is to insist that his overhaul of the Labour Party is “not just a paint job” but a total revamp of the party in a bid to win over disaffected Tory voters.
The Labour leader will deliver a speech on Tuesday to mark the four-year anniversary of the 2019 general election – when Jeremy Corbyn led the party to its worst defeat since 1935.
Sir Keir will aim a barb at Mr Corbyn as well as former Labour leader Ed Miliband, still a shadow minister, acknowledging the public has had problems with the party “for a while”. And he will promise to end the Tory “psychodrama” and give Britain hope.
“Working people up and down our country looked at my party, looked at the journey we’d been on – not just under Jeremy Corbyn, but for a while. And they said ‘no’,” he is expected to say. “We’d taken a leave of absence from our job description. Reneged on an old partnership – the Labour bargain that we serve working people – as they drive our country forward.
“Everything I’ve done as leader, every fight I’ve had, has been to reconnect us to that purpose. If you want a government committed to economic stability, the rule of law, good public services, restoring Britain’s standing, making family life more secure and putting the country first, this is what a changed Labour Party will deliver.”
Sir Keir Starmer will say he has made Labour the ‘party of service’ again (Maja Smiejkowska/PA)
Sir Keir will also seize on the threat to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s authority posed this week by a Tory Party bitterly divided over his Rwanda Bill, a piece of emergency legislation aimed at reviving the Government’s flagship asylum policy.
“We’re all stuck in their psychodrama, all being dragged down to their level,” he is expected to say.
“While they’re all swanning around self-importantly with their factions and their ‘star chambers’, fighting like rats in a sack, there’s a country out here that isn’t being governed.”
He will urge parts of the electorate who have previously voted Conservative that the change they hope for “will not (come) from a Tory fifth term”.
“It’s about doing the basics better. The mundane stuff. The bureaucratic stuff. Busting the backlogs, rebuilding a functioning asylum system, removing people more quickly so you don’t have to run up hotel bills, and cross-border police force that can smash the smuggler gangs at source.”
Sir Keir’s leadership has seen Labour shift away from the left-leaning Opposition headed by Mr Corbyn after the party suffered a landslide defeat in 2019.
He recently appeared to attempt to court traditionally Tory voters by writing for the Conservative-supporting Telegraph newspaper that Margaret Thatcher had sought to “drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”.
Sir Keir later sought to calm criticism of the move by telling a Scottish Labour gala dinner that she did “terrible things” and he “profoundly disagrees” with some of her actions.
Tory chairman Richard Holden said: “The truth is Labour hasn’t changed. It’s the same old ideas of more borrowing, more debt and more taxes.
“Sir Keir Starmer will never take the difficult decisions to deliver the long-term change this country needs.”
