Keir Starmer paints a ‘gloomy picture of Britain’: I never promise you a Rose Garden

BPM Keir Starmer warned of a “painful Future” in a speech from… the No10 Rose Garden.
Photo: Getty Images

The new Prime Minister of Great Britain has already become famous for his brilliant phrase from the depths of the Rose Garden: “Things will get worse before they get better.” People immediately remembered the old famous song with these words: “I never promised you a rose garden.”

In his first major speech since becoming prime minister, Keir Starmer told the British people on Tuesday that their country was in a societal and economic “black hole” and that “things will get worse before they get better.”

The speech was remarkable for its woeful description of modern Britain. Starmer repeatedly deployed the word “rot” to describe the condition of the country he now leads, as in a house with a rotting foundation that needs more than a cosmetic coat of paint, writes ‘The Washington Post’.

Starmer maintained that he wanted to be honest — in contrast, he said, to his predecessors, whom he blamed for the current state of affairs and for selling the British people “the snake oil of populism.”

Starmer suggested that taxes will go up and that cuts will be made, even for those most reliant on public assistance — like the 10 million elderly who await help with winter heating bills.

In a July 4 election, British voters went big time for Starmer and the center-left Labour Party, ending 14 years of Conservative rule and bucking a rightward trend on the continent.

The nation was stunned by a July 29 stabbing attack that killed three children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England.

Over the past two weeks, Britain has seen its worst civil unrest in over a decade. Here's how anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots swept the country.

British prosecutors have charged more than 600 people with violent disruption and attacking police and property with bricks and gasoline bombs.

Starmer said the riots had exposed “a deeply unhealthy society” that had been “weakened by a decade of division and decline” and “infected by a spiral of populism.” The effort to respond to the riots also highlighted the failures of previous governments, he said.

He recounted that his team had to “check the precise number of prison places we had and where those places were, to make sure we could arrest, charge and prosecute people quickly.”

“Not having enough prison places is about as fundamental a failure as you can get,” said Starmer, a former top prosecutor.

He went further, saying that the rioters had been “gaming” the system.

“They didn’t just know the system was broken. They were betting on it,” he said. “They thought: ‘Oh, they’ll never arrest me. And if they do, I won’t be prosecuted. And if I am, I won’t get much of a sentence.’ They saw the cracks in our society after 14 years of failure — and they exploited it.”

He also pointedly chose to deliver his remarks in the 10 Downing Street Rose Garden, where during the pandemic, staffers for then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson held one of their gatherings that flew in the face of lockdown rules.

He blamed the current state of “rubble and ruin” on 14 years of Conservative Party rule, saying that the previous government had racked up 22 billion pounds — more than $29 billion — in debt, and had hidden it from the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent and authoritative overseer of public finances, funded by the Treasury.

Starmer offered some hope for a brighter future, but warned that tough times are ahead.

“There’s a budget coming in October and it’s going to be painful,” he said.

Britain’s Labour Party is closely allied with Britain’s labor unions. But after Starmer’s speech, Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite union, worried that “a bleak vision of Britain is not what we need now.”

The Green Party issued a statement saying that “more economic pain and hardship isn’t what people voted for.”

Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak, said Tuesday’s speech revealed a hidden agenda, “what Labour has been planning to do all along — raise your taxes.”

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