Keir Starmer’s rose garden speech today should be seen as a companion piece to last month’s melodramatic Commons statement by Rachel Reeves on the condition of the public finances.
In each case the purpose was clear – to lower expectations and buy the government more time by heaping extra blame on the last Conservative administration for the state of the nation.
So there we have it – any union that can bring a key industry to a standstill now knows there is a PM in office who will always seek to buy it off
How much validity there is in a pitch saying things are much worse than they expected is highly debatable. But it was both predictable and indeed predicted that Labour would do this.
As Prime Minister, Starmer naturally gave a rather broader assessment than his Chancellor had in her Commons statement of four weeks ago. But the core message was the same.
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