Keir Starmer promises to take back control

Keir Starmer’s new year speech was better than Rishi Sunak’s. It’s easier to give a speech about fixing problems when you’re in opposition and someone else has caused them. But it was just more interesting than what the Prime Minister had to say yesterday. There was the politically audacious decision to pick up Vote Leave’s ‘take back control’ mantra, not just as a slogan but also in the form of a ‘Take Back Control Bill’ which will devolve new powers to local communities and give them the right to request more authority from central government. There was a rejection of the old Labour way of doing things: Starmer said he wouldn’t be get out the ‘big government chequebook’, for instance, and instead advocated a ‘partnership model’ between government and the private sector. And there was – finally – a sense that Starmer is a bit more ambitious than just winning power to fix things for a few years: he talked about a plan for a ‘decade of national renewal’. 

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