Keir Starmer pledges to end voters' exhaustion with Westminster

Keir Starmer has promised a "politics that treads a little lighter on all our lives" if Labour win the next election.

In his first speech of the year, said The Times, the opposition leader "kickstarted months of campaigning" by lamenting the "exhausting" nature of recent politics at Westminster. 

Starmer told an audience in Bristol that the “understandable despair” and apathy of voters was the “biggest challenge” that Labour faces in winning the election. But Labour offers the “potential for national renewal” of a "downtrodden" country that is “crying out for change”, he said, before urging voters to “hold on to the flickering hope in your heart that things can be better, because they can”.

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His speech, at the Bristol and Bath Science Park, was "heavy on rhetoric and criticism of the Conservatives but didn’t include any new policy", said the BBC's political editor Chris Mason.

There was a "rhetorical flourish throughout", agreed Sky News's political editor Beth Rigby, and Starmer set out the "dividing lines" between "the self-serving Conservatives" and "Labour, the party of service", with "hope" mentioned "18 times". 

Questioned about Labour's £28 billion green pledge, Starmer recommitted to that figure but added that it was all subject to shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves's fiscal rules and that if they don't allow it, "we will borrow less".

Cuts to income tax would also be dependent on economic growth, he said, because "the first lever that we will pull is the growth lever" in order to "get the money we need to fund our public services". 

"It will be fascinating to see where in Downing Street he reckons this magic growth lever is, and why no one else has ever tried pulling on it," quipped The Times's sketch writer Tom Peck on X. 

But Starmer’s pitch to end the public's Westminster fatigue is "a good one", said The New Statesman's senior editor George Eaton on X. 

"Most voters don’t want to think about Westminster politics as much as they’ve been forced to in recent years," Eaton wrote.