Keir Starmer pledges to end voters' exhaustion with Westminster

Labour leader kickstarts election campaigning with promise of 'national renewal'

Keir Starmer
Critics said Starmer's speech was 'heavy on rhetoric and criticism of the Conservatives but didn’t include any new policy'
(Image credit: Getty Images)

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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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. 

Jamie Timson is the UK news editor, curating The Week UK's daily morning newsletter and setting the agenda for the day's news output. He was first a member of the team from 2015 to 2019, progressing from intern to senior staff writer, and then rejoined in September 2022. As a founding panellist on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast, he has discussed politics, foreign affairs and conspiracy theories, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. In between working at The Week, Jamie was a senior press officer at the Department for Transport, with a penchant for crisis communications, working on Brexit, the response to Covid-19 and HS2, among others.