Who really runs Britain? That’s the question Robert Jenrick poses as he launches a blistering attack on Keir Starmer, accusing the Prime Minister of lacking leadership and vision while the country faces economic stagnation, rising crime, uncontrolled immigration, and a failing state.
In a damning assessment, Jenrick warns that Starmer is merely managing decline—too timid to confront the deep-rooted crises threatening Britain’s future—and entered office with no real plan to rebuild a nation in desperate need of direction.
Writing in the Telegraph, Shadow Lord Chancellor & Secretary of State for Justice Robert Jenrick says:
Who runs Britain? In a world of sprawling agencies and quangos and growing activism in domestic and international courts, it’s a question worth asking.
Whatever your answer, we can be certain it’s not Keir Starmer.
It’s becoming obvious that he simply isn’t a leader. Starmer appears oblivious to the enormous challenges facing the country. We have experienced nearly two decades of lost growth, a surge in violent crime, and unprecedented levels of mass migration have left parts of our major cities unrecognisable.
Britain’s social fabric is fraying from the denigration of British culture and the proliferation of divisive identity politics, high energy prices are deindustrialising Britain, and our borders have been blown open by young men crossing in small boats. The British state is as expensive and poorly planned as it has ever been and struggles to perform even the most basic functions well.
The diagnosis is dire and the prescription must surely be something strong. But wherever you look, Starmer’s Government is tinkering around the edges, seeking to manage failure, not turn things around. Take the sense of lawlessness on our streets. Starmer’s new Crime and Policing Bill has been heralded as a game-changer. But Labour’s own impact assessment shows that they only envisage between 13 to 55 extra criminals going to jail every year.
Or look at defence spending, where Starmer talks with a straight face of moving the UK to a “pre-war” state with just a £6 billion funding boost. Welfare spending is still forecast to rise even with his £3.4 billion pounds of savings, inevitably forcing the tax burden up higher still and killing any chance of growth.
Labour has already missed its target for new homes and analysis shows the housing crisis will continue to worsen because demand from immigration will outstrip supply. When it comes to the economy, he is actively making things worse. His tax hikes have led to the growth forecast being halved for this year, and Reeves’s fiddling of the fiscal rules has massively backfired, with interest on debt now more than a £100 billion.
Meanwhile Ed Miliband’s head-first rush to reach net zero is crippling businesses and family finances. Starmer is timid. He chooses to preserve his reputation within the British establishment as a status-quo politician that doesn’t rock the boat. It’s little wonder anti-politics sentiment is soaring and people have lost hope.
Starmer spent five years fighting a battle to make the Labour Party electable, root out anti-Semitism and defeat Corbynism. He largely succeeded. What he didn’t spend five years doing is thinking about how to fix the broken state. His mission has been to restore the soul of Labour, not that of the country.
It meant that when he entered into Government he had no real plan, and no agenda for rebuilding Britain.
The country yearns for leadership, for an end to economic and societal decline. If the penny does finally drop for Starmer, it will be too late. The question is: what will be left of the country after four more years?
Read Robert Jenrick’s full piece in the Telegraph here.
