Starmer: Labour is ready for an election next May
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says he and his party are ready for an election next May, adding that he does not believe current government "has got a record to stand on", while his party has "completely changed" since he became leader. Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 if you're going to have a mission,
00:01 how are you going to carry it out?
00:05 Because the how is not always thought through,
00:07 in my view, in government.
00:08 So the how is, first, we're not going to suck it up
00:12 to the center.
00:13 We're not going to run it from Westminster and Whitehall,
00:16 trying to run things through government.
00:19 I don't think government can do your job
00:21 better than you can, and I don't think we should try.
00:24 I think that's a big mistake.
00:26 Equally, I think that if a government just sits it out
00:30 and says, well, we've made our mission clear,
00:34 the markets usually react, business knows what to do,
00:37 we just sit back now.
00:39 I don't think that's going to work,
00:40 because you don't have a driving sense of purpose.
00:42 Therefore, it's got to be a partnership,
00:45 and it's got to be a partnership between business,
00:48 between you, and an incoming government.
00:52 And therefore, if we do come into government,
00:55 you will be coming into government with us,
00:59 because we will be saying, this is what we want to achieve.
01:02 We set that out, and we ask you to partner with us
01:06 to achieve that.
01:07 The big question on everybody's mind will be
01:10 what's going to happen in the election,
01:12 and I'm not going to predict that.
01:14 There's a long way to go, and my job was to get
01:18 the Labour Party from the worst election victory,
01:21 a defeat, since 1935, which is what happened last time,
01:25 back to a position where we can win an election,
01:28 and to change the Labour Party.
01:30 The Labour Party you see today is completely changed.
01:33 I hope you can see that and feel that.
01:36 So I'm not going to predict the outcome
01:37 of the general election, nor when it'll be,
01:41 although it'll obviously be the May or October,
01:44 and our team is ready for May,
01:47 because I don't think anybody would rule out May.
01:51 I honestly don't think this government has got a record
01:55 to stand on.
01:56 At the end of the last government,
01:59 we've had 13 years now of this government,
02:00 we've had 13 years of a Labour government.
02:03 At the end of the last Labour government,
02:04 at conferences like this, literally,
02:08 Gordon Brown as Prime Minister could stand up on stage
02:11 for his conference speech and list at some length
02:15 the achievements of the last Labour government.
02:17 There's a clip of it, you may say it goes on and on,
02:20 it goes from side to side.
02:21 Now you may agree with everything that was done,
02:23 or nothing that was done, or some of what was done,
02:26 but you can't argue there was a long list of things
02:28 that the last Labour government was done.
02:30 There is no equivalent list.
02:32 There isn't a list.
02:34 My worry is, this is net zero,
02:38 there are other examples of this,
02:40 that instead of making decisions
02:43 in the long-term interests of the UK,
02:46 the government is in danger of making decisions
02:49 in the short-term interests of opening up divides
02:52 for the purpose of an election.
02:54 And when a government gets into that place,
02:56 whatever political party it is,
02:58 that's a bad place for the country,
03:00 because it ought to be decisions
03:02 about the long-term of the country.
03:03 So I'm predicting, I'm afraid,
03:05 that the election campaign will descend into that place,
03:10 rather than on the sort of principles and values
03:12 that it ought to be about.
03:13 Now I hope, my other predictions
03:15 have been reasonably accurate.
03:17 I hope on this one I'm wrong,
03:19 because I think the country deserves
03:24 a really good debate and argument
03:27 about our future direction over the next 10 or 20 years,
03:31 and I hope we can have that.