British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday on his first day in office that he would scrap the Conservatives’ controversial policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, pledging to make the change, although he warned it would take time.
“The Rwanda plot was dead and buried before it started,” Starmer said at his first press conference. “It never worked as a deterrent. Almost the opposite.”
The announcement was widely expected because Starmer had said he would abandon the plan, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars but was never implemented.
The news conference came after the first cabinet meeting, as the new government faces the enormous challenge of fixing a host of internal problems and winning over a public tired of years of austerity, political chaos and a battered economy.
Starmer welcomed the new ministers around the table at 10 Downing Street, saying it was the honour of his life to be asked by King Charles III to form a government at a ceremony formally elevating him to the position of prime minister.
“We have a tremendous amount of work to do, so now we have to get on with it,” he said.
Starmer’s Labour Party dealt the biggest blow to the Conservatives in their two-century history on Friday with a landslide victory on a platform of change.
Among the problems they face are boosting a stagnant economy, fixing a broken health care system, and restoring confidence in government.
“Labour’s landslide victory does not mean that all the problems faced by the Conservative government have gone away,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.
In his first comments as prime minister on Friday after a “shaking of hands” ceremony with Charles at Buckingham Palace, Starmer said he would start work immediately, although he warned it would take time to show results.
“Changing a country is not like flipping a switch. It will take time. But there is no doubt that the work of change will begin immediately,” he told cheering supporters outside his new official residence at 10 Downing Street.
He will have a busy schedule after a six-week campaign that has seen him cross the four nations of the UK.
Putin is due to travel to Washington next week for a NATO meeting and will host a European Political Community summit on July 18, the day after the opening of parliament and the king’s speech setting out the new government’s agenda.
Starmer made several big points on Friday, such as reforming the venerable but crippled National Health Service and securing its borders, a reference to a larger global problem across Europe and the United States of accommodating an influx of migrants fleeing war and poverty as well as droughts, heatwaves and floods blamed on climate change.
The Conservatives have struggled to stem the flow of migrants arriving across the English Channel, failing to deliver on former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats” that led to the controversial plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“Labour will need to find a solution to the small boats coming through the Channel. It will abandon the Rwanda scheme, but it will have to come up with other solutions to deal with this particular problem,” Bell said.
Suella Braverman, a Conservative hardliner on immigration who is a likely candidate to replace Sunak as party leader, criticised Starmer’s plan to end the Rwanda deal.
“It has taken years of hard work, parliamentary decisions and millions of pounds spent on a plan that would have worked if it had been implemented properly,” she said on Saturday. “There are big problems looming, and I fear that Keir Starmer is the cause of them.”
The Starmer government has also started working.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy is set to embark on his first international trip on Saturday to meet his counterparts in Germany, Poland and Sweden to reinforce the importance of relations between them.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said he would start fresh negotiations next week with early-career NHS doctors who have staged a series of strikes over several days. The pay dispute has exacerbated the long waits for appointments that have become a hallmark of the NHS’s problems.
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