Britain's King Charles outlined Prime Minister Keir Starmer's plans for the coming year onWednesday, promising a government of service focused on growing the economy and tackling issues from an acute housing shortage to a cost of living crisis. Starmer's Labour party won an overwhelming victory in the July 4 general election and had vowed to “create wealth for people up and down the country”.
Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer outlined his Labour government’s priorities for the coming year on Wednesday when King Charles III officially opened the new session of Parliament.
This year’s State Opening of Parliament marked the first sitting of the House of Commons after the July 4 general election in which Starmer’s left-leaning Labour Party won a landslide victory, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule.
Wearing the diamond-studded Imperial State Crown and a long crimson robe, King Charles delivered the proposals from a golden throne in the House of Lords upper chamber during a lavish ceremony.
But despite its name – and for all the ceremony’s royal trappings – the address is not written by the monarch but by the government, which uses it to detail the laws it proposes to make over the next 12 months.
The speech said Labour would get more houses and infrastructure projects built, strengthen workers’ rights and create a new industrial strategy.
The king said the goal is to “see rising living standards in all nations and regions of the United Kingdom".
Starmer said the measures announced in the King's Speech would “take the brakes off Britain” and “create wealth for people up and down the country” by spurring economic growth.
The speech included more than 35 bills, including measures to enforce public spending rules and others to prevent a repeat of the utility bill price hikes that triggered the UK's recent cost-of-living crisis.
‘This is a hungry party’
The legislation also fleshed out announcements already made, such as the launching of a fund to draw investment into the UK and of a publicly owned body tasked with boosting clean power by 2030.
Labour also announced the restoration of mandatory housebuilding targets, plans to renationalise Britain's much-maligned rail services, as well as the opening of recruitment for a new border security command.
Starmer has scrapped the Conservatives’ plan to send people arriving in the UK across the English Channel on a one-way trip to Rwanda. The controversial scheme faced multiple legal challenges and cost the UK several hundred million pounds (dollars), without a single flight taking off.
A bill to boost workers' rights, including a ban on zero-hour contracts, and strengthened protections for renters were also included.
"This is a hungry party," former Labour minister Tony McNulty told AFP.
"They are chomping at the bit to show that they can get back to being what they see as the natural party of government."
‘Very ambitious and very wide-ranging’
Starmer has promised to patch up the country’s aging infrastructure and frayed public services, but says he won’t raise personal taxes and insists change must be bound by “unbreakable fiscal rules”.
There will be moves to give more powers to local government, and a law to ensure all government budgets get advance independent scrutiny. Jill Rutter, senior research fellow at the Institute for Government think tank, called that the “anti- Liz Truss bill”, referring to the Conservative prime minister whose package of unfunded tax cuts in 2022 rocked the British economy and ended her brief term in office.
A law was announced on regulating the development of artificial intelligence, a possible break from the previous government’s light-touch approach to governing AI.
The government also announced significant changes to the UK’s political system, including lowering the voting age from 18 to 16, one of Labour’s election promises.
It even tackled an issue that has foxed previous governments: reforming the House of Lords. The unelected upper chamber of Parliament is packed with almost 800 members – largely lifetime political appointees, with a smattering of judges, bishops and hereditary aristocrats.
While much of Starmer’s agenda marks a break with the defeated Conservative government of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Starmer also revived Sunak’s plan to stop future generations from smoking by gradually raising the minimum age for buying tobacco.
Wednesday’s address was the second such speech delivered by Charles since the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September 2022.
In keeping with the convention that the monarch is above politics, keen environmentalist King Charles remained expressionless during the last address in November when then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government announced new oil and gas licences.
"There's probably much in this King's Speech that he will favour rather than the other one he had to read out," said McNulty, a British politics lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
"But he'll play it with a straight face. That's the job."
(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and Reuters)
