Sir Keir Starmer: It is ‘not right’ to say I am talking country down

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said it is “not right” to say that language he is using is talking the country down.

Sir Keir told the BBC he thinks the NHS is “broken but not beaten” and that the service is not “going gangbusters” at the moment.

Asked by the BBC if he thought his language over recent weeks “talks the country down”, The Prime Minister said “that’s not right”.

“We have to have an accurate diagnosis of what the problem is and then our job is to say what are we going to do about it? Short term, difficult decisions,” Sir Keir said.

“But what I was setting out yesterday is, as it were, the purpose behind it, and trying to answer that question which is important, what do we get for it? And making it clear that the purpose of the difficult decisions is to make sure we grow the economy, living standards, everyone better off, our public services back properly functioning, an NHS that’s on its feet fit for the future.”

The Prime Minister was speaking to broadcasters from New York City where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly.

He said last month that the upcoming Budget will be “painful”, and warned in his conference speech on Tuesday of “the difficult road ahead”.

Asked by the BBC whether he thought his language was creating a sense of fear and uncertainty, Sir Keir said he does not believe that is the case.

“I don’t think that anybody seriously would argue that the NHS is going gangbusters,” he added.

A BBC report earlier on Wednesday suggested that sources within the NHS were uneasy about some of the language being used by the Government about the service, and the impact it could have on patients and staff.

The Prime Minister described the service as “broken but not beaten” and said he gets a “daily dose” of what staff are experiencing as a result of his wife’s job.

“I do understand from the staff perspective it’s really hard,” he said, adding that during the last Labour government “confidence and satisfaction in the NHS was at an all-time high – imagine how you felt working in the NHS then”.

He added: “Because of what the last government has done, it’s now at an all-time low. That’s really difficult.”

In his keynote speech to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday, Sir Keir pointed to decisions made by the previous government as being behind decisions like squeezing winter fuel payments and releasing prisoners early.

“For 14 years the Tories performed the politics of easy answers rather than use the power of government to serve our country,” he told delegates in Liverpool.

“Yet still those wounds of trust must be healed.”