In his first speech in Downing Street since the riots, Sir Keir Starmer has promised the coming months to be “painful” as public finances are apparently is a worse state than Labour thought.

There couldn’t be a better speech before the start of the new parliamentary session next week.

For more than half an hour, the British prime minister displayed the dire state of the country inside the gardens of Downing Street, in front of his advisors and civil servants.

“Things will get worse” was his first warning to the members of his staff and the British public as he aims to “put an end to the fourteen years “root out 14 years of rot” from the conservatives.

Public finances “worse than we imagined”

The catastrophic state of public finances left by the conservatives has been the main attack by the Labour government since it arrived in power in early July and Keir Starmer came back on it heavily.

“Things were worse than we imagined” insisted the PM who came back on the £22 billion blackhole left by the conservatives and which Rachel Reeves pretends to have discovered once she arrived in power.

This argument was a clever way for Sir Keir Starmer to explain the introduction of new tax rises in the next budget and the scrapping of the fuel allowance for 10 million pensioners, while none of these measures were in the Labour manifesto.

“There is a Budget coming in October and it is going to be painful. We have no other choice given the situation we are in” warned the PM. More details are expected to be released in the following weeks.

“Deeply unhealthy society”

The riots were the other topic which made the police, the courts and the media quite busy this month.

For the first time since mid-August, the PM recognised that they revealed a “deeply and unhealthy society”.

Once again, he laid the responsibility on the “decade of division and decline” the UK had done through under Tory rule.

Sir Keir Starmer also admitted that “dealing with the riots this summer was much harder than in 2011” because of the serious lack of places in prisons. He said that during the recent unrest he “genuinely didn’t know” if the nation’s prisons and courts could cope. 

“That’s what we have inherited,” he said.

Sir Keir said the Government had to check every day during the riots to make sure there were enough prison places so that people could be jailed. 

This speech by the new PM shows how hard his task will be in the year to come. In fact, one shouldn’t exclude that new riots take place in the British suburbs soon if another stabbing like the one on Southport happens. And the mobilisation of the tens of thousands of people to clean their neighbourhoods and fix the ventures of their shops will not stop these from happening.

This summer’s riots show how divided the country is today between the poorer cities in the north where there is small public or private investment and fewer jobs available every year and the prosperous London and southeast.

This is at least one reason which explains this summer’s unrest which always took place in impoverished areas of the UK.

But other crucial issues weren’t addressed by the PM during his speech, especially the rise of illegal migration and of boat crossings in the Channel in the two past months.

All this phenomenon has raised a feeling that the economic system is not working for the British public anymore. And condemning racism endlessly — however unacceptable it is — will not help the situation to improve.