UK’s Starmer Calls on Party to Unite and ‘Stop Navel Gazing’
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called on his party on Sunday to stop “navel gazing” and unite to defeat Reform UK, accusing the populist party of planning to launch a “racist policy” of mass deportations if it wins power.
Starmer, whose governing Labor is well behind Reform in the polls, kicked off his party’s annual conference by issuing a rallying cry to party members to direct their anger towards Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform, rather than his leadership.
“I’m saying we have got the fight of our lives ahead of us, because we’ve got to take on Reform. We’ve got to beat them and so now is not the time for introspection or navel gazing,” he told BBC news. “We need to be in that fight united.”
With Starmer’s Labor badly behind in the polls before a national election due in 2029, the British prime minister wants to reset the narrative about his leadership after weeks of difficulties when he was forced to reshuffle his government.
He sees his party’s conference in the northern English city of Liverpool as a chance to rally Labour and challenge those critics who want him to be replaced, including the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, by focusing their anger on Farage.
Starmer defended his government’s efforts to tackle illegal immigration, which is one of the main concerns of British voters, describing Farage’s plan to deport refugees who had settled in Britain as “racist”. “It is one thing to say we’re going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here. I’m up for that,” he said.
