Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.
In his farewell speech to the nation, Keir Starmer talked of “what [he’d] achieved in just two years”. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a bad attempt at a joke – but the outgoing Prime Minister seemed to be completely serious.
After nearly two years of Starmer, we’ve made little-to-no progress on the major problems facing our country. In fact, he’s made a lot of our existing issues worse, and created a whole host of new ones.
Take his talk of “an economy that is stronger, growing faster than our peers”. The British economy has in fact grown by just 1.1 percent a year since Labour came into Government – less than half of what the US has achieved. The latest quarterly national accounts data says that, on a per person basis, our economy is actually shrinking.
The Prime Minister says that we should be grateful for, “wages rising faster than inflation”. In July 2024, wages were growing at more than 5 percent a year, while inflation was at 2.2 percent (2.8 percentage points less). By this April, inflation was up to 2.8 percent, while wage growth was down to 3.4 percent — so the gap has shrunk to about half a percentage point. In short, it’s becoming more difficult for people to afford the essentials, just as their wages aren’t growing as fast as they were.
Starmer spoke of “investment secured, infrastructure being built”. That’s despite the fact that, in the first quarter of 2026, business investment was nearly 2 percent lower than a year before. Meanwhile, more than half of new infrastructure projects signed off by this Government have been delayed. The Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Plant was delayed by six months before being cancelled – but not before £80 million of taxpayer money was spent on planning.
Next came his appeals to the Labour left – “an end to austerity”. If by “an end to austerity”, he meant “putting up taxes, despite promising not to, to pay for more welfare”, he was right – thanks to Starmer, we’re spending billions more on people who don’t work.
Then he claimed to have overseen “the biggest improvement in rights for workers and renters in a generation” – but making it harder for people to get a job, or to find somewhere to rent, isn’t an “improvement” in anybody’s rights. Thanks to Labour’s changes, the number of job opportunities is at the lowest level since the pandemic, and rents continue to rise.
“The biggest uplift in defence spending since the Cold War” – despite the fact that his own Defence Secretary resigned just last week, saying that Starmer was “unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country”.
“Small boat crossings falling” – despite the fact that crossings have actually increased by nearly 10,000 people a year since he came into office.
“Asylum hotels closing” – but only because the Government is now pushing illegal migrants directly into our communities.
And then there are the things that Starmer didn’t mention. Scrapping jury trials, enabling vexatious prosecutions against Northern Ireland veterans, letting tens of thousands of criminals a year avoid prison, and taking the disastrous decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador. He let Bridget Phillipson wreck the curriculum, let David Lammy continue to inject group-based grievance politics into our judiciary, and let Ed Miliband blow up our homegrown oil and gas industry.
His record speaks for itself. Keir Starmer was a complete failure.
If there was a silver lining to Starmer’s tenure as Prime Minister, it was his weakness – which made it possible for Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives to force him into u-turn after u-turn. He was dragged into holding a national inquiry into the grooming gangs, into watering down his family farm tax, and into scrapping his plans for digital ID.
Of course, Keir Starmer didn’t act alone. He was supported along the way by more than 400 Labour MPs, almost all of whom supported these changes. When they pushed back, it wasn’t because they recognised how terrible Starmer’s instincts were – it’s because they wanted him to double down. They rebelled when he tried to reduce the growth of the welfare bill – not the total amount, just the growth. As Labour’s own Welfare Secretary said, the first question raised by Labour MPs is always “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?”.
And so, while Starmer might be going away, the Labour Party isn’t. Their MPs will remain the same, and so will the challenges facing the country. Though much-touted as a fresh face, Andy Burnham is an establishment Labour man, through and through. He was first elected as a Labour MP in 2001, while I was still at primary school; he served in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet.
Regardless of the churn at the top, the fundamentals remain the same. Labour will not secure our borders, they will not cut our ballooning welfare bill, and they will not do what’s necessary to keep our country safe. They are simply not dispositionally or ideologically capable of making the trade-offs that we need to make in order to fix any of these problems.