London.- British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Saturday he would scrap a controversial policy by his predecessor to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, vowing to implement change but warning it would take time.
“The Rwanda plan was dead and buried before it began,” Starmer said at his first press conference since Labour seized power from the Conservatives after 14 years. “It has never served as a deterrent. Quite the opposite.”
Starmer told reporters in a wood-panelled room at 10 Downing Street that he was “uneasy about change” but did not commit to saying when Britons would feel improvements in their living standards or public services.
The 30-minute question-and-answer session followed his first Cabinet meeting as the new government takes on the daunting challenge of solving a host of local problems and winning the trust of a population fed up with years of austerity, political chaos and a battered economy.
“We have a huge amount of work to do, so we will now get to work,” Starmer told them.
Starmer’s cabinet includes a record number of women: 11 out of 25 ministers. Almost all members attended state schools, another record that marks a marked difference from Conservative ministers who historically come with private school pedigrees.
“I am proud of the fact that we have people around the Cabinet table who did not have the easiest of starts in life,” Starmer said.
Among the host of issues they must address are boosting a sluggish economy, fixing a troubled health care system and restoring trust in government.
“The fact that Labour won in a landslide doesn’t mean that all the problems the Conservative government has faced have gone away,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.
Starmer, in his first comments as prime minister on Friday, highlighted several big issues, including fixing the revered but hampered National Health Service and securing Britain’s borders, in reference to a broader global problem of absorbing an influx of migrants fleeing war, poverty, droughts, heat waves and floods blamed on climate change.
The Conservatives have struggled to stem the flow of migrants arriving across the English Channel, failing to deliver on former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats”.
Rwanda’s controversial plan was presented as a solution that would deter migrants from risking their lives on a journey that could end with their deportation to East Africa. So far, it has cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars and has never taken off.
Starmer denounced it as a “stunt” although it is unclear what he will do differently given record numbers of people disembarked in the first six months of the year.
“Labour is going to need to find a solution for small boats crossing the Channel,” Bale stressed. “It will abandon the Rwanda plan, but it will need to find other solutions to address that particular problem.”
Suella Braverman, a hardline Tory on immigration who is a possible contender to replace Sunak as party leader, criticised Starmer’s plan to end the Rwanda deal.
“Years of hard work, Acts of Parliament, millions of pounds spent on a plan that, if implemented properly, would have worked,” he said on Saturday. “There are big problems on the horizon which, I fear, will be caused by Keir Starmer.”
Starmer will have a busy schedule after a six-week campaign. On Sunday he will set out to visit each of the four nations of the United Kingdom — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. He plans to meet metropolitan mayors, regardless of party, and reiterated that he is not a “tribal politician.”
He will then travel to Washington for a NATO meeting on Tuesday and host the summit of the European Political Community on July 18, the day after the State Opening of Parliament and the King’s Speech, which sets the agenda for the new government.
Starmer has held telephone conversations with a number of world leaders, including US President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, European Union leader Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
On Saturday he sent Foreign Secretary David Lammy to Germany, Poland and Sweden.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said he would start fresh negotiations next week with early-career NHS doctors who have held a series of multi-day strikes. The pay dispute has exacerbated the long wait for appointments that has become a hallmark of the NHS’s problems.
In cruder language than he has used before, Starmer repeated Streeting’s description of the NHS as “broken”.
“Everyone who uses it and works on it knows it’s broken,” he said. “We’re not going to operate under pretense or language that doesn’t express the problem for what it is, or we won’t be able to fix it as quickly as we need to.”
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