Ahead of the King’s speech the other day the BBC recently outlined key problems that Keir Starmer’s government has to fix including local council funding, universities and prisons. The King’s speech, of course, is the introductory platform that any government has to outline their draft laws that they plan to implement. It also broadly acts as a way to sell their vision for the country.
Starmer says Labour will start with fixing the economy, and blames “Tory irresponsibility” for leaving public finances in a “worse place than they found them”. He continued with “We don’t just turn the page on that today, we close the door on it forever.“ He added: “No more wedge issues or gimmicks, this government will solve problems, not exploit them.”
This gave us pause for thought as we wonder how typical 4/5 year government terms can possibly tackle the immense issues that we face. It’s not that we don’t believe Keir Starmer, so far he genuinely appears to want to do the right thing. And for the purposes of this discussion it’s not as much about whether you believe him or not – it’s really about what anyone can do to deliver real, meaningful, long lasting change in such a limiting environment to begin with.
If it was like passing the baton in a relay race – this works when you’re on the same team and have practised and trained for many, many hours, days weeks and months. And even then it doesn’t always go to plan. Imagine if the receiver was from a different team or with very different ideas – you get the idea – not only may the finish line be a very long way away but you may never actually get there and caught up in an endless loop of restarts and directional changes.
Our memories are very short and our ability for true vision seems perpetually impaired by a very familiar loop of boom and bust and of never ending repeated messages of change from every election that we can remember. How can anything meaningful be expected under the environment of such constant government changes. No doubt there are a great many very diligent and uncelebrated government experts continually and tirelessly working on these issues at any given time. But how many times does this get watered down, paused, slowed down or stopped altogether due to political changes at the top?
Checks and balances are the core of any democracy and of course any single person coming to power for too long could obviously prove to be very problematic.
So what to do?
Ahead of the King’s speech the other day the BBC recently outlined key problems that Keir Starmer’s government has to fix…
