General election: ‘Teenage Dad’s Army’ – Sir Keir Starmer says Conservatives’ national service plan will not work
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Sir Keir Starmer has said the Conservatives’ plan for national service will result in a “teenage Dad’s Army”.
The Labour leader, giving his first major speech of the election campaign, called the Tory plan for 18-year-olds to serve in the military for a year or do mandatory volunteering “desperate”.
“All this spinning round and round, it’s symbolic of the chaos and the instability,” he said.
“You’ve seen that again over the past few days, the desperation of this national service policy, a sort of teenage Dad’s Army, paid for, I kid you not, by cancelling levelling up funding and money from tax avoidance that we would use to invest in our NHS.
“I think they are rummaging around in the toy box to try and find any plan that they can throw on the table. I don’t think it’ll work.”
Sir Keir said the Conservatives were planning to take money from the levelling up fund, which shows “they’ve completely abandoned the project they put before the electorate in 2019”.
The Labour leader said he recognised many people had not yet decided on how they will vote on 4 July despite being “fed up with the failure, chaos and division of the Tories”.
He admitted many “still have questions about us” and will be asking whether Labour has “changed enough” and if they can be trusted with the economy, immigration and security.
Sir Keir tried to persuade voters he had changed the party permanently away from the Jeremy Corbyn era by saying he would always place the country’s needs before party needs.
He accused Rishi Sunak of governing to appease sections of the Tory party, not for the whole country, and said the government’s Rwanda policy was evidence of that.
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Security will take centre stage of the election campaign. Pic: PA
Placing security at the heart of his speech, Sir Keir said the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was part of Mr Sunak’s “gimmicks and gestures” to appease parts of the Tory party.
“He never believed in it. He knew it wouldn’t work. He said that they tried to stop it when he was chancellor, but he was too weak to stand up to his party,” he said.
“He caved in, and now he’s gone through and it’s cost £600m. And that was called an election before it can be tested. Weakness upon weakness.”
The Labour leader admitted he was “not against third country processing” and it has been successful in places such as Afghanistan but said there was a difference in processing people in a different country and “simply deporting people to Rwanda”.
Sir Keir said Labour had changed under him and was ready to meet the “core tests” the British people set for government – economic security, border security and national security.
“Make no mistake, if the British people give us the opportunity to serve, then this is their core test. It is always their core test,” he said.
“I haven’t worked for four years on this, just to stop now. This is the foundation, the bedrock that our manifesto and our first steps will be built upon.”
Ahead of his speech, in Lancing, West Sussex, Sir Keir released a video featuring his childhood home and pictures of his parents, revealing his family were hard up at times and had their telephone cut off.
Appealing to people struggling through the cost of living crisis in the clip, he says he knows what they are going through and knows what it is like to struggle to make ends meet.
“I grew up working class, I’ve been fighting all my life and I won’t stop now,” he says in the video.
Sir Keir, who has previously been accused of being unrelatable to the electorate, has sought to show how he cares deeply about people’s lives and in the past week has repeatedly said how he grew up working class and how his parents struggled for money at times.
He has also strived to show how each of Labour’s policies would be paid for after being accused of not having any clear plans for the UK over the past few years.
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Echoing his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, he also said all Labour’s policies were “deliverable, fully-funded and ready to go”.
“A clear direction, not the endless spinning around that successive Conservative governments have subjected our country to,” he said.
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Reacting to the speech, Richard Holden, the Conservative Party chairman, said Sir Keir told the country “absolutely nothing”.
“In this wearisome and rambling speech there was no policy, no substance, and no plan,” he said.
“The question remains: will Starmer ever find the courage and conviction to tell us what he would do, or does he simply not know?
“The choice is clear: stick with the plan that is working and take bold action for a safer, more secure future with Rishi Sunak. Or, go back to square one with Sir Keir Starmer and the same old Labour Party.”
