Historical racism is resurfacing within UK politics, which makes people feel very scared, the Prime Minister has stated, cautioning that polarizing far-right politics was “dividing the nation”.
In conversation with GP and TV personality Amir Khan, Starmer pointed to the Reform UK party of overseeing a return of discriminatory and divisive political discourse “that frankly I thought we had dealt with decades ago”.
In the interview, broadcast on ITV’s Lorraine show this week, the PM provided a clear indication suggesting the two-child benefit cap might be scrapped during the upcoming fiscal announcement later this month.
Asked if he would scrap the limit, which charities have said is the biggest driver of poverty for children in the UK, the Prime Minister responded: “Let me be perfectly clear I will strive to lower poverty rates for kids.”
He outlined measures the government has already launched including no-cost school lunches, morning meal programs, and child care support and emphasized: “Further action is necessary, and I can look you in the eye that I am personally committed to cutting childhood poverty.”
When pressed about if his remarks indicated he intended to remove the two-child cap, Starmer said “It would be misleading to claim we plan to reduce child poverty unless I was certain that we will be taking several steps for that purpose”.
The Chancellor, provided a similarly clear signal earlier this week when she told a national radio station how finally, children must not be punished because their parents don’t have very much money”.
Government officials are reportedly planning to scrap the restriction fully, having originally looked at ways to taper it either for very large families or richer ones. An economic thinktank projects this would cost roughly £3.5 billion by the end of the decade.
In the interview, Starmer said the political divide in the UK now was between Labour’s “patriotic national renewal” versus “the toxic division of Reform” and other right-wing groups that are “splitting the UK”.
“Parts of the discourse currently circulating – racist rhetoric, polarizing language – that frankly I thought we had dealt with long ago is coming back into politics and it makes people feel very scared,” he stated.
“We must confront to that racism, that division, and affirm with pride that to be British is to have concern for others, is to be reasonable, entails tolerance and compassionate, and this is our pride.”
The prime minister mirrored language expressed by Wes Streeting, who cautioned recently how an “ugly” racism reminiscent of past decades had become alarmingly frequent once more with NHS staff were bearing the brunt of it.
Streeting said occurrences of both verbal and physical attacks based on people’s skin colour had become so frequent that it was now “socially acceptable to be racist”.
“We’ve got to call time to discrimination in this country and we’ve got to put such harmful attitudes that has emerged in our country back in its box and once again create an environment across Britain that rejects racism to be racist,” Streeting said.
Starmer used his speech at the Labour party conference this autumn to outline political battle lines with his political opponents, saying that voters faced a pivotal moment.
The prime minister said he was involved in a struggle for the nation’s identity, and argued that while the public had “reasonable” concerns about illegal migration, existed “a moral line” which some politicians had overstepped.
Starmer vowed to challenge anyone who argued that people who were not white did not belong and that families who had lived in Britain for years should be deported, saying those advocating these ideas constituted “an enemy of national renewal”.
“If you incite racial attacks and hatred, that is not expressing concern: it’s criminal. Our political movement is proud of our flags, yet if they are painted with hateful messages, telling a Chinese takeaway owner to leave the country, that is not patriotism; that’s racism,” he informed supporters.
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