Keep the faith and Britain will prosper, urges Starmer

PM says trade-offs and tough decisions needed after 14 years of Tory rule

- Pippa Crerar

Britain could become a country of pride, wealth and stability if the public accepted a series of difficult "trade-offs", rejected nimbyism and saw through the Conservatives' populist "lies", Keir Starmer told the Labour party yesterday.

In his first conference speech as prime minister, Starmer urged the public to keep faith amid difficult and sometimes unpopular choices made by the government, saying he understood the impatience for real change.

Those difficult decisions included building new prisons so that justice could be served and overground pylons to provide cheaper electricity, and stopping pretending that a system to tackle irregular migration seriously would not also include accepting some asylum seekers.

Starmer attempted to draw a line under a week of bruising rows over donations by telling the delegates that he would not be distracted by noisy criticism of his government which he regarded as "mere glitter on a shirt cuff", a reference to a protest during last year's speech.

The prime minister left the gathering in Liverpool early to travel to New York last night for the United Nations general assembly, with senior aides pressing for meetings with the US presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

But aides said that he had now started to address concerns, some of them internal, that he had been too gloomy since taking office while trying to "level with" the public about the economic inheritance.