Every part of my life belies Starmer’s claim that he’s improved Britain.
No Keir, you didn’t leave the nation in a better shape than you found it – you left us even more moribund and hopeless than we were before.
I’m arranging a little whip-round for Keir Starmer’s leaving present since, in the departing PM’s own words, he’s leaving this country “in a better shape than I found it”. Yup, instead of the ragged, non-ergonomic outline of the British Isles, nasally stifled bureaucrat Starmer has marshalled us into a functional hexagon! Hollow joking aside, the delusion of success conjured in Starmer’s departing speech isn’t much less absurd. Precisely zero people I know nodded along, saying: “Thank God for Sir Keir! He turbo-charged the economy, built thousands of truly affordable homes, tackled the cost-of-living crisis, ended the injustice of student loans, cleaned up our waterways, made the trains run on time and transformed the NHS so radically you could actually see a GP in person!”
Starmer’s self-congratulatory valedictory speech was in painful, surreal contrast to the conversation I had this week with a Left-leaning former nurse in my home town of Cambridge, one of the most progressive-minded cities in the UK. We both have one child at university and another who’s just turned 18. The main theme of our chat was the tragic fact that we’re turfing them out into an AI-dominated world that has no meaningful job vacancies and where widespread messaging about the “climate crisis” means the young are riddled with anxiety disorders.
Her super-clever student daughter has a summer post in a pub in London where all the other bartenders have top degrees and MAs from Russell Group universities. The prospect of our children ever earning enough to repay their student debt and own a property is negligible. And if they can’t do that, how can they afford to start a family? No wonder most of them have no ambitions beyond making enough to travel. They look at their middle-class parents strangled by tax, inflation, soaring grocery and utility bills, and cancelling summer holidays (this is the first year in a decade I’m not booked to go away), and are convinced the domestic carousel isn’t worth the price of the ticket.
No wonder most of the young women I know say they never want to start a family. The Ockenden report and constant horror stories from maternity wards up and down the UK have put paid to that notion. Nor do other parts of the NHS stand up to scrutiny. I had to beg to get HRT, and when my octogenarian aunt was hospitalised in early summer, she reported the air-con malfunctioned and every corridor was lined with moaning patients on trolleys like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
Addenbrooke’s hospital is the biggest employer in Cambridge after the university, but the number of people waiting more than 12 hours in Cambridgeshire A&Es has soared from seven in February 2020 to 1,479 in February 2026. A friend having a suspected heart attack waited 16 hours for an ambulance last year and then drove himself in. In London, a friend who had severe chest pains and was gasping for air was dismissed from two different A&E departments as a time waster. On the third occasion, as he struggled to climb stairs, he demanded a D-dimer test to check the possibility of blood clots. It transpired he’d suffered a “massive bilateral pulmonary embolism” for which the key symptoms are… breathlessness and chest pain.
But the worst part of our failing state is the abject failure to help small businesses thrive. I grew up in a pub and have been involved with three small publishing businesses (two that I co-owned) over the past 30 years. These kinds of ventures can’t survive if you make the real cost of employing staff too costly. Now pubs are going under at a rate of knots, while the online magazine I currently edit can’t afford to take on young people: changes to employment law, along with increased minimum wage, National Insurance contributions and all-round rising overheads make it an impossibility. Even if we did employ a youngster, they couldn’t afford London rents. We’ve been chasing and getting thrillingly close to, yet never quite securing, investment for four years now. Pretty much every other entrepreneur I know is in the same boat: great business plans abound, but no one rich and canny wants to part with cash in a country that feels permanently on the brink of recession. Confidence has ebbed away like water in the nation’s leaky pipes.
So Starmer can jaw on as much as he wants about Britain being a “better place” under his leadership and raising the “national living wage”, but a PM will always be judged by whether people want to invest in the country he leads. Look at fizzing, confident Poland, where GDP grew by 3.5 per cent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the UK’s paltry 0.6 per cent. There, a great education – prioritising both Stem and humanities (all my Polish friends have studied philosophy at school) – is par for the course. The actual “living experience” of most voters is that we’re squeezed to the pips, caring for ageing parents and kids who have no hope in the future and want to emigrate. Our roads are full of potholes, petty crime like bike and phone theft blights our lives, public transport is shockingly bad, healthcare is a lottery where only the wealthy are guaranteed treatment, retirement looms on an ever-more-distant horizon and when we do stop, bent over with rheumatism, old-age care is unaffordable.
Of course, the rot started long before Starmer became prime minister and was escalated by Covid, along with staggering political complacency across the main parties. But Sir Keir fudged some obvious popular wins. What about taking the big water companies by the scruff of the neck and tackling filth and E.coli in our seas and rivers? What about allowing small businesses like mine to offer short periods of unpaid work experience once again, in return for training young people? (I don’t mean official apprenticeships with all the attendant red tape.) I envisage class warriors protesting about exploitation, but the young working-class woman from Blackburn I trained on that basis 27 years ago is about to arrive at my house for a drink. She made herself irreplaceable, increased our productivity and we created a full-time job for her. Now she edits trade publications for a company in Wimbledon.
Sadly, Starmer’s period in office has seen this kind of enterprise and social mobility stifled. But, then, he had a remarkable lack of forward motion and oomph in his own person. The truth is, he left Great Britain even more moribund and hopeless than he found it – or feeling that way, which is just as bad an indictment. Hell, we even lost the most important footie match of my lifetime. Bye-bye Keir, we will not miss you.
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