Yes, Sunak’s King’s Speech plans are dire – but Starmer will have to up his game

The leader of the opposition’s rebuttal to the King’s Speech was savage. Now, Keir Starmer must come to terms with the public spending wasteland he seems likely to inherit, says John Rentoul

Keir Starmer with the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, ahead of the King’s Speech (PA)

The King’s Speech is just like all the Queen’s speeches that went before it. Journalists try to find a theme, or anything new, in the random list of bills presented to parliament. “It’s always a struggle, isn’t it?” one editor commiserated with a colleague in the press gallery.

The government always presents a set of bills that have emerged from vicious inter-departmental warfare up and down the length of Whitehall as if it were a coherent plan for the future.

And the opposition always says that the government has run out of ideas. And Keir Starmer did it well today. He recycled the greatest hits of opposition slogans from the ages. “Their mortgage bombshell.” “He raised taxes 25 times himself.” “The broken promises of the last 13 years.” The King’s Speech, he said, was a “missed opportunity”.

It was mainly a missed opportunity, he went on, to sack Suella Braverman, the home secretary, for the crime of describing rough sleeping as a “lifestyle choice”. Labour MPs shouted “shame” enthusiastically.

They were less animated when Starmer set out the alternative programme that the Labour Party offered. He introduced this section of his speech with a defensive double negative: “It is not that there aren’t better choices.”

A Labour government would have a target for building 1.5 million houses over five years, he said. This is a strong argument, although Labour MPs seemed subdued. Perhaps they were wondering why Rishi Sunak hadn’t stolen their thunder on this subject, by promising to build, build and build.

Starmer himself seemed to think it was a possibility that the Conservatives could still outbid him on house building before the election. He said that if the prime minister “stood up to the blockers by bringing back national housing targets, he can count on Labour votes”.

Starmer would certainly be in difficulties if Sunak did U-turn again on housing targets, because Labour has little else to offer. The Labour leader said that there should have been a “modern industrial strategy” in the King’s Speech – “on a statutory footing”. And there should have been an employment bill, to ban fire and rehire and zero-hours contracts, he said, but Labour MPs much preferred the bits where he was rude about Braverman.

The Labour leader wound up, accusing the government of “drift, stagnation and decline”. He said several times that it was unconvincing – “laughable” was his word – for Sunak to claim to offer “change”. He is right, of course. Sunak has a problem if his pitch at the election is: “Trust us, we’ve changed.”

This allowed Starmer to declare: “The change Britain needs is from Tory decline to Labour renewal” – and then to sit down.

That is all he needed to do. Even some Conservative MPs were scathing about how few bills there were in the King’s Speech, and how many of them were drafted purely for the sake of the hustings. “There isn’t enough in there to keep us occupied until Christmas,” one Tory MP told me, predicting a June election and saying that if Starmer described Sunak as running a zombie government, he would have to agree with the leader of the opposition.

But I have also come across thoughtful Labour MPs in recent days who are alarmed that they are a long way from being ready for the rigours of public office. They know, and Starmer knows, that they will inherit a wasteland if they win the election. They have no room for manoeuvre on public spending, as the autumn statement will confirm later this month.

A few recycled slogans, an implausible target for house building and a personal attack on a home secretary who may soon succeed in getting herself sacked do not form a sustainable programme for government.