Keir Starmer's biggest U-turns since Labour came to power

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Keir Starmer's mid-air announcement that he was reversing his previous opposition to a national grooming gangs inquiry is the latest in a long line of U-turns that have led allies to worry about a lack of political direction.
Before he became prime minister, the Labour leader gained a reputation for U-turning on some of his most significant policies, including spending £28bn a year on green infrastructure and abolishing tuition fees.
Since entering government, the pattern has continued, with Starmer having changed his mind on cuts to winter fuel payments and the grooming gangs inquiry within the last few weeks.
Here is a list of the biggest policy U-turns – or prospective U-turns – that the prime minister has executed since taking power.
When Elon Musk began furiously tweeting about the grooming gangs scandal in January, the prime minister responded robustly. Faced with calls from Kemi Badenoch and other Conservatives for a national inquiry, Starmer accused them of 'calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right'.
But at the same time that Starmer was accusing his opponents of jumping on bandwagons, his government was appointing Louise Casey to lead an 'audit' into how wide-scale the problem was. This decision was to pave the way for the U-turn that followed.
Sources say Lady Casey began her work believing that a national inquiry was unnecessary. But she changed her mind, and when Starmer read her report last week he realised he had little option but to change his position and accept her recommendation.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, described her decision last year to cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners as 'necessary', 'urgent' and 'responsible' after discovering what she said was a £22bn black hole in the public finances.
Just under a year later, Starmer sounded a very different note when unravelling the policy for the vast majority of people. 'I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners,' he said. 'That is why we want to ensure that as we go forward, more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments.'
Ministers stressed the U-turn had been made possible because of the strengthening economy. But on several measures, including growth forecasts and government debt levels, the economy was in no better position than it had been when the policy was first announced.
Labour's 2024 manifesto was plain speaking in its tax offer to voters. 'We will not increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, or VAT,' the party promised.
So when Reeves used her first budget to raise national insurance by 1.2 percentage points and to reduce the threshold at which companies start paying it, the decision looked like a fairly straightforward violation of the pre-election promise.
Ministers argued it should not be counted as such, given the manifesto also said Labour would not raise taxes on 'working people', and that it was employers rather than employees that were being asked to pay higher tax rates. This did not persuade Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, however, who called the move a 'straightforward breach' of the manifesto.
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Labour went into the election promising to restore aid funding to 0.7% of gross national income 'as soon as fiscal circumstances allow' after the Conservatives cut it in 2021.
There was no talk of potentially cutting development spending even further. But in February that is exactly what the prime minister announced, removing nearly half the development budget to pay for extra spending on defence and taking British aid spending to the lowest level in history.
Even while making the cut, Starmer insisted he wanted to bring levels back to what they were before 2021 when he was able. But officials admit there is no prospect of this happening in the foreseeable future, as reflected by the recent comments by the aid minister, Jenny Chapman, who said: 'The days of viewing the UK government as a global charity are over.'
In March 2022, Starmer told the Times: 'A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that, trans women are women, and that is not just my view – that is actually the law.' The following year he told the Sunday Times that 99.9% of women 'of course haven't got a penis', adding that he did not want to turn the issue into a 'toxic divide'.
That stance changed, however, after the supreme court ruled that the Equality Act was referring only to biological sex when using the terms 'woman' and 'sex'.
In the days after that ruling, Starmer's official spokesperson was asked whether the prime minister still believed trans women were women. 'No,' he said. 'The supreme court judgment has made clear that when looking at the Equality Act, a woman is a biological woman.'