LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th September, 2021) UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer on Wednesday tried to win back voters lost to the ruling Conservatives Party in the 2019 general election by distancing himself from his predecessor, veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and promising to "make this nation anew" if elected prime minister in 2024.
"My job as leader is not just to say thank you to the voters who stayed with us. It is to understand and persuade the voters who rejected us," Starmer said in a keynote speech at the party's national conference which was also his first in-person address to members since being appointed to the role in April, 2020.
Taking an indirect swipe at Corbyn, who lost two consecutive elections, the Labour party leader said that he will never go into an election "with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government."
"It will not take another election defeat for the Labour party to become an alternative government in which you can trust. That's why it has been so important to get our own house in order this week and we have done that," he said.
During his speech in front of a packed auditorium in the coastal English city of Brighton, Starmer got standing ovation, but was also heckled by some left-wingers supporting Corbyn.
He also blamed prime minister Boris Johnson for the failures arising from the UK's departure from the European Union last year and is handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"None of the lessons of Covid are learned. The flaws that were brutally exposed by the pandemic all worsen. Childhood poverty increases. The crisis in social care gets worse. The housing market is still broken. Slow and steady decline," the leader of the opposition in the UK parliament said.
Starmer, who called Johnson a "showman" and a "trickster," also said that the one thing about the prime minister that offends everything he stands for is his assumption that the rules do not apply to him.
In his 90-minute speech, he pledged that a Labour government would insulate all homes within the decade, bring about an ambitious schools' improvement program, protect working people from unfair tax hikes and make Brexit work.
