Progressive politicians must directly confront the “lies” used by populists and counter their “industrialised infrastructure of grievance”, Keir Starmer has said in a speech that included thinly veiled criticism of Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
Addressing the Global Progress Action summit in London, where he also spoke publicly for the first time about the plan for mandatory ID cards, Starmer took aim at the idea of London as a decaying, dangerous city, one put forward repeatedly by the US president.
But speaking alongside Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese, the Canadian and Australian prime ministers, afterwards, Starmer said the world had to accept Trump’s policies, such as tariffs, as a reality.
“You can have your own view on tariffs … The fact is, they’re here. President Trump believes in them, uses them, and we have to understand that. It’s a profound belief that he has about the way he wants his economy to be reshaped.”
In his speech, Starmer said recent election wins for himself, Carney, Albanese and others meant he did not accept that progressive, centre-left politics was “dying out”. He added: “But I do accept that it is now time for social democrats to confront directly some of the challenges and some of the lies, frankly, that have taken root in our societies.
“Because we don’t just hear these stories about our politics, we also hear stories about our great countries, our communities, our cities, that simply do not match the reality that we see around us.”
Addressing the multinational crowd, Starmer joked that those who had been looking around London in the run-up to the summit “may have noticed that this city isn’t the wasteland of anarchy that some would have you believe”.
Trump has repeatedly described London as lawless and decaying. In a rambling speech to the UN general assembly on Tuesday, the US president said the city had changed under the mayoralty of Sadiq Khan, falsely saying that Khan, who is Muslim, wanted to move to a system of sharia law.
Derogatory and incorrect comments about London “captures what we’re up against”, Starmer said, without referring directly to Trump.
“There are versions in all of your countries where places, institutions, communities are portrayed in a way that is a million miles from reality,” he added. “A sort of industrialised infrastructure of grievance. An entire world, not just a worldview, created through our devices that is miserable, joyless and demonstrably untrue.”
The “most poisonous” manifestation of such division was shown in London two weekends ago with a huge far-right demonstration, Starmer said, condemning what he called an attempt to set out an imminent “violent struggle for the nation”.
The prime minister added: “You don’t have to be a great historian to know where that kind of poison ends up.”
Starmer has faced criticism from some of his MPs for being slow to react to the far-right march and the rise of Reform and its policy of mass deportations, including of some people granted the right to live permanently in the UK.
In response, Starmer has sought to set out what he called in his speech “patriotic renewal”, which he said involved not defending the status quo but delivering for voters.
In the panel discussion, Carney noted that in some countries there has been no growth in real wages for 15 years, saying: “The last time that happened was the middle of the 19th century – Karl Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto. There’s a connection. So you’ve got to deliver real wage growth, first and foremost.”
Speaking about ID cards in the speech, Starmer explicitly linked their introduction to migration, saying: “The simple fact is that every nation needs to have control over its borders. We do need to know who is in our country … You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.”
