TO be fair, it still scans:

Things can only get better

Can only get better

Once they’ve been worse

This is the message Keir Starmer will reportedly deliver to the UK population today, in his first keynote speech since becoming Prime Minister. He will tell us that he is going to be honest about the choices that lie ahead, and assure us that he will not shy away from making difficult decisions.

It seems he had little difficulty making the decision to be dishonest with the public when it mattered the most.

In the run-up to the General Election he shied away from answering questions about the elephant in the room, despite the valiant efforts of many others to point it out. He pretended to be entirely oblivious, talking instead about non-negotiable fiscal rules and making grand promises of national renewal.

Today, it seems, Starmer will lead the elephant onto centre stage, point as it defecates on the floor, then expect our applause as he starts shovelling it up. He will not shy away from this task – oh no! But we should be braced for even more of a shit show, because “there is no quick fix to the mess the Conservatives have made”.

He and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have the audacity to declare the financial state of the UK to be worse than they ever imagined. But they didn’t have to imagine it, as they were repeatedly warned about it in very simple terms by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, then reminded about that warning countless times during interviews and televised debates.

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Reeves, who it seems spent much of June with a blindfold over her eyes and cotton wool in her ears, declared that “upon my arrival at the Treasury three weeks ago, it became clear that there were things that I did not know … things that the party opposite covered up, covered up from the opposition, covered up from this House, covered up from the country”.

To say this does not inspire confidence is putting it mildly. How can she claim the financial black hole of £22 billion was “covered up” when the fact of its existence was splashed across newspapers? Does she really expect us to believe that she and Starmer were among the tiny minority of British citizens who actually believed what Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt were saying about the state of the economy after 14 years of Tory rule?

Perhaps they were simply bamboozled by references to a massive black hole. Reeves might have a PPE degree from Oxford but she’s not an astrophysicist, after all. How could she have been expected to imagine that a financial black hole meant either tax rises or budget cuts would be required? Or, of course, tinkering with those fiscal rules, which were declared to be non-negotiable before the grand Tory “cover-up” was exposed by the bold detective Reeves.

Now, it seems, Labour are to declare the existence of a “societal black hole”, perhaps in the hope that it will detract attention from the other one – the one they pretended not to know about in order to win votes.

Few could have predicted the horrific events that unfolded in Southport on July 29 or the wave of riots that followed – not least because they were sparked by the spread of information about the attacker that was quickly proved to be false.

Starmer’s response undoubtedly sent the much-needed message that rioters would be charged, prosecuted and face significant sentences, and this undoubtedly helped quell the unrest. But his party cannot now pretend that their own rhetoric on immigration has not in any way contributed to the “societal black hole” to which they now want us to direct our focus.

In May the party pledged to “act to bring down migration, strengthening wages and conditions for Britain’s workers”.

The implication was clear: that the scale of immigration into the UK had served to weaken wages and conditions for Britain’s workers, who were entitled to be aggrieved about that. Of course, such grievance would never be justification for the horrifying scenes we saw in towns and cities across England, but the targeting of hotels housing asylum seekers made it clear anti-immigrant sentiment was a key motivator for many committing acts of violence.

The fact that asylum seekers are not allowed to work is neither here nor there to the kind of people who think it’s a bright idea to force their way into a hotel surrounded by police or throw bricks at its windows. There need be no coherent logic to their actions, especially if a few wealthy pot-stirrers have convinced them that “immigrants” of some description are getting one over on them, and are to blame for whatever problems they happen to have.

It will be interesting to see how Labour go about forming a rational immigration policy that meets the urgent needs of a country desperate for health and social care staff but is inhabited by many people who genuinely believe they can’t see a doctor because the A&E waiting rooms are overcrowded with immigrants, and that their grandmother can’t get the care she needs because that funding has been allocated to housing desperate people in a Holiday Inn Express.

Pandering to these beliefs might have helped to secure a few votes, but if Starmer wants to serve two terms as prime minister he is going to have to start being honest about the root cause of problems, even if it isn’t what some potential voters want to hear.

A cohesive society has to be built on trust – time will tell whether a man who fibbed his way to power is capable of restoring it.