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Sir Keir Starmer has denied wanting to wave a “magic wand” to prevent either tax rises or public spending cuts to deliver on his promise to grow the economy.
The Labour leader also insisted he is prepared to make enemies in order to get the economy growing, including driving through contentious planning applications.
Speaking to the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Sir Keir also said he was “not hostile” to people who used private healthcare, after previously saying he would not use it personally in any circumstances.
In the latest in a series of Panorama interviews with the party leaders, Sir Keir was pressed on whether he wanted to re-join the European Union, having campaigned for it after the Brexit referendum.
He ruled that out saying the EU was “not a silver bullet” but said Labour would negotiate a better Brexit trade deal if it wins 4 July’s general election.
At Labour’s manifesto launch this week, Sir Keir said his was the party of economic growth and would boost wealth creation.
Nick Robinson suggested the party was trying to disguise an £18bn hole in Treasury funds – equivalent to 10% of the NHS budget – which would need to be filled either by tax rises or spending cuts to public services.
However, Sir Keir said he rejected the choice was simply being “boxed in” between tax and spend because there was another lever, which he said was growth.
“My manifesto is about wealth creation,” he said. “This is a party of wealth creation, of growth.
“Therefore this boxing in that everybody is trying to do… that the only levers available to a Labour government or a Labour prime minister is to put up tax or pull down spending – I reject that – growth is the lever that I intend to pull.”
When asked if he was trying to “wave the magic wand of growth”, Sir Keir said “it’s not a wand, it’s a plan” and outlined how Labour was focused on how to get rid of blocks to business needs that were preventing economic growth.
The Labour leader gave the example of a wind turbine that could be built in two years but would instead be held up by the planning process for five years – suggesting he would be willing to override objections to new developments.
When Nick Robinson asked if he was prepared to make enemies in order to drive economic growth, Sir Keir replied: “Yes – we’re going to have to be tough.
“We’re going to have to change the way things are done.”
Following the first leaders’ debate where Sir Keir said he would not use private healthcare himself, there was some concern the Labour leader was “hostile” to people who did go private, Mr Robinson suggested, and thought they were “queue jumpers”.
“I’m not hostile in the slightest,” he said. “I completely understand why people would go private… because they wanted to get an operation more quickly or get back to work or something else.”
But he defended the NHS as the best performer on acute care saying it was “the very best place to be” for the treatment of life-threatening illness, adding that private hospitals “refer into the NHS for acute care” for that reason.
Sir Keir opposed Brexit and, as Shadow Brexit Secretary wanted to keep the option of a second referendum on the table, before ruling out a re-entry last year.
The post-Brexit trade deals were “botched”, he said, but many issues around growth could be fixed without undoing Brexit.
“I do think we can do better than the botched deal that we’ve got under Boris Johnson,” he said. “I think every business thinks that.”
He added: “If you look at the problems for growth over the last 14 years, they were there, or many of them were there, before Brexit, so the idea that the sort of single silver bullet is simply the relationship with the EU is not something I accept.”
The BBC is interviewing all the major party leaders in the run-up to the election in The Panorama Interviews with Nick Robinson. You can watch the interview with Sir Keir Starmer at 19:30 on BBC One or BBC iPlayer.
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