Sir Keir Starmer is maintaining a difficult balance in acknowledging rising global security threats and the fiscal facts

When it comes to the defence budget, enormous pressure is being put on Sir Keir Starmer to do something he already intends to do. As a Nato member, Britain has signed up to a target of military spending at 2.5% of gross domestic product. The prime minister has made a “cast-iron” guarantee to honour that pledge, and restated it ahead of a Nato summit in Washington this week.

This was also the policy of the last Conservative government. There was no timetable for reaching the target until April this year, when Rishi Sunak declared that it would happen by 2030. Within a month, Mr Sunak had called an election. Those two things are related. The 2030 deadline was a partisan device to make the Tories look more hawkish than Labour.

Sir Keir Starmer’s No 10 meeting with metro mayors sent the right message. But big challenges loom

Over the years, England’s town halls have become used to being treated with a mixture of hostility, condescension and neglect. During the late 1980s, writing at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s ideological assault on leftwing councils, the political scientist Andrew Gamble warned that her centralising tendencies could pave the way to “the eventual abolition of local government”. In the 2010s, Conservative administrations blithely swung the wrecking ball once more, as punitive austerity hollowed out council budgets to an unsustainable degree.

Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to sit down with England’s metro mayors in Downing Street this week – the first meeting of its kind – was therefore both welcome and significant. Tuesday’s get-together largely amounted to warm words and selfies outside No 10. But Sir Keir’s announcement of a new council of regions and nations formalises a more equal and respectful relationship. It is a genuine statement of collaborative intent. The sense of a step-change was also conveyed by Angela Rayner’s decision to remove Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” slogan from the housing, communities and local government department that she now leads. Rarely has a political slogan generated so many ministerial speeches and column inches, to such little concrete effect.

The new parliament better reflects a modern Britain that politicians have ignored for too long

Seeing a Labour prime minister speak from the dispatch box in parliament sealed an electoral coup executed in the quiet of the country’s polling booths last week. The proceedings in the House of Commons on Tuesday revealed the scale of the revolution that Sir Keir Starmer led. Out of 650 parliamentarians elected, 335 have never been an MP before.

Parliament now looks more like Britain. The Commons is the most diverse ever in terms of race and gender. Black, Asian and ethnic minority lawmakers will make up about 13% of the total, up from 10% in 2019. There are a record 242 female MPs, 22 more than after the last election. The Labour leader pointed out that the Commons now has the “largest cohort” of LGBTQ+ MPs of any parliament in the world. It was heartening to see Sir Keir break with convention to praise the mother of the house, Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black woman MP, who was almost blocked from standing as a Labour candidate. It may be a trick of the light, but the nation feels a better place.

A strong emphasis on rehabilitation is what the justice ministry and Prison Service need

The appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister is a hopeful signal that Labour plans to take a socially liberal, reformist approach to criminal justice, placing more emphasis on rehabilitation and less on punishment. That would be very welcome. Mr Timpson runs what he calls a “paternalistic family business”, the Timpson group of shoe repair and key-cutting shops. About 10% of his workforce are former prisoners, and Mr Timpson appears eager to get stuck into the huge challenges of overcrowding, high reoffending rates and failed reintegration.

There is no argument about the severity of the current crisis. Jails in England and Wales are 99% full, and release dates have been brought forward repeatedly to relieve pressures. In May, the governor of HMP Wandsworth resigned following a highly critical inspection. Last year a prisoner escaped from Wandsworth; more recently a prison officer was charged with misconduct in public office after a video appeared to show her having sex with a prisoner in a cell.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.