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Long-standing racial prejudice has come back to UK politics, and it leaves citizens fearful, the Prime Minister warned, cautioning that divisive far-right politics are “tearing our country apart”.

Confronting Discriminatory Language and Harmful Politics

In conversation with GP and TV personality a well-known TV doctor, the prime minister pointed to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK for enabling a return to racist and divisive political discourse that seemed a thing of the past decades ago”.

In the interview, which aired on a popular morning program this week, the PM provided his strongest signal suggesting the two-child benefit cap could be removed in the budget in the coming weeks.

Promise to Combat Poverty Among Children

Asked whether he planned to eliminate this restriction, as noted by advocacy groups is a major cause of child poverty across Britain, the Prime Minister said: “Let me be perfectly clear I will strive to lower poverty rates for kids.”

He outlined measures the government has already launched such as free school meals, breakfast clubs, and childcare but added: “Further action is necessary, and I assure you that I am dedicated on reducing child poverty.”

When pressed about if his remarks indicated he would lift the two-child cap, Starmer said “I would not say we are going to drive down poverty among children without being sure that we will implement a number of measures in order to do so”.

Strong Indications from Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves, gave a similarly clear signal on Monday when she told a national radio station that “in the end, a child should not be penalised if their parents are struggling financially”.

Ministers are getting ready to scrap the restriction fully, after initially considering phasing it out for bigger households or richer ones. An economic thinktank has estimated this would cost about £3.5bn by 2029-30.

Political Divide and National Renewal

In the interview, Starmer said the ideological split in the UK now was between Labour’s “patriotic national renewal” and “the toxic division of Reform” and others on the right who were “tearing our country apart”.

“Parts of the discourse we’re hearing – racist rhetoric, divisive rhetoric – that many assumed had been addressed in the past is returning to politics and citizens are very scared,” he said.

“It is essential to oppose such discrimination, that division, and we have to proudly say that to be British means showing empathy, requires rationality, entails tolerance and compassionate, which we value deeply.”

Echoing Warnings from the Health Secretary

Starmer echoed language used by Wes Streeting, who cautioned recently that an “ugly” racism reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s was now alarmingly frequent once more with healthcare workers were primary targets of it.

Streeting said occurrences of both verbal and physical attacks based on people’s skin colour now happened so often that it had become “socially acceptable to be racist”.

“We must end to discrimination in this country and we’ve got to put such harmful attitudes that’s found expression in our country back in its box and reestablish an environment across Britain that rejects racism to be racist,” Streeting stated.

Critical Decision for Voters

The Prime Minister used his speech at the Labour party conference in September to draw political battle lines with his political opponents, saying that voters faced a “defining choice”.

The prime minister explained he was involved in a struggle for the nation’s identity, noting that while voters expressed valid worries regarding unauthorized immigration, existed “a moral line” which some politicians had crossed.

Starmer vowed to confront those who argued that non-white individuals were not truly British and that households who had lived in Britain for years should be deported, saying those advocating these ideas constituted “opposed to the country’s progress”.

“If you incite racial attacks and hostility, that goes beyond concern: it’s criminal. This party – this great party – is proud of our flags, but if they are displayed with hateful messages, telling a Chinese takeaway owner to ‘go home’, that’s not pride; that is pure discrimination,” he informed activists.