Sir Keir Starmer was skewered with questioning as he appeared on ITV's This Morning today (November 25). Presenter Cat Deeley ripped into the Labour Prime Minister for a number of moves that he has made since being in power.
She addressed the "tough" decisions he has made so far, after just five months in office, including axing winter fuel payments for pensioners. He admitted: "It's tough things to do, especially as the economy was as bad as it was."
The politician added that he and his government had made "tough but fair" decisions as he continued: "I wouldn't swap a single day in opposition for a day in power. It's much better to be in power to be able to do things."
Cat saw this as a chance to grill him as she said: "What's interesting is you said 'tough but fair', that's what you just said. But then there are people, like there are pensioners, who wouldn't say it was fair.
"There are farmers who wouldn't say it was fair. There are parents of primary school children who wouldn't say that it was fair."
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Cat's co-star, Andi Peters, chimed in as he said: "Small businessmen. I spoke to a friend this morning, who said he might need to shut his business down because the National Insurance now will be so high that he will have to shut the business.
"That means people are going to lose jobs. How do you balance this, you know, it feels like you're stealing from Peter to pay Paul."
Keir argued back as he said: "Look, you have to make decisions. At the end of the day we inherited a broken economy and £22 billion was unaccounted for in the books, so we had to fill that black hole.
"At the same time, I knew we had to put money into the health service and we had to put money into our schools. So you have to make choices. You can't do both."
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He hit out at the former Conservative government adding: "You can't say you're going to fix the NHS and we won't raise a single penny of tax. Those were the things that were said for many years, but they're not true and that's what got us into the problem.
"I'm not pretending for anybody impacted that things aren't tough. I don't think that's fair or right to whoever is impacted.
"But political choices are about saying I do think that just at the moment, we've got to keep the NHS up, keep the waiting lists down and make that a priority. If you're going to do that you need to make tough decisions."
