By Elizabeth Piper and Andrew MacAskill
LIVERPOOL, England (Reuters) -British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called on his party on Sunday to stop "navel gazing" and unite to defeat Reform UK, accusing the populist party of planning to launch a "racist policy" of mass deportations if it wins power.
Starmer, whose governing Labour is well behind Reform in the polls, kicked off his party's annual conference by issuing a rallying cry to party members to direct their anger towards Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage's Reform, rather than his leadership.
"I'm saying we have got the fight of our lives ahead of us, because we've got to take on Reform. We've got to beat them and so now is not the time for introspection or navel gazing," he told BBC news. "We need to be in that fight united."
UK PM DEFENDS EFFORTS TO TACKLE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
With Starmer's Labour badly behind in the polls before a national election due in 2029, the British prime minister wants to reset the narrative about his leadership after weeks of difficulties when he was forced to reshuffle his government.
He sees his party's conference in the northern English city of Liverpool as a chance to rally Labour and challenge those critics who want him to be replaced, including the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, by focusing their anger on Farage.
Starmer defended his government's efforts to tackle illegal immigration, which is one of the main concerns of British voters, describing Farage's plan to deport refugees who had settled in Britain as "racist".
"It is one thing to say we're going to remove illegal migrants, people who have no right to be here. I'm up for that," he said.
"It is a completely different thing to say we are going to reach in to people who are lawfully here and start removing them ... I do think that it's a racist policy, I do think it is immoral, and it needs to be called out for what it is."
LOW POLL RATINGS
Starmer is under pressure. The polling firm Ipsos said his approval ratings have fallen to the lowest level of any prime minister since it started collecting the data in 1977. Only 13% of voters are satisfied with Starmer while 79% are dissatisfied.
The British leader said he was "not sticking his fingers in his ears" and he would be judged by three things: whether people's living standards improve, if public services are better, and if people feel safe in their homes.
"I will rightly be judged in that way," he said.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper and Andrew MacAskill; Editing by David Holmes)
