The Starmer Government’s Final Acts: Kyiv and British Steel
Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership closed on two deliberate notes. On his last overseas trip he travelled to Kyiv, pledging £255m with Sweden towards 16 Gripen fighter jets for Ukraine and being awarded the Order of Freedom, telling Kyiv Britain’s support “will endure” under his successor. At home, his government took British Steel into public ownership, securing the Scunthorpe blast furnaces — Britain’s last able to make steel from raw materials — and thousands of jobs from its Chinese owner. Both now pass to Andy Burnham.
The two closing acts are a fair summary of the government Starmer led: a steadfast, expensive commitment to Ukraine abroad, and an interventionist rescue of a strategic industry at home from a party that came to office promising restraint. Nationalising British Steel was a decision reached reluctantly and framed as security rather than ideology — losing Scunthorpe would have left Britain the only G7 nation unable to make virgin steel — and it hands Burnham an industrial policy already in motion, along with an unresolved bill for compensating the former owner. The Kyiv trip, with jets not due until the end of the decade, was as much a message of continuity to Moscow and to Kyiv as a parcel of hardware. Together they frame the inheritance: a set of commitments, foreign and industrial, that the new Prime Minister must now fund and see through. Watch how Burnham carries both forward, the compensation settlement over British Steel, and whether the jet deal holds to its timeline.