LONDON: Newly-elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday began a whistlestop tour of UK nations, promising an “immediate reset” of relations with the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Starmer was due to meet Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the pro-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) John Swinney in Edinburgh ahead of trips to Cardiff and Belfast expected on Monday.

The meeting comes as the SNP was almost wiped out at last week’s election which put Starmer’s Labour Party in power by a landslide. Labour, which crushed Rishi Sunak’s ruling Conservatives at the polls, also overturned more than a decade of SNP domination in Scotland by capturing the majority of its 57 seats. Swinney lamented a “very, very difficult and damaging” election result for his party. He had set the party’s sights on winning 29 seats as a mandate for reopening negotiations with the British government for another independence referendum, but it returned only nine MPs.

Under ex-premier Tony Blair, Labour was the architect of devolving power to the regions in the late 1990s with the setting up of parliaments or national assemblies in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. But under the Conservatives leaders in the three capitals complained that they were increasingly sidelined.

Starmer said disagreement could be turned into cooperation “and a genuine seat at the table” to deliver the UK-wide change he has promised. “That begins today with an immediate reset of my government’s approach to working with the first and deputy first ministers, because meaningful cooperation centered on respect will be key to delivering change across our United Kingdom.”

Starmer will make his debut on the international stage as leader when he flies to Washington next week for a NATO summit. Foreign Minister David Lammy meanwhile travelled to Berlin to meet his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock, in his first in-post trip. The ministers discussed issues from boosting NATO’s support for Ukraine to the situation in the Middle East, the German foreign ministry wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“The United Kingdom is an indispensable part of Europe,” the ministry wrote, adding that Germany is “working with the new UK government to see how the UK can move closer to the EU”. Earlier Sunday, as Starmer began his second full day at the helm, former three-time Labour prime minister Blair made an early intervention, urging him to have a “plan to control immigration”.

Blair warned Starmer that the anti-immigration Reform UK Party also posed a challenge to Labour, not just the Conservative Party. “We need a plan to control immigration. If we don’t have rules, we get prejudices,” Blair wrote in the Sunday Times, advocating the introduction of digital ID. Business Minister Jonathan Reynolds later ruled the idea out.

Starmer on Saturday began his first full day in charge declaring the ousted Tories’ plan to deport migrants to Rwanda “dead and buried” and pledging growth as his government’s “number one mission”. The Labour leader on Friday won a landslide election victory bringing to a close 14 years of Conservative rule. He said he was “restless for change” and that his party had received a “mandate to do politics differently”.

Starmer started the day with a first meeting of his cabinet including Britain’s first woman finance minister Rachel Reeves and new foreign minister Lammy. “We have a huge amount of work to do, so now we get on with our work,” he told his top team to applause and smiles around the cabinet table.

At a news conference afterwards he said he would not be proceeding with Sunak’s controversial scheme to tackle rising small boat arrivals on England’s southern coast by deporting migrants to Rwanda. “The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started... I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent,” he told reporters at his 10 Downing Street office.

Starmer spent his first hours in Downing Street on Friday appointing his ministerial team, hours after securing his center-left party’s return to power with a whopping 174-seat majority in the UK parliament. Notable lower-ranking appointments included Patrick Vallance, chief scientific government adviser during the COVID-19 pandemic, who has been made a science minister.

James Timpson, whose shoe repair company employs ex-offenders, was also made a prisons minister. Starmer said both new ministers were people “associated with change” and illustrated his determination to deliver concrete improvements to people’s lives. Work on “driving growth” had already begun, he said, adding that he had told his ministers “exactly what I expect of them in terms of standards, delivery, and the trust that the country has put in them”. – Agencies