LONDON (AP) — Fixing Britain's troubled economy will be a long haul in a “harsh” fiscal environment, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday, setting the stage for his government's high-stakes first budget this week.
Starmer hopes voters will accept his argument that higher taxes and limited public spending increases are needed to “fix the foundations” of an economy that he says has been undermined by 14 years of Conservative government. But his message — things will slowly get better — is a risky one in a high-speed political world.
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Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer gestures while speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
“It’s time to embrace the harsh light of fiscal reality,” Starmer said, telling voters that politicians must “stop insulting your intelligence with the chicanery of easy answers.”
“I will never stand here and tell you to feel better, if you don’t,” he added during a speech in the central England city of Birmingham two days before Wednesday's budget. “Change must be felt.”
Starmer's center-left Labour Party was elected July 4 after promising to banish years of turmoil and scandal under Conservative governments, get Britain’s economy growing and restore frayed public services, especially the state-funded National Health Service.
Pumping money into health, education and other services is made harder by a sluggish economy, hobbled by rising public debt and low growth of just 0.2% in August. Starmer also says that on taking office he discovered a 22 billion pound ($29 billion) “black hole” in the public finances left by the Conservative government.
The Conservatives say they left an economy that was growing, albeit modestly, with lower levels of debt and a smaller deficit than many other Group of Seven wealthy nations.
Paul Johnson, head of independent think-tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the budget hole is real, but that both Labour and the Conservatives were dishonest about the economy during the election.
“It was obvious that they were either going to have to cut spending, which is what the previous government said they were planning to do, or increase taxes,” he told Sky News. “But of course, no party was willing to say that. That’s why we called it a conspiracy of silence at the time.”
That means the budget is certain to include tax increases – though Labour has pledged not to raise the tax burden on “working people,” a term whose definition has been hotly debated in the media for weeks.
Treasury chief Rachel Reeves – Britain’s first female chancellor of the exchequer -- is widely expected to tweak the government’s debt rules so that she can borrow billions more for investment in the health system, schools, railways and other big infrastructure projects, and to raise money by hiking tax paid by employers, though not employees. She could also raise taxes on capital gains, arguing they do not form part of the main income of working people.
Starmer said that “tax rises will prevent austerity and rebuild public services,” while “borrowing will drive long-term growth.”
“There are no shortcuts,” he said.
Starmer’s government set out its tough-medicine approach to the economy soon after being elected. One of its first acts was to strip millions of retirees of a payment intended to help heat their homes in winter. It was intended to signal determination to take difficult decisions, but spawned a sharp backlash from Labour members and sections of the public.
It also sat awkwardly with news that Starmer had accepted thousands of pounds’ (dollars’) worth of gifts including clothes, designer eyeglasses and tickets to see Taylor Swift. After days of negative headlines, he agreed to pay back 6,000 pounds (almost $8,000) worth of freebies.
Headlines about internal Labour feuds and “Swiftgate” flourished during the long wait for the budget, which is being delivered almost four months after the election, an unusually big gap.
Labour “has been finding the adjustment into government a bit hard,” said Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government think-tank. “There has been a sense that everybody is just in a holding pattern until we get the budget.”
Starmer is a famously cautious politician, and Reeves, a former Bank of England economist, wants to be seen as a prudent guardian of the nation’s purse strings. Rutter said that part of the reason for the slow buildup to the budget is the memory of the economic turmoil unleashed by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss in October 2022. Truss resigned as prime minister after just 49 days in office when her plan for billions in tax cuts rocked the financial markets and battered the value of the pound.
“Every chancellor is now scarred by the ghost of Liz Truss past,” Rutter said, noting that Reeves “clearly didn’t want to do a Liz Truss and do a rushed job.
“The question is, does she do a good enough job on Wednesday that people think that she’s used that time well?” Rutter added. “The stakes are quite high for the government.”
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer gestures while speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
Britain's Prime Minister Prime Keir Starmer speaking at an event in the West Midlands, England, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Darren Staples)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
