LONDON — Keir Starmer didn’t have a summer honeymoon.

Britain’s new prime minister, elected in a landslide less than two months ago, was forced to cancel a planned holiday after anti-immigration riots erupted across the country. He has spent his first weeks in office dealing with the aftermath and issuing stark warnings about the state of the country and the economy.

As lawmakers returned to parliament on Monday from a shortened summer break, Starmer’s left-wing Labour government was preparing to deliver a budget statement next month that is likely to include tax rises or public spending cuts — or both.

The mood music is a sharp contrast to the campaign song of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, the last Labour leader to win an election: “Things Can Only Get Better.”

“Quite frankly, things are going to get worse before they get better,” Starmer told voters in a televised speech last week.

Starmer is trying to hammer home the point that the right-wing Conservative Party, ousted by voters in the July 4 election, has been in power for “14 years of rot” that has weakened Britain economically, structurally and even morally.

During the election campaign, Starmer promised to boost the country’s struggling economy and revive ailing public services such as the state-funded National Health Service.

Since taking power, he has said the situation is “worse than we ever imagined”, with an unexpected £22 billion ($29 billion) hole in the public finances. Labour has decided not to raise taxes on “working people” but must find the money elsewhere. It has already cut a payment to help pensioners heat their homes in winter.

Starmer said last week that the Budget statement, due on 30 October, would be “painful” and would involve “short-term pain for long-term good”.

Conservative Economic Party spokeswoman Laura Trott accused Starmer and his government of trying to “evade responsibility for the tax rises they always planned but kept from the public at the election”.

Paul Johnson, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an economic think tank, said Labour was being “disingenuous” when it claimed it was surprised by the state of the finances, but the Conservatives had “left Labour a mess to sort out”.

Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said Starmer’s government would have to “take the bull by the horns” and face up to the fact that two key commitments – improving public services and not raising any major taxes – “are not achievable”.

Starmer faced a major challenge within weeks of taking office when anti-immigration violence erupted after three children were stabbed in the town of Southport. The violence, fuelled by online disinformation blaming a migrant and fanned by far-right groups, spread across England and Northern Ireland within days.

Starmer has responded forcefully, condemning a “mindless minority of thugs” fuelled by “the snake oil of populism” and promising swift justice and tough sentences for rioters. But he says he has been hamstrung by previous Conservative spending cuts that have left courts overwhelmed and prisons overcrowded.

Amid concerns from some Labour lawmakers about the gloomy messages, the government is now trying to sound more positive, noting that in his first weeks in office, Starmer has abandoned a stalled and controversial Conservative plan to send some asylum seekers arriving in the UK to Rwanda, struck deals with public sector unions to end a wave of strikes and begun to repair relations with the European Union after years of bitterness over Britain’s exit from the bloc.

The government is promising what it calls a “packed” parliamentary programme to tackle some of voters’ biggest gripes, including unreliable trains, water companies that discharge sewage and rising rents. It plans legislation in the coming weeks to take railways into public ownership, create a state-owned green energy company, impose tougher regulations on water companies and strengthen workers’ rights.

“After 14 years of Conservative rule, we have had to act quickly and radically to stop the unravelling of our country’s finances, our public services and our politics,” Commons Leader Lucy Powell said on Sunday.

Opposition Conservatives have questioned Starmer’s judgement and accused him of cronyism after several Labour supporters were given civil service jobs. But the defeated party is busy with a leadership contest to replace Rishi Sunak, which could give Starmer some breathing space.

Despite all this, Ford said Starmer was “taking a big risk by testing voters’ patience”.

“If you look at all the polls, it suggests that people are very aware of the severity of the crisis, and I think that will buy them some time,” he said. “But I think any strategy that relies on disappointing voters and asking them to be patient is inherently risky.”