Alastair Campbell has spoken of his concern over Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to tell voters that “things will get worse”.

The Prime Minister is due to deliver a speech on Tuesday where he will tell the public it will take “hard work” to “root out 14 years of rot and reverse a decade of decline”.

With tax hikes looking likely in October’s budget, the Prime Minister will use a speech in Downing Street to dampen down expectations of what his government will be able to achieve in his first term.

He will use his speech to 50 members of the public he met on the election campaign trail to warn that “frankly – things will get worse before we get better” as the Labour administration tries to deal with “not just an economic black hole but a societal black hole”.

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Speaking at an Aye Write event in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on Monday, Mr Campbell - who served as a strategist and spokesperson for Tony Blair - said Sir Keir needed to give the country a sense of direction. 

“I think people get very negative, much more quickly than they used to,” he said. “And I think if you're not giving people a sense of the journey that they're on, I think it becomes hard to take people with you through very difficult times.

“I slightly had a bit of twitch over the weekend with the briefing of this speech, things can only get worse before they get better.

“You've got to give people that sense of this is where we're going. I don't think we can ever just be a kind of managerial, technocratic, as the politicians who've done that recently intend not to last very long.”

Mr Campbell also said he was uneasy about Labour’s plans to means test the Winter Fuel Payment and their pay agreement with Aslef.

“You’ve just got to be very, very careful about some of that stuff,” he said.

The former spindoctor was joined on stage by the journalist Tom Baldwin, who has recently written a biography of Sir Keir.

They were challenged by an audience member, who criticised some of the decisions taken by Sir Keir, particularly around welfare and the reluctance to scrap the two-child cap on benefits.

Mr Baldwin said the new government did not “feel comfortable” with the policy, brought in by George Osborne, and would eventually move to scrap it.

“I would say just to give him a chance,” he said. “I'm a bit worried about budget. I'm worried that the budget is going to shape the whole government in ways which the five missions will shape the government.

“I'm worried that the spending review and the budget are actually going to put too much of a straight jacket on anything they do.”

He said people should take a “little bit of hope” from the UK Government’s decision to hike public sector pay.

“I think there's a recognition that doctors, nurses, teachers, public sector workers deserved a pay rise, and they did it. And I thought that was interesting. That felt to me like a slice of clean air coming into the corridors of power for the first time in a long time.”

Meanwhile, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is set to release a “dossier” laying out what he claims is the extent of Scotland’s “economic decline and financial mismanagement” under the SNP.

Ahead of the publication, he pointed to divergence in income tax north and south of the border, the reintroduction of peak rail fares following a pilot and cuts to council budgets.

“For too long the SNP has forced working Scots to foot the bill for government failure,” Mr Sarwar said.

“As families struggle to make ends meet during a cost-of-living crisis, they shouldn’t have to deal with the added cost of SNP incompetence.

“Taxes keep spiralling while services crumble – but we cannot keep paying more and getting less in return.

“The current budget crisis is the result of years of economic decline and financial mismanagement by the SNP government.

“The SNP must drop the excuses and spin and take responsibility for fixing the mess it has made of public finances.

“Scotland needs change and with the SNP falling further into chaos by the day, it’s clear that only Scottish Labour can deliver it.”

Finance Secretary Shona Robison described the “so-called dossier” as “nothing more than a smoke-screen to try and distract from the billions of pounds in cuts that his boss in London is unveiling this week”.

She added: “We have delivered a more progressive income tax system in Scotland which ensures those on lowest incomes pay a bit less – and unlocks billions more in investment for public services.

“Of course, the Scottish government operates with a largely fixed budget from Westminster – and if Anas Sarwar really wanted to see more investment in public services in Scotland, he would join with us in standing up to Labour’s austerity agenda at Westminster.”