The strange thing about Keir Starmer’s policy ideas is that they tend to evaporate over the years. He ran for Labor leader with clear, radical promises: abolish the House of Lords, waive all university fees and more. Over time, such promises were then downgraded and dropped altogether. On Thursday, it appeared his policy vanishing act was complete. Amid much commotion at an Essex film studio, the Shadow Cabinet met to unveil its latest strategy: essentially promising almost nothing at all.
It has been deliberately kept minimalist, says Angela Rayner. Labor will not promise the earth – or promise anything, it turned out. The promise to adhere to ‘tough spending rules’ gives Starmer the opportunity to define the word ‘tough’ however he wants.
“Reducing NHS waiting times” will happen anyway as the post-lockdown patient pile-up has reached its peak. Creating a “border security command” ignores the small fact that such coordination is already taking place. This is rebadging, not revolution.
Promising 13,000 extra police officers is hardly radical after a Tory government that promised (and recruited) 20,000 extra police officers. Only one of yesterday’s pledges had a concrete figure: “recruiting 6,500 additional teachers” over five years, paid for by imposing VAT on private school fees. Even if it were introduced tomorrow, it would mean a 1.3 percent increase in the teacher workforce. That is certainly an improvement, but it is unlikely to lead to a school revolution.
My suspicion is that Labor will likely oversee a major education recession and end up closing schools every year – as it should in a country whose falling birth rate will mean almost 10 per cent fewer pupils by the end of this decade.
There is no need to lay off teachers: you simply replace fewer of the 40,000 who leave or retire each year. Labour’s sole aim is to better meet the teacher quota (the Tories are about 1 per cent short), but the overall workforce is likely to decline. In this way, a promise of “more teachers” will likely come to mean “fewer teachers.”
This is how the word game is played. “Political language,” Orwell wrote, “is designed to make lies ring true and murder respectable, and to give pure wind an appearance of solidity.” This sums up the political promises: they always end up as verbal illusions. You think about what will happen anyway (halving inflation, decreasing waiting lists) and then promise to make it happen. Both examples obviously do not come from Starmer, but from the five promises that Rishi Sunak made last year.
Starmer is now engaged in promise deflation. Last year he promised an economy with the “highest sustainable growth in the G7.” Now he simply says he will “grow our economy”: an economic ambition that is about as low as you can imagine. There was no Blair-style promise on income tax freezes: in fact, no firm promise on taxes at all. There was also nothing concrete on defense spending, nor any response to Sunak’s recent idea to slowly increase it over the next five years.
This launch was about mood music, to convince voters that Labour’s ambitions are decent and not scary. To keep the streets safe, you need to keep bills low and not much more. An ex-Tory voter was paraded to announce his conversion to a cheering crowd.
Neil Basu, former head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, appeared via videolink to give his blessing. We heard from a man who says a gang tried to steal his car. And a retiree, to talk about the costs of heating – and living expenses.
Fuel poverty is serious business, but under the Conservatives the country has less of it than ever before. And the elderly? The hugely expensive triple-lock promise has brought pensioner poverty to its lowest level in history: quite an achievement. Theft? There are fewer of them than at any time since records began in 1981. But for several reasons, voters’ perception is of a country where everything is falling apart – and of a government that deserves to be thrown out. In this light, Labour’s strategy is to do or say nothing.
There is only one barnacle left on Starmer’s boat. We were reminded when Ed Miliband came on stage as a Shakespearean comedy interlude character, to talk about a net-zero home energy sector by the end of the decade. British renewables are cheaper, he said – and safer. This is nonsense, as even the Tony Blair Institute admits. A total commitment to renewables, a report concluded yesterday, “could increase energy costs or reduce energy security, with major economic and social consequences for the country.” Rather.
So Miliband’s plan would be a disaster, but it is unlikely that it will ever be attempted as it would quickly disappear on contact with reality. Gary Smith, head of the GMB union, once told me that he is not worried about Miliband’s plan because it is so clearly impossible.
Why is the policy still there? Perhaps because Labor is afraid of the Greens (who may be nipping at their heels in Bristol) and needs to perpetuate some delusions. But the £28bn-a-year green spending plan, the signature Miliband policy for years, has now been scrapped – so it may seem cruel to take away what little is left.
Normally, oppositions start by stating generalities and slowly build up to a solid, policy-rich manifesto platform. Starmer does things the other way around.
But now that he’s entering the summer of an election year with a 20-point lead in the polls, this makes sense. The vaguer his agenda becomes, the stronger his poll lead. Why offer hostages to Fortune if you don’t have to? His strategy is to look boring, not risky. To present as small a target as possible.
The Conservatives will understandably be furious about this. Where are his better ideas? How can he get away with silence on welfare reform and the NHS, and on the other problems so big they seem to be crushing the government? Can Starmer really win a general election on the basis of a nothingburger of a manifesto, where his main claim is that he is not a Tory?
From what we saw (and didn’t learn) on Thursday, that’s exactly his plan. The question now is whether the Tories can make a better offer to voters.