Election 2024: Is Keir Starmer ready for government?
If the pledge card Keir Starmer launched last week is anything to go by, the still doesn’t know what it will actually deliver if it gets elected, says Will Cooling
Last week Sir Keir Starmer put Labour’s election campaign on a new footing when he launched his pledge card. This attracted groans, as many commentators rushed to point out that Tony Blair’s famous pledge card played little role in securing New Labour victory in 1997.
Like then, Labour and Starmer himself already enjoy a hefty polling lead, with little headroom for additional growth. But it would be wrong to dismiss the pledge card as a gimmick. Forcing politicians to specify what they will change if they get elected better communicates their priorities and values than a lengthy manifesto filled with long-winded platitudes. Indeed, this process of narrowing down their ambitions to a series of key priorities can be clarifying for the politicians themselves.
It is a shame then, that Labour’s new pledge card too often retreats to generalities, lacking the specific details that the party offered in 1997. For example, on the economy they do not make a promise as clear as Blair’s pledge not to increase income tax and to cut VAT on household energy, with Starmer merely promising to keep taxes as low as possible. Likewise, whereas New Labour clearly pledged to halve sentencing and get young people off benefits through creating 250,000 subsidised training places, today’s party gives no numbers to the additional police officers, tougher sentences, and new town hubs with which it hopes to tackle anti-social behaviour.
The lack of detail is more striking with regards to the pledge to set up Great British Energy, which seemingly by magic will cut customer bills and boost national security. That Starmer now feels the need to include a pledge on energy shows how the landscape has changed since 1997, but this pledge would be much more meaningful if he had specified what Labour will do differently beyond setting up a potentially superfluous state-owned energy company. Given the party has earmarked £8bn to spend on its environmental policies, it would surely be possible to explain how many new wind or solar farms it plans to build in the new parliament. This confusing of means with ends can also be seen in the immigration pledge. A new Border Security Patrol may well be needed, but there’s no detail about what it will do in practice, beyond a boast to utilise counter-terror powers to smash the gangs.
At least in these areas there’s a vague sense of vision, unlike the education pledge, which implies that hiring less than 7000 additional teachers will somehow transform education. Again, Tony Blair set out a clearer, more exciting vision, promising to get class sizes under thirty for the youngest school pupils. One wonders whether a pledge to address the school infrastructure backlog would have made more sense.
There is however one pledge that gets the format. And that is health. Just as back in 1997 they promised to treat 100,000 extra patients, today Labour promises to create 40,000 additional medical appointments in the evening or weekend. Not only is it a tangible target, focused on the experience of the user not provider of a key public service, but it also speaks to the type of flexible, patient-focused NHS that Wes Streeting has talked about wanting to encourage. It shows a clarity of thought and communication, that is sadly lacking in the rest of the pledges.
The weaknesses of Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge card won’t cost him the election, any more than the strengths of Tony Blair’s helped him win his. But what Blair’s pledge card did do, was show how focused Labour would be on delivery – something that would pay real dividends in government. If on the eve of a general election Labour still lacks clarity on what its policies will mean in practice, is it actually ready for government?