So much for the reset or the relaunch or whatever it was Keir Starmer didn’t want us to call it.
Instead of a bold, new course correction – essential after the most disastrous start of any new government in living memory – all we got from him was a humdrum repeat of existing plans, embellished with a few more targets, most of which Labour will miss.
This was no stirring restatement of the Government’s purpose, no careful recalibration of aims after five months of the realities of power. It was as flat as a stale pint of beer, replete with all the old platitudes we heard ad nauseam during the election campaign: ‘Clearing up the mess’; ‘fixing the foundations’; ‘country first, party second’.
At times Starmer seemed even wistful about the good old days of opposition, when everything was so much simpler and easier – and all you had to do was bash the Tories.
Yesterday felt more like a manifesto launch than a progress report from a Prime Minister in power.
Government is proving much harder for this untrustworthy PM and his lacklustre team than they ever realised – and Starmer is such a poor politician that he manages to set himself up to fail, as he did in yesterday’s speech, even if he doesn’t quite know it.
The venue was the iconic Pinewood Studios, home of James Bond and many other global cinematic successes, which is to British creativity what Starmer is to scripted boilerplate cliche. He had summoned his Cabinet, assorted Labour worthies and His Majesty’s media to hang on his very word.
He began with a joke – about how he could be the next Bond – so bad that I will not ruin your day by repeating it (we journalists, in our renowned spirit of self-sacrifice, endure this sort of thing so you don’t have to). It went downhill after that.
Instead of a bold, new course correction, Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered a humdrum repeat of existing plans, embellished with a few more targets
Scrape away the usual, familiar guff (‘mission-led government’, ‘measurable milestones’, ‘plan for change’) and Starmer has committed to targets too challenging for him to meet, even though he’s watered them down. Or too easy to be worth the candle. It is a bizarre way to run a country.
Take his promise for Britain to have the ‘highest sustained growth’ of any G7 country between now and the end of the decade.
It was a foolhardy commitment when he first rolled it out in the run up to the election, since it benchmarks Britain against major market economies over which he has no control.
It is even more foolish now that Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s first budget has already knocked the stuffing out of what growth there was in the British economy.
We might yet do better than Europe’s sclerotic economies (hardly a high bar), which, let us not forget, Starmer wants to make us more like. But we have no chance of outpacing the US (or even Canada).
To his vainglorious growth pledge, Starmer yesterday added a meaningless one: a rise in real living standards over the next five years, as measured by real disposable household income. Meaningless because, even under the Tories and in the midst of the most terrible cost-of-living squeeze, living standards by Starmer’s chosen metric rose during the last parliament.
By a pathetic 0.3 per cent, to be sure, the weakest in recent history. But official forecasts project living standards to rise again — but by a mere 0.5 per cent — between next year and 2030, another boost in living standards nobody will notice.
Does Starmer really expect us to hang out the bunting in celebration if he counts that as hitting his target? Probably. Because, significantly, he put no number on raising living standards – a typical Starmer sleight of hand.
Sir Keir had summoned his Cabinet, including Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, assorted Labour worthies and His Majesty’s media to hang on his very word
His target for the NHS does have a number on it, but it is fraught with danger. He wants 92 per cent of patients to wait no longer than 18 weeks for their elective treatment. It is a proper goal, one that has not been achieved for more than a decade. At the moment it is closer to 60 per cent. NHS waiting lists are a national scandal and Starmer is right to confront them head on.
But his Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, plans to drive NHS resources closer to home – to community health centres and the like – and to beef up measures to prevent illness. It’s hard to see how the Government can do that and provide hospitals with the extra funds to force down waiting lists.
Health service professionals are already expressing concern that other parts of the NHS, such as A&E, will be sacrificed to meet the waiting-list target. Given the 92 per cent pledge is measurable and Starmer has pinned his colours to it, we can be sure it will have the priority. Even so, it is almost certainly unobtainable, though much treasure will be squandered trying to hit it.
The vow to build 1.5 million new homes in England during the current Parliament is another mission impossible. Even ministers mutter that it is ‘much more difficult than expected’. But then joining the real world can often be a sobering experience.
House building fell almost 6 per cent to about 220,000 in the past year – the lowest in eight years. Starmer thinks he’s cleared the way by neutralising the planning rules holding back development. Just wait til his friends in the legal profession get stuck in on behalf of the nimbies and the well-financed Green Blob.
Even if he managed 300,000 new homes a year for the next four years — unprecedented in modern times — he would still fail to hit his target.
Just as he will fail with his aim for ‘clean power’ by 2030. In the aftermath of his speech, it was said that Starmer had watered down his commitment to decarbonising the electricity grid by the end of the decade.
The briefing document issued after he had made his remarks states that the UK will be ‘on track to at least 95 per cent clean power by 2030’. Yet, in November last year, Labour promised the nation would be ‘leading the world with 100 per cent clean power by 2030’ and the Party’s manifesto promised ‘clean power by 2030’.
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But this is dancing on the head of a pin. Whether it’s 100 per cent or 95 per cent or even 90 per cent, the target will be missed. It requires a massive expansion of renewable energy, for which Britain has neither the supply chains nor the skills; huge investment in carbon capture and storage, a nascent technology that remains untried at scale; and a multi-billion pound upgrade to the National Grid to cope with intermittent supplies from renewables in remote places, which simply can’t be completed by 2030.
The two remaining targets Starmer outlined yesterday — covering education and crime — are so vague and modest that a man with his ability to fudge the truth and renege on past pledges will have no problem claiming victory.
On crime, for example, gone is the manifesto pledge to cut serious violent crime and violence against women and children by 50 per cent. It has been replaced by a milquetoast ambition to add 13,000 more bobbies (of which, it turns out, only 3,000 will be proper full-time police constables).
In retrospect, Starmer was right to say this was not a reset or relaunch of his government. Instead he doubled down on his current course, which has already brought him (and the country) so much pain. Things can only get worse.
Of his six ‘measurable milestones’, two are of marginal importance, and he is currently on course to miss — perhaps by more than a mile — the four that do matter. Nor are there any ‘milestones’ for cutting net migration or raising defence spending, which tells us all we need to know about his priorities.
We are in for a grim four years. A talentless government without vision or direction, stumbling from failed target to failed target. Starmer claims to have set his face against our economic decline while pursuing policies that will hasten it.
Good news for a Tory revival, you might think. But when it comes to net zero, low growth, too few police, a failing NHS, an underfunded defence and stagnant living standards, the Tories are just as complicit as Labour.
On Starmer’s current trajectory, the main beneficiary is likely to be Nigel Farage’s Reform, whose hands are clean on all of the above. By the time that dawns on him, even James Bond won’t be able to rescue him.