MEDWAY, England — Keir Starmer is a man on five missions. But the Labour leader’s big plan for government may soon have to contend with reality.
Starmer launched the last in a five-strong list of “missions” for the U.K. on Thursday if — as current polls suggest — he becomes the country’s next prime minister at the upcoming general election.
Speaking at a college in Gillingham, Kent, the opposition leader argued only his party could break the “class ceiling,” and vowed to put education at the heart of his governing plan.
But while the promise of five “missions” might make for a snappy headline, converting them into actually policy could prove more tricky.
Starmer’s not the first leader to give the pledges tactic a try. Labour’s last election-winner, Tony Blair, rode to power with five key promises — printed on physical cards — in 1997. Starmer’s Tory opponent Rishi Sunak is currently working his way through five key priorities, with limited success.
Iain Mansfield, director of research at the Institute for Government (IFG) think tank, says voters “always remember the eye-catching pledges.”
But he warns that while the missions show a leader “thinking seriously about the big questions that matter to ordinary people … the jury is still out on whether [Starmer] has the right answers.”
So what exactly are Starmer’s missions — and where might the Labour leader come unstuck as he tries to make good on them?
“Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage“
This is Starmer’s newest mission — and the one he travelled to Medway to unveil Thursday.
Starmer’s opportunity missions have (bear with us here) five more mini-missions inside them.
He’s promising to help students break down five big barriers to education; language; confidence; an outdated curriculum; a culture of rejecting vocational training; and a “soft bigotry” of low expectations.
To try and overcome the first and second hurdles, Starmer is promising new funding — earmarked from removing tax breaks currently enjoyed by private schools — to deliver language intervention in the early years of education.
He wants a new focus on oracy — speaking clearly and fluently — throughout the school journey, which Labour argues will improve children’s confidence and help them to “articulate themselves, justify, persuade, challenge and explain.”
Reforming the U.K.’s school curriculum is another big part of what Starmer’s promising. He wants a focus on vocational skills and creativity in a bid to manage the on-trend problem of artificial intelligence taking everyone’s jobs.
Sam Butters, co-chief of NGO the Fair Education Alliance, said Starmer’s speech offered “hope for the first time in a long time” — but (get used to hearing this one) reckons the “substance still needs work.”
“What’s missing is the practicalities on the teacher workforce,” Butters said. “The teacher workforce and the general education workforce is the foundation — and it’s crumbling. The five missions set out are not really going to work if we don’t solve that foundation.”
Starmer has noted that retention is a problem in Britain’s teaching workforce, which has been pushing through its trade unions for an above-inflation pay rise.
But while Labour’s promising new teachers will get £2,400 after their second year of training as a retention bonus, questions remain among those on the frontline about whether that will really be enough.
“Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7“
Both Sunak and Starmer are aiming to turn around Britain’s sluggish growth prospects. But Starmer is going big, angling for the highest sustained growth in the G7 — a tall order for a country that grew by just 0.2 percent month-on-month, according to the latest stats.
Starmer’s target could galvanize a Labour government — but the IfG’s Gemma Tetlow and Tom Pope, have warned that the goal is “slightly ill-defined,” and that it’s a policy that, in reality, could take decades to achieve.
Starmer may only get one term in office — and, as the IfG experts point out, sometimes the economic picture is as much about luck as as it is about politics.
“Make Britain a clean energy superpower“
Labour’s looking to Joe Biden’s administration for its thinking on green energy, covetously eyeing a package of green subsidies unveiled by the U.S. president at a time when the British government is taking a very different tack.
Indeed, its vow to create a zero-carbon electricity system by 2030 was welcomed by climate activists, with Greenpeace saying plans to meet the goal while “whilst protecting workers, creating over a million new jobs, giving people warm homes, as well as ending new north sea oil and gas licenses are policies we desperately need.”
But actually making good on the promise is another matter entirely, and Labour faces intense pressure to show it’s a sensible steward of the public finances.
In a sign of internal tensions over the green agenda, the party announced recently that it will scale down plans to borrow £28 billion a year to invest in green tech, with Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves saying Labour would instead “ramp up” its green spending towards that total in the second half of a parliamentary term.
Tensions over the shift were on full display at Starmer’s speech Thursday, as two activists from campaign group Green New Deal Rising interrupted the leader of the opposition to urge him to “stop making U-turns.”
“Build an NHS fit for the future“
Britain’s publicly-funded health service turned 75 to much fanfare this week, but it’s facing a major crisis amid spiraling waiting lists and a row over frontline pay.
Starmer’s promising to build “an NHS fit for the future” — something that may feel a long way off to anyone who has recently had to wait for a doctor’s appointment.
When Starmer launched his health mission in May, he vowed to focus on key areas including reforming adult social care (a challenge that’s bedeviled successive governments); expanding the NHS workforce; and revolutionizing NHS tech.
The leader of the opposition — a former director of public prosecutions — even slipped in the humblebrag of reminding those gathered that he had run a public service and knows that “money makes a difference.”
Yet Starmer has been repeatedly pressed on one big question: how will Labour pay for an NHS turnaround?
Hugh Alderwick, director of policy at the British Medical Journal, has said that while Starmer’s goals are “ambitious,” there are a lot of missing pieces.
“Public services are creaking after a decade of austerity, and the COVID-19 pandemic will cast a long shadow,” wrote Alderwick. “No amount of reform will avoid the need for substantial investment for Starmer’s Labour to make real progress.”
“Make Britain’s streets safe“
Tony Blair famously vowed to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” and Starmer — as a former top prosecutor — is promising big too.
The Labour leader has promised that his government would, within a decade, halve the level of violence against women and girls; halve incidents of knife crime; raise confidence in every police force to its highest levels; and reverse a collapse in the proportion of crimes solved.
But — while these are some of the most specific pledges in Labour’s “missions” plan — experts remain concerned that there are parts of the criminal justice system left out of the equation. The IfG has urged a focus on a backlog of cases in England’s courts, and the think tank’s researcher Gil Richards wrote: “It’s also not clear how prisons, already at capacity, can accommodate more people. This will also affect reoffending rates as the prisoner increase will make it harder to deliver rehabilitative activities.”
Mansfield said: “Labour appears to be putting all of its eggs into the prevention basket — a worthy aim, but one that has its limitations when dealing with serious, organized crime.”
