Keir Starmer’s five missions for government: proper policies or pure politics?

The battle lines for next year’s general election are being drawn, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. In January, Rishi Sunak published his five pledges (halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing public debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping the Channel migrants). Last week, Keir Starmer followed suit with a speech in Manchester in which he set out Labour’s “five missions”.

Starmer “hates” being in opposition, said Ben Nunn in The i Paper. “He finds it painfully frustrating.” He’s impatient for power, and he has a very clear idea of what he’d do with it. He “knows from history that the most transformative governments are in it for the long haul”. This is what we saw last week, a two-term plan focused on missions: he wants Britain to have the highest sustained economic growth of any G7 nation; he wants it to be a “clean energy superpower”.

‘We learnt nothing about his real views’

He wants a better NHS, safer streets, and to break down the barriers to opportunity by reforming childcare and education. “But who’s not in favour of those things,” asked the Daily Mail. “He may as well say he wants the Sun to shine for longer.” Beyond platitudes and waffle – he says he wants government to be “more agile, empowering and catalytic” – there was no clue as to how he’d actually achieve or pay for any of it.

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We learnt nothing, either, about his real views on many important issues. “Illegal small boat migrants? Silence. The housing crisis? Silence. The definition of a woman? Silence.” I’ve often wondered why Starmer is so boring, said Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph. And I’ve concluded that it may be “an intelligent ruse” to distract us from the fact that he keeps “changing his mind on things”.

In 2019, for instance, he joined “the howls of Labour outrage” over the stripping of Shamima Begum’s citizenship. Yet by last week, he’d completely changed his tune. When he campaigned for the leadership, he promised to respect Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy, and to abolish tuition fees and renationalise utilities; Corbyn has now been purged and the policies ditched.

‘He’s laying a solid foundation’

The point is that “when the facts change, then policies must change too”, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. “Since Starmer made those pledges, there have been Covid, Ukraine and the Liz Truss ‘kamikaze’ Budget.” With energy prices sky-high, it’s not a priority to spend a fortune buying back privatised utilities. There are probably 18 months until the election. There’s no need for Starmer to give us detailed policies now. Instead, he’s outlining his principles, laying a solid foundation. “Sir Keir’s problem is that his principles are exactly what the public is coming to doubt after so many U-turns,” said The Times.

Although the party is still 20 or so points ahead of the Tories in the polls, there is evidence that this is a “vulnerability”: given the choice, voters prefer Rishi Sunak to him; they still don’t quite know what he stands for. To win, he “will need policies, rather than missions”.