Five missions, six first steps, seven… dwarfs? This week Keir Starmer added ballast to his election proposition by outlining how he and his government will begin work to deliver a richer, fairer, less broken Britain. Surrounded by members of his Shadow Cabinet and emblematic endorsers (including some clients of Lodestone!), the Labour Leader was seeking to distil the intent of his five missions into specific policy deliverables.
It’s an old trick, and a good one. What happens at the end of long, fractious governments is that voters grow cynical about the capacity of politics to deliver for them. They’ve had too many promises broken, they’ve seen the downsides of the ones that have been kept. And so whilst the electorate may have made up its mind not to trust the last lot again they are suspicious about the attempts of the maybe next lot to seduce them. But boiling down grand themes (a better NHS) into specific, tangible things (reduced waiting lists) demonstrates a level of seriousness and accountability that makes it easier to trust, or at least to hope. Labour wants to show how it will get to work and how you will be able to test its success.
That’s the theory, how about the practice? Well, truth be told Labour needs to do better at the detail. If the point is to offer specifics – so that voters at the very least know what they can judge you by in five years’ time – then the ‘six first steps’ are a very mixed bag indeed. Recruit an extra 6,500 teachers? Good, precise, clear and straightforward to assess at the end of a term. “Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability” and “setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company”… less so, to be honest.