The story of Labour power, told in pledge cards

Good morning. Keir Starmer will today unveil his six general election pledges as what is shaping up to be a very long election campaign continues. (Just 257 days until the absolute latest Rishi Sunak can hold the election, folks!)

Pledge cards have a mythical status in large parts of the Labour party, because Labour doesn’t often win elections, and the last time it entered government it had a pledge card. Some thoughts on what they reveal when we look at them side-by-side below.

A movie script ending

In 1997, Tony Blair made five pledges to the country. Three were pretty traditional Labour “retail offers” in areas the Labour party loves talking about: putting more money into schools, the criminal justice system, and the National Health Service. And two, which I have bolded and italicised below, aimed to reassure voters about specific fears they have about the Labour party:

• Cut class sizes to 30 or under for five, six and seven-year-olds by using money from the assisted places scheme.

• Fast-track punishment for persistent young offenders by halving the time from arrest to sentencing.

• Cut NHS waiting lists by treating an extra 100,000 patients as a first step by releasing £100,000,000 saved from NHS red tape.

• Get 250,000 under-25s off benefits and into work by using money from a windfall levy on the privatised utilities.

• No rise in income tax rates, cut VAT on heating to 5 per cent and inflation and interest rates as low as possible.

And here’s five of the six in Keir Starmer’s plan for Labour’s first steps — I have reordered them to emphasise the commonalities with the 1997 list. Once again we have the familiar Labour topics of education, crime and the NHS, and I have again bolded and italicised the two pledges designed to reassure people about specific anxieties they have about the Labour party.

• Recruit 6,500 new teachers in key subjects to prepare children for life, work and the future, paid for by ending tax breaks for private schools.

• Crack down on antisocial behaviour with more neighbourhood police paid for by ending wasteful contracts, tough new penalties for offenders and a new network of youth hubs.

• Cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more appointments each week, during evenings and weekends, paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.

• Launch a new border security command with hundreds of new specialist investigators and use counterterror powers to smash the criminal boat gangs.

• Deliver economic stability with tough spending rules, so we can grow our economy and keep taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible.

As you can see, not a lot has changed in terms of how Labour is positioning itself. There are some very important differences in terms of what they are bidding to inherit, of course. In 1997, Tony Blair was essentially promising to stick with something that was working and inherited a fantastic economy from John Major. In 2024, although Starmer is seeking to reassure people, he is not promising to stick with something that is working and will not inherit a fantastic economy. That is a good reason to think that he will not manage to be re-elected once, let alone twice, as Blair was. Winning the next election is a different matter.

The recurrent challenge for the Labour party is that people fear a Labour government means higher taxes for them personally. One of Labour’s preferred shields against that is a windfall tax, because, for most voters, a “windfall tax” is something that happens to other people. Note the reappearance of a windfall levy in Starmer’s sixth pledge, which does not so clearly echo the past:

• Set up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power company, to cut bills for good and boost energy security, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas giants.

There are two obvious reasons for this pitch. The first is that global temperatures have continued to rise, and the second, closely linked with that, is so has the importance of environmental issues to British voters. In 1997 the Green party stood in 89 constituencies in England and Wales and got 61,731 votes. In 2019 Caroline Lucas got more than half that in her Brighton Pavilion constituency. Having something to say about the environment has become a political essential.

Now, it’s not as simple as “the Labour party is ticking all the boxes it did last time it entered government, and now it will again”. But ultimately the things people want from a Labour government — for it to spend more on health, criminal justice and education — and what they fear, that it will tax them too heavily, haven’t really changed.

My theory of British politics is not particularly profound: it is that, as Reginald Maudling put it after the 1970 election, the UK is “a Conservative country that sometimes votes Labour”. Labour manages to break up the usual pattern of Conservative victories when it doesn’t scare people and when the country thinks that the public realm badly needs more money.

I know some readers — including some people who work for Keir Starmer! — think that I am being backhanded when I say Starmer’s big achievement is that he has succeeded in being a Labour leader who does not inspire fear and who most British voters regard as, at the least, hireable. But the Labour party very rarely manages to do this! In every election I have covered, when I have travelled the country, I have met people who are frightened of the Labour party in general and its leader in particular. Starmer is the first leader of my career who does not inspire fear. Some people really hate him, but nobody fears him.

So Labour has taken care of the bit it can control. Its biggest asset is that Rishi Sunak seems completely uninterested in the part he can shape — the country’s belief that the UK is in need of greater public spending. Emergency measures have had to be introduced in the criminal justice system. NHS waiting lists are at record highs. Sunak has done little to change this and he has run out of time to do so. At the next election, large swaths of the UK public realm will be dysfunctional, from the border to the GP surgery to what happens if you report a stolen bicycle.

A Labour leader who doesn’t scare people going up against a Conservative government overseeing public services in a bad state doesn’t happen very often — indeed it has happened just twice since the second world war, in 1945 and 1997. In 1945 the Tory party was led by Winston Churchill, who had won a war in which the UK’s survival was at stake. In 1997 the Conservatives were led by John Major, who had what is still the best economic record of any British government in modern times. In 2024, it is led by Rishi Sunak. I can see no good reason to think he will do better at the polls than Churchill or Major and some very good ones to believe he will do worse.

The FT’s public policy editor Peter Foster is relaunching his Brexit newsletter with a refreshed remit. “The State of Britain” will tackle everything from skills, planning reform and devolution to post-Brexit regulation, foreign direct investment and trade. The first edition drops today and premium FT subscribers can sign up here.

Now try this

I saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. This is far and away the smartest Hollywood franchise, and while this latest instalment is not quite as good as the best in the series — the one with Gary Oldman — it is terrific fun. It is that rare thing: an American blockbuster whose two-and-a-half-hour running time flew by and which would only have been improved by letting it breathe a little and extend to three hours.

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