A key plank of Starmer’s campaign has given way. Matthew Partridge reports
Two years ago, Labour’s pledge to invest £28bn a year in the “green economy” was “the biggest jewel in its policy crown”, says The Times. Fast-forward to the present, and it has been formally abandoned by leader Keir Starmer on the grounds that “such a large spending commitment is incompatible with his party’s promise to reduce government debt as a proportion of economic output”. In its place is a revised “green prosperity plan” that is “priced at the considerably more modest sum of £23.7bn over the course of the next parliament, in addition to £10bn which the government has already committed”.
Changing tides
Labour’s retreat is the result of “a number of changing tides in politics”, says Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. There has been a “global backlash against climate action”, and the UK’s longstanding “relative consensus” on climate policy has made it a “global outlier”, for one. The economic situation has changed, too, from when Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, made their pledge. Interest rates were at record lows and they faced in Boris Johnson a Tory prime minister “whose closest allies were committed to tackling climate change”. Today they are challenging one “who is busily and cheerily retreating from many of Johnson’s more ambitious pledges”.
Before Labour’s U-turn, there were signs that the Conservatives were planning to “run an aggressive campaign” arguing that the green pledge would “inevitably lead to tax rises”, says Katy Balls in The Spectator. The plan had already been scaled back once in the face of rising borrowing costs, so it was little surprise that many in Labour’s campaign team wanted to get rid of something that they viewed as an “electoral liability”.
The change of heart is, though, unlikely to do anything t
