“You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!” former prime minister Margaret Thatcher said in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference on October 10 1980. But U-turning has been a trait of many politicians before and not least since.
 
Think John Major and the poll tax, Tony Blair and the referendum on the EU constitution, Nick Clegg and tuition fees, Boris Johnson and free school meals and Liz Truss and her tax proposals.
 
And the new PM, Labour’s Keir Starmer, has also done his fair share of U-turning. Starmer, among other things, pledged and promised to “increase income tax for the top 5 per cent earners” in 2020, during the Labour leadership election — “I will maintain our radical values [ … ] no stepping back from our core principles” as he added in the pledges. Only for him to back away from tax rises.
 
“We are in a different situation now, because obviously I think we’ve got the highest tax burden since World War II,” he told the BBC in May, when asked about this policy pledge.
 
Starmer has also essentially abandoned several other pledges, such as to nationalise public services like mail and water companies and the abolition of university tuition fees, among other of his 10 pledges from 2020.
 
“We are likely to move on from that commitment, because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation,” he told the BBC when asked about tuition fees.
 
 

More cake

Labour’s so-called “missions” for Britain (a “long-term plan to get Britain’s future back” that “will drive forward a Labour government”) instead include sticking “tough fiscal rules with economic stability at their heart.”

In Labour’s election manifesto, the party promises not to raise income tax and keep corporation tax at the current level. And in a speech at the launch of the manifesto — that was interrupted by a climate protester — Starmer said that wealth creation is Labour’s number one priority.
 
“Some people say that how you grow the economy is not a central question — that it’s not about how you create wealth, but how you tax it, how you spend it, how you slice the cake, that’s all that matters. So let me be crystal clear — this manifesto is a total rejection of that argument,” Starmer added.
 
When in opposition back in 1979, two months before she became PM, Thatcher had said something similar to Starmer’s cake analogy in a speech at the Conservative local government conference: “We can improve our position as a nation only by working together to create greater wealth. We cannot do it by each fighting for a bigger share of the existing cake. The cake is too small.”
 
If the new PM really wants to turn Britain around and keep his political momentum, he will need more than economic stability, growing cakes and political dilly dallying, however. He will need to improve the lives of ordinary people, as well as keep his promises, principles and integrity.
 
But Labour’s election manifesto does not even contain the sort of spending plans needed to protect public services from future cuts, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says in a response to the manifesto.
 
“Delivering genuine change will almost certainly also require putting actual resources on the table. And Labour’s manifesto offers no indication that there is a plan for where the money would come from to finance this,” the IFS adds.

The ‘stood down’ green pledge

If we look at the most important issue of our era — climate change — Labour is more in favour of action than the previous Conservative government. At least according to a study on British MP’s voting patterns since 2010 from VoteClimate (an independent political movement founded by Ben Horton, a climate campaigner from Cambridge).
 
According to the study, no elected Tory MP has given more votes in favour of action on climate (all were given an “anti”-rating), while most Labour MPs have voted pro-climate.
 
Starmer has voted pro-climate 11 times and not voted eight times (which gave him a “good” overall rating), while several fellow Labour MPs and Liberal Democrats have only given pro-climate votes (and were given a “very good” overall rating).
 
In 2021 Rachel Reeves, who was shadow chancellor at the time, told the Labour Party Conference: “I am committing the next Labour government to an additional £28 billion of capital investment in our country’s green transition for each and every year of this decade.” And in 2022, Starmer said that “a central mission of my Labour government will be to turn Britain into a clean energy superpower.”
 
But Labour has since scaled back and dropped the £28bn green investment pledge, even though Starmer has previously said that no issue is “more important to our future than the climate emergency.”
 
“We won’t reach the £28bn envisaged. That figure is effectively stood down [ … ] The reason for that is because since we announced the £28bn the Tories have done terrible damage to our economy,” Starmer told Channel 4 News in early 2024.
 
In the party’s Green Prosperity Plan, there are instead promises such as to quadruple offshore wind, more than triple solar power and more than double onshore wind capacity by 2030. As well as new nuclear projects and investing in carbon capture and storage.
 
And in the party’s election manifesto, Labour says it “will ensure the institutional framework for policymaking reflects our commitments to reach net zero and meet our carbon budgets.”
 
But the U-turn on the green investment pledge and the fact that Starmer flew by private jet to a campaign rally in Scotland about clean energy jobs during the election campaign and that he has previously used another private jet after attending the Cop28 climate conference in Qatar, undermines his attempts to claim the moral high ground on climate change.
 
In the manifesto, Labour also talks of kickstarting economic growth with “a new partnership with business to boost growth everywhere,” as if growth and net zero go well together. And of oil and gas production in the North Sea being with us “for decades to come,” with an “ongoing role [ … ] in our energy mix.”
 
Part 3 of Peter Kenworthy’s series on the election result and government to come appears in tomorrow’s Morning Star.