Bold vision or flubbed reset? Starmer set to reveal targets for this parliament
It’s less than five months since the election. But already the prime minister fears you aren’t sure what his government wants to achieve in this parliament.Or maybe, given the muddle and mixed messaging of recent weeks - and in particular the significant costs he, the chancellor and the deputy prime minister have loaded on businesses that fight against his need for them to invest and grow - he thinks he needs a new pack drill for ministerial colleagues.Whatever his motives, in the coming days - probably next week - he will be publishing a “Plan for Change”, or a set of targets to be achieved in the next four years or so, and he’ll make a big speech to accompany it.
They'll be how we're supposed to decide whether or not he has delivered for the majority of us when we next come to choose our rulers.They will include goals we already know, such as building 1.5 million houses and reducing waiting lists.Others may feel newish - such as giving us the strong sense we are better off, that our living standards have improved after years of stagnation.
To state the obvious, such would be a bit more relevant to most of us than the existing target of increasing the economic growth rate to be the fastest among the G7 economies.There will also be crime and climate change targets, I am told.Perhaps the most controversial ambition for a Labour government, and the target that I understand has caused the most heated debate inside government, will be something around migration numbers.
Starmer's people seem to believe that Sunak's "stop the boats" was a failure of execution rather than of first principles.It all feels like poll-driven, electoral pragmatism. And in their harking back to the target obsession of the Blair years, they bear the hallmark of Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and of Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster who learned politics at the feet of Blair.For that reason they feel like a big deal: this is politics precisely as we've lived it for decades, rather than the new, longer-term, mission-based government that Starmer had been promising.He consistently said as opposition leader that his five missions to change Britain over ten years - with broad programmes covering economic growth, green energy, modernising the NHS, tackling crime and increasing opportunities - represented a new way of governing.
Nodding to the pioneering research of the economist Marianna Mazzucato, the missions were supposed to deliver a fundamental overhaul of both public services and the machinery of government. They were supposed to spell death to quick fixes.For what it's worth, Mazzucato felt Starmer never really got her ideas, that his missions weren't framed as the kind of policy outcomes that would generate optimal innovation.But they did look and feel different from the programmes of his predecessors. And although Starmer will insist that his five missions aren't pushing up the daisies, that the Plan for Growth is a staging post, it looks to me like government-as-usual.
Whether he's conscious of it or not, he seems to have been captured by the Whitehall machine and a kind-of Blairite orthodoxy.I suspect the reaction of many commentators will be to cast the Plan for Change as a panicky re-set or relaunch, and one that is unusually early in the life of the government, after the mishaps since July.There is an element of that, a determination to show momentum before the Christmas shutdown.But truthfully it feels more significant, in that Starmer's hopes of remaking the state are already lying in pieces on the rocks of institutional conservatism.
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