Heir to Blair? Keir Starmer’s 6 big pledges rated.

LONDON — Keir Starmer’s trying a bit of the old Tony Blair magic. But is the Labour leader’s new clutch of Blair-style voter promises up to scratch?

Blair famously unveiled a “pledge card” of key promises in the lead up to his landslide victory in 1997. It was an attempt to crystalize the doorstep offer to the public ahead of the vote, and put Blair front and center of Labour’s centrist revamp as a potential prime minister.

Starmer aped Blair Thursday by unveiling a credit-card sized handout — complete with a moody black and white shot of the current leader — featuring six core policies. Speaking Thursday, Starmer said the “first steps” announced today are just the start of his party’s ambition to change Britain — and that there is “no quick fix to the mess that the Tories have made of this country.” 

The left-wing Momentum campaign group reckon it’s small beer. A spokesperson accused Labour of a lack of ambition, saying the six promises “fall desperately short of the bold policies needed to fix the Tories’ broken Britain.”

So how do the six pledges stack up — and where might the pitfalls lie? POLITICO ran the rule over them.

1. Deliver economic stability

Starmer — and his influential Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves — have promised that Labour will be the party of “economic stability” if it wins the election. The key to this framing is a raft of measures which they claim will avoid the economic chaos that greeted Liz Truss’ 2022 mini-budget in her brief stint as Tory prime minister.

The party will introduce a “fiscal lock” — which is largely indistinguishable from Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s current strategy of ensuring government debt is falling as a percentage of GDP in the final year of a five-year forecast. 

But sticking to the Tories’ “fiscal rules” adds danger for Labour too, as under the current rules debt isn’t set to fall and all current spending is based on uncertain forecasts.

Labour has also said it will set up a new Office for Value for Money … Pledged to halve government consultancy spending … and promised to crack down on Whitehall hiring sprees, as part of plans to claw back money for public services through strict efficiency measures.

But while Starmer said Thursday he still wants to achieve his previous promise of securing the “highest sustained” economic growth in the G7, the wording of his new economic pledge on the card is significantly less ambitious.

A Labour spokesperson told POLITICO Playbook voters don’t want hitting around the head with loads of numbers — “they want to know how you’ll do it and pay for it.”

Difficulty rating: 2/5 on delivering economic stability … but 5/5 when it comes to securing the sustained growth Labour craves.

2. Cut NHS waiting times

No political platform is complete without a promise to improve Britain’s struggling — but still wildly popular — National Health Service. In 2024, that naturally takes the form of trying to cut its gargantuan waiting list for treatment — which currently sits at more than 7.5 million cases. 

Starmer’s promise to lessen waiting times for treatment mirrors Rishi Sunak’s own pledge to cut waiting lists, which he made in early 2023. Underlining the challenge for Starmer, waiting lists have actually risen since Sunak made that promise, though the overall list has started to come down a little in 2024. 

Labour plans to bring lists down by providing 40,000 more hospital appointments each week, including over weekends and evenings. The party says it will fund this by tackling tax avoidance — a common promise for governments searching for an apparently pain-free way of funding a commitment without raising taxes.

Difficulty rating: 3/5. Labour may be able to slash waiting times — but the NHS’s problems run deeper.

3. Launch a new Border Security Command

Labour has long agonized about matters of migration, and there’s now a concerted effort at the top of the party to sound tough but realistic on the issue.

Hence the serious-sounding new “Border Security Command” on the pledge card. It comes alongside a “fast-track returns and enforcement unit” to cut the asylum backlog. New specialist enforcement officers, investigators and intelligence agents would also be hired using money saved from scrapping the government’s Rwanda deportation scheme, and it would be headed up by a former police, military or intelligence chief.

Setting up a new government unit is the easy part, of course. Getting it to achieve its aims will be much harder, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has found to his peril. Tories argue Labour’s plan lacks any deterrent factor without the headline-grabbing deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda the government hopes will begin in July.

Difficulty rating: 1/5. A promise to set up a thing… not to make it work.

4. Set up Great British energy

Another promise to set up an institution — rather than to ensure it actually does what it’s meant to.

Labour may have jettisoned a totemic target to spend £28 billion a year on green investment — but all the policies which the cash was intended to support (somehow) remain in place.

Starmer’s first priority is “Great British Energy,” a publicly-owned energy company which would be underpinned by an investment of £8.3 billion of taxpayers’ money over the course of the next parliament. It would invest in clean energy projects and in other infrastructure required to hit Labour’s very stretching goal of an almost entirely carbon-free electricity system by 2030. 

Ed Miliband’s shadow energy and climate team has said the company will be established in the first 100 days of a Labour administration, and be headquartered in Scotland, the U.K.’s powerhouse for offshore wind. It’s been pitched as a British imitation, with the patriotic appeal of the “GB” branding, of European state-backed clean energy firms like Sweden’s Vattenfall or Denmark’s Ørsted — but detractors say those companies took years to become serious players in a globalized energy market. 

In interviews, Starmer promises that more home-grown renewables will mean U.K. household energy bills being less exposed to global gas price shocks — like the one that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. You may have heard him say once or twice that GB Energy plans will “get Putin’s boot off our throat.” That’s the great Labour hope.

Difficulty rating: 1/5. Again, setting up the new outfit is the easy part.

5. Crack down on antisocial behavior

Setting up a publicly owned energy company ain’t very Blair — but this pledge certainly is.

Through promises of extra neighborhood policing, new penalties for offenders and a network of youth hubs Starmer is pledging a crack down on antisocial behavior, a buzz-phrase of the last Labour government and something party chiefs believe makes a tangible difference to voters’ lives.

In terms of policy meat, Labour’s already promised to put 13,000 more police and Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) on the streets in a bid to crack down on antisocial behavior. This was twinned with a commitment “to ensure local people are involved in setting local policing priorities.”

Starmer has tried to follow Blair by promising to be tough on crime, and his team believe his past life as director of public prosecutions gives him the space to own this area from the Tories. But this particular pledge is ill-defined and has no clear target — meaning Labour will likely claim victory through any number of metrics it chooses to use in five years’ time to assess the promise.

Difficulty rating: 1/5 … on Labour’s vague terms.

6. Recruit 6,500 new teachers

Education, education, education is another Tony B fave.

The issue didn’t quite make it to the top of Starmer’s pledge card — but the Labour leader still included a very specific promise to recruit 6,500 new teachers in “key subjects to set children up for life, work and the future.” The party said it will fund this through ending tax breaks for private schools, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank reckons would raise just over £1.7 billion a year.

So far, so good. But it’s less clear where that figure of 6,500 actually comes from — and whether it’s enough to lessen the pressure on stretched schools as large numbers of teachers continue to leave the sector. The party’s education chief has stressed that 6,500 is just the “starting point.”

Difficulty rating: 3/5. This one may be achievable and has a clear target — but Britain already faces an acute teacher recruitment crisis, and schools are playing Covid catch-up.

James Fitzgerald, Stefan Boscia, Esther Webber and Charlie Cooper contributed reporting.