When Keir Starmer became Prime Minister he promised ‘change’, and this promise was beefed up in his 2024 Christmas message with his six promises.

1. ‘More money in the pockets of working people’

Note This could be interpreted as more than the future rise for middle class, so lowering income inequalities. It could be interpreted as more than inflation, so increasing living standards. It was not clear.

2. ‘Building 1.5m homes and fast-tracking planning decisions on at least 150 major infrastructure projects’

Note No change from his previous promise of the ’40 new hospitals’ kind, but it might become an actual change. A promise to speed up decisions to make the decisions of whether something may be allowed.

3. ‘Treating 92 percent of NHS patients within 18 weeks’

Note It is worth comparing this to the ambition of the 1945 Labour government, creating an entire National Health Service from scratch, out of the then mess of charity and private healthcare existing provision.

4. ‘Recruiting 13,000 more police officers, special constables and PCSOs in neighbourhood roles’

Note A very technocratic solution to the breakdown of community cohesion and the disorder this can generate. More people walking around in a variety of uniforms, some of them on our streets.

5. ‘Making sure three-quarters of five-year-olds are school-ready’

Note Why not all of them? Or why not school at age 6 as elsewhere in Europe? And very little detail on how struggling families with children under age five will actually be helped, including helped to have hope.

6. ‘95% clean power by 2030’

Note This is the promise the far right attack the most. As Nigel Farage said at the time: “I think net zero is going to be an absolute catastrophe, electorally, for Labour.” Starmer could have said “affordable clean power”.

Contrast the above list to what Labour succeeded in enacting in 1945. The 1942 Beveridge report in which Beveridge was clear that the minimum benefits he proposed “should be given as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it,” and that “no means test of any kind can be applied to the benefits of the scheme.” Or contrast it to the list that Gordon Brown produced in his Leader’s Speech to Labour Party Conference made in 2009:
“If anyone says that to fight doesn’t get you anywhere, that politics can’t make a difference, that all parties are the same, then look what we’ve achieved together since 1997: the winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Surestart, the Cancer Guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, devolution, civil partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the social chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the minimum wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act; that’s the Britain we’ve been building together, that’s the change we choose.”
A cynic replies: A winter fuel allowance would not be required in a country with a decent social security system. We wait months, years even, for hospital appointments when our health service was once the best in the world. University student numbers increase. University management can profit by taking more and never mind the declining quality of education provided in return, or the mounting student debt. Half a million children can be taken out of poverty, but by such a small margin that neither they nor their families notice the difference.

Gordon Brown claimed, in much the same way that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves now do, that almost all good only comes from economic growth:

“Growth is progress. Growth is what has given the world the tablet you’re reading this book on, the medicines by your bedside, the economic breakthroughs that have lifted billions out of poverty.”

That claim of Brown’s appeared in Permacrisis: “A Plan to Fix a Fractured World” a book he authored alongside Mohammad El-Erian (chief economic adviser at Allianz, the corporate parent of PIMCO) and Michael Spence (who in 1999 joined Oak Hill Capital Partners is a private equity firm headquartered in New York City, with more than $19 billion of committed capital). Brown and his co-authors, of course, were wilfully missing. A former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister whose politics were so often positioned as ‘Brownite’ rather than full on modernising ‘Blairite really shouldn’t need reminding by their book’s reviewer:

“They assume the development of a tablet computer is due to economics rather than developments in universities and other state-funded bodies which created the micro-components that that enable a computer to be transmuted into tablet form. Computers, and electricity before that, were not products of “the market” but technological inventions that have been marketised.”

If Keir Starmer wants to aim for a target that is far easier to achieve than he may realise, he should say he wants to reduce economic inequalities by a greater amount than either of his immediate forebears as Labour prime ministers managed, Blair and Callaghan (see Figure below). But to do so means breaking with their, and his, fixation on a model of economic growth that contributes next to nothing towards such a reduction. More often than not, it does the reverse.

… Chapter continues

For the full chapter and link to the original source click here.

Cover of the Starmer Symptom