Sir Keir Starmer has set out what Labour would do first if it wins this year’s general election.
The Labour leader unveiled a pledge card with six key policies, including delivering “economic stability” and providing 40,000 more hospital appointments each week.
Some of the pledges are more modest in scale than the five “national missions” Sir Keir announced last year.
But he said they were the “first steps” towards Labour’s bigger plans.
Sir Keir’s five missions include making the UK the fastest-growing major economy by the end of a first Labour term in government and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Speaking at an event in Essex, he rejected claims the party had scaled back its ambitions as an election approached, saying the party had a “big, bold plan” but “we need first steps”.
The six “first steps” are:
-
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
-
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
-
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week – funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.
-
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
-
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
-
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Pledges on healthcare, policing and teaching only apply to England as powers over these matters are devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Labour will make separate policy pledges for Scotland and Wales.
Sir Keir said the steps were about looking “the public in the eye” with a “down payment” on what the party would offer the country.
Asked whether the step on NHS appointments could be called a promise despite lacking a specific time scale for delivery, he replied: “It is – from day one, minute one, we’ll be working to deliver it.”
He added that his party was already in discussions with doctors and that Labour would be able to increase appointments “pretty swiftly”.
He acknowledged that some promises he made when running to be Labour leader had been “adapted and changed” but added “only where circumstances have changed”.
“I’m not going to make a promise before the election that I’m not comfortable we can actually deliver.”
The Labour leader rejected being a Tony Blair “copycat” – despite handing out pledge cards, as Sir Tony did before his 1997 landslide election victory, and posing for pictures in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves.
But he welcomed comparisons between himself and past Labour leaders who had led the party to general election victories.
“Well the first thing I’d say about Tony Blair, other than he took his tie off at big events, is that he won three elections in a row,” Sir Keir added.
But he insisted the circumstances in 2024 were much different to those experienced by Labour when Sir Tony took power, describing it as a “very different moment to 1997”.
He said his onstage style, without a jacket and his sleeved rolled up, was about “trying to get across the sort of leader I am and my mind set and who I’ve got in my mind’s eye when I make decisions”.
Labour has said the six steps are “not the sum total” of the party’s election offer and insisted the party also stood by its other policy commitments, such as housing and workers’ rights.
Conservative chairman Richard Holden said the British public would not be “conned” by Sir Keir, saying the Labour leader had “dumped every pledge that he made during the Labour leadership campaign” and when he was “trying to get Jeremy Corbyn in to be our prime minister”.
“I think people need to take with an enormous pinch of salt anything that he is putting forward,” added Mr Holden.
“It’s quite clear Labour don’t have a cohesive plan.”
