Keir Starmer makes pre-election pitch with six pledges
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-69016719
by easy_c0mpany80
Keir Starmer makes pre-election pitch with six pledges
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-69016719
by easy_c0mpany80
49 comments
More mostly meaningless non-quantifiable sound bites from Mr Things Can’t Really Get Better. They seem to be trying to emulate Blair, but have ignored the fact Blair’s pledges were mostly targets you could judge him on. How are we supposed to judge Labour on ‘economic stability’ – is the economy particularly unstable at the minute?
These five labour pledges seem really good. I have some optimism now that I know the four main things Kier will focus on. Everyone always asks me why they should support labour outside of ‘not tory’, and it’s good to have a list of three clear positive directives to point to.
Edit: */s – required because some people can’t read/count. (Which is fine, no judgment here)*
Will he decide he doesn’t want to do these like he did with all his other pledges?
More potential u-turns ahead. How many pledges has he made so far? What happened to the original 10 pledges when he stood for the leadership. Labour need a new leader, one with charisma and new ideas, not a weather vane.
Man infamous for dropping pledges, makes more pledges.
Yay?
“Tough spending rules” aren’t going to get us out of this slump. These seem so weak compared to what he could do, it’s just sad.
Given his track record on making pledges, expect all six to have been dumped/reneged upon by the time the election has been called – I’d be surprised if he hasn’t started u-turning by the end of the day
He should carve them in stone that makes it more effective
I still remember the pledges he made when campaigning to be Labour leader.
The fact that his only good quality is that he’s better than the Tories is fucking depressing.
Other than the energy company, this is very underwhelming. If we want a decade of renewal, we need a proper re-industrialisation plan. Look at America, loads of industry is coming back to the country because the government is investing trillions on infrastructures and skills. Make North England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland Green-Industry powerhouses. They have the renewable and water resources already.
Borrowing is not bad if its focus is to bring in industry. It’s an investment in the future.
A couple of these are alright, but they aren’t giving me a huge amount of confidence about the party’s direction.
They are:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
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
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
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.
At this point the only thing I will vote for is proportional representation. The UK is in a tiny minority of countries using FPTP and it doesn’t work.
I’m guessing the extra police are just going to be community officers who work for free then not proper officers,most of these guys don’t even have transport ,often see them in the bus ,I’m not to sure as to how these guys lower crime ,it’s fair if they are backing up real police but having them wonder up and down the canal tow path isn’t doing shit
How do you know when a politican is lying?
Their lips move.
I can’t wait to see all of these qualified people suddenly materialise and cover the 40,000 extra weekly appointments.
Maybe they’ll have a corporate rebrand of them and call them pending lists rather than waiting, as they have with the Greenbelt.
> Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Yay! More austerity.
How do those Tory boots you’re licking taste, Keir?
> Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week – funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
I don’t think we’d save nearly as much from closing tax loopholes as we would from actually raising taxes. We have some of the lowest tax rates in Europe and our public services suffer as a result.
If I were Keir I’d be raising the additional rate tax band back to 50% (as it was under Gordon Brown) and gradually phasing out the Personal Allowance. That policy alone has cost us tens of billions in tax revenue every year.
> Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
So… Do the exact same thing the Tories are doing, minus the plans to fly asylum seekers out to Rwanda.
Maybe if we stopped screwing over the developing world and exporting media that makes the West look like this free land paved with gold, we wouldn’t have waves of migrants.
What if we did what Richard Nixon did with China, and set up a few trade deals in Africa and South Asia that similarly build up other nations as manufacturing powerhouses?
Like… Imagine if we did more with the Commonwealth than just holding our own cheap imitation of the Olympic Games every four years.
> Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
We should be nationalising all public utilities, but unfortunately it seems like the Tories and New Labour fear that word…
Also I see no mention of public transport, water or sewage, even with trains being worse and more expensive than ever, Thames Water facing potential collapse, and every water company dumping tonnes of sewage into our rivers and lakes.
I don’t get the social media trend of wild swimming, because if all these influencers knew what was being pumped out, they’d be put off for life.
> Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Are we talking actual police officers or the ‘community support’ ones who have no powers of arrest or even enforcing the law?
Our laws are fine. It’s the lack of resources to enforce them that’s the issue, and the amount we’d need to recruit and train new police officers is gonna take a massive hit on our coffers.
> Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
I don’t think the savings from that alone would be enough to pay for 6500 teachers.
Bit vague aren’t they.
Also how do we know for sure he really really means it.
Maybe he should get them carved in stone?
hmm.. not seeing anything actually left wing on the list
Home these six pledges are going to last longer than his previous 10 pledges he made.
Ah yes, famously he never goes back on any pledges.
I like the idea of that Great British Energy company but it sounds a little too good to be true
if he pledged to be slightly less of a gimp, then he might get my vote
“Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders”
more badly trained thickos in stab vests wandering the streets fining people for breathing in a potentially hateful way and misgendering a privet hedge
shouldn’t a labour party mention labour somewhere in it’s ambitions?
PLEDGES. i don’t know how anyone can trust or take any politicians seriously. these pledges will be obscured, warped, compromised and then in 4 years’ time they’ll say ‘we did it just like we said we would!’.
Don’t mean shit. You all know as well as I do the country is on its knees financially. You can say any old shit. It’s like we forget what we teach our children
Words are cheap.
Every single model unless we all pay significantly more tax nothing can change. And we can’t really pay anymore tax as we are all allready taxed to fuck.
They will win as they are not the Tories however anyone expecting some panacea to come riding over the hill is in for disappointment
The thing I like most about labour is they wind up the divs in Novara Media something rotten. Other than that, meh.
On police officers and teachers – yeah that’s great and all and something to strive for but they’re really going to struggle unless they address the underlying poor pay and conditions. For instance will there also be an uplift in the number of support staff?
I’ll believe it when I see it and highly doubt either will be addressed. Politicians really seem to hate the idea of supporting desk jobs roles and view them as wasteful. For example when they came out saying the navy needed to get more sailors out from behind their desks and out to sea. Ok yes great but it completely ignored that vast majority of them were downgraded for whatever reason or had just done 2 years on the frontline and this was their dedicated shore time. They also failed to completely address who would then do the jobs these people were doing.
Great British Energy – sounds good on paper but what is it going to look like in reality. Is the government going to invest billions into building their own energy producing infrastructure for example?
Tough spending rules – ok so we wont be expecting any large borrowing or anything like that no matter how good the business case for it is? If Labour are serious about growing the economy they and the other parties need to have a serious, grown up conversation about Brexit and give very serious consideration to re-joining the customs union.
Is this skin walker actually going to follow through with these pledges or is this going to be just another round of Westminster knobbery for five additional years?
I think politically he’s done the right thing. There’s nothing here he hasn’t alluded to before so he’s safe from the pitfalls of revealing a manifesto early and simultaneously they’re not exactly ground breaking.
I know reddit wants renationalisation of every utility and public transport company, universal basic income, and legalised weed, but Labour have to actually win elections first.
“Conservative Party chairman Richard Holden said Labour’s plans did not “amount to a hill of beans”.”
Does this prick understand that a hill of beans isn’t what we want, it would collapse & you’d be killed by falling beans. If labour AREN’T offering a “hill of beans”, that’s EXACTLY what we want.
None of these will make your shitty lives any better
I am going to go against a lot on this sub and I think that the idea of someone doing the basics but better makes a lot of sense.
The only ones there that even remotely seem worth sharing is the teachers and the Great British Energy.
And I know that the number of teachers is a pitiful amount compared to what we really need, but at least it’s measurable.
6,000 extra teachers? That’s just one for every 4 secondary schools. It’s a tiddly-winks intervention for a sector that’s really struggling with the post-Covid education malaise sweeping through the poorest communities and estates.
Ah yes pledges, the modern politicians favorite lie.
This is the shittiest manifesto that’s going to win an election.
Maybe it’s because they think their win is inevitable that they’re only willing to pledge to tinker around the edges.
Fancy that, loads of promises to fix things they (all parties) keep promising to fix.
Is this all we have, back and forth with Conservatives and Labour?
Starmer pledges, so funny. As funny as Tory pledges. He’s like Judas running for position of Christ.
That’s a risky game. I expect the tories will announce the same thing next week and then accuse Labour of stealing all their ideas. Like they usually do. C**ts.
Which party is most likely to legalize cannabis? That’s who I’ll vote for. I might get something out of democracy for once
I like the state-owned green energy company…. But this is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
> Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
A good way of rebranding austerity.
> Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
The VAT on private schools can actually been shown to cost us money if more than 30% of students switch back to mainstream education:
– It costs ~7.5k to educate a child per year so that cost will be back to the taxpayer
– For every teacher moving from private to state, the government will lose £7.5k in tax revenue (government purse to government purse doesn’t generate revenue). Average class size of 16 students means another loss of ~£470 per student.
– VAT at 20% for private school will generate on average £3.5k per student.
– Every student leaving therefore costs the government ~£8k. 69% x 3.5 – 31% x 8 = -0.65% loss.
It remains to be seen how many people leave private school as a result – I’m betting pretty big as there will be less funds for scholarships. Let’s see how it shakes out…
EDIT: 6.5k teachers… they’ll say they hit this target as 5.5k teachers will have to move across anyways as part of the above due to student changes. In reality, all they’re done is make it harder for socially mobile people to send their kids to private school and reduce scholarships. Bit of a farce.
These pledges are a bit irrelevant given he is obviously intent on redefining Brexit as well as implementing huge structural change in our political system but I don’t think any of them are bad/unrealistic ideas
“Sticking to tough spending rules” just deflates me.
Underwhelming, there is no bold vision to actually create economic growth, it’s just *”raise taxes to fund things that focus groups said they liked”*
* *”Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability”*
* If this is what he really means, that means more austerity
* *”Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week -* [*funded by*](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68762802) *tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.”*
* The entire purpose of HMRC, one of the largest departments, is to collect taxes and to identify and chase tax avoidance – so it’s basically saying that we will magic up 40k NHS appointments by doing what HMRC already does.
* *”Launching* [*a border security command*](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68984778) *to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings”*
* This essentially already exists, Home Office, police, NSA, border force – they all already work together and with the French to try and stop small boats. But ultimately nothing will change if France lets smugglers operate freely, and if there is basically zero chance of deportation once in British waters. So this ‘pledge’ is meaningless.
* *”Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company”*
* So Labour are **not** promising to nationalise energy. Great British Energy would just be a state owned company, competing with privately run companies. It’s a weird pledge since it makes it sound like nationalisation but it isn’t.
* *”Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders”*
* I mean, great, but to do this means increasing taxes to fund the extra officers (which we should do) – but Labour are being disingenuous when they promise any increase in public services without mentioning they have to increase taxes to do so.
* *”Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.”*
* Ending private school tax breaks which increase private school fees, which will mean fewer kids attend private school – and so the estimate for extra taxes brought in are inflated.
Looking at these pledges objectively, they are not something that most people across the political spectrum would disagree with. Not very exciting or transformative but unobjectionable. Starmer wants to get into office above all. His poll lead is such that he will get in unless he does something really stupid or objectionable and that is what this list is designed to avoid.
And here the mud slinging and false promises begin.
Do you want shit tories or shit labour? Both will be bad no question and this country needs a serious shift to get back on track.
I never understood why Milliband got such stick for engraving his pledges in stone. Given all the comments in this thread about the impermanence of pledges, I thought it was a pretty strong move.
Look at those SMART targets. Rishi’s targets were some generic unmeasured crap that the govt didn’t really control.
Halve inflation? Yeah how? Wave the magic wand and Big Bailey appears with his interest rate hike – Tick
Grow the Economy? Ah yes, were in inflation, but but but 0.6% growth this month, yep we’ve surely done it – Tick
Could go on but i got tired from here lol… OH and P.S – if you dont like these targets well unless we rid of first past the post you either injest the red pill or the blue pill, at least NEO had a choice.