Keir Starmer makes pre-election pitch with six pledges

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.

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?

Any politician saying they are funding something by tackling tax avoidance is making things up. It’s not like they are actively not tackling avoidance now – it isn’t that easy.

He should carve them in stone that makes it more effective

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.

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.

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

> 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.

hmm.. not seeing anything actually left wing on the list

Ah yes, famously he never goes back on any pledges. 

if he pledged to be slightly less of a gimp, then he might get my vote

shouldn’t a labour party mention labour somewhere in it’s ambitions?

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

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.

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.

None of these will make your shitty lives any better