What Labour lacks

Has Keir Starmer promised anything so far, during this general election, that will make anyone’s life significantly better? The clearest pledge is to impose VAT on independent schools and it’s hard to see how this benefits anyone. Many of the smaller schools will have to close and others will be forced to cut bursaries. The money raised is intended by Labour to increase the number of state-school teachers, but it will do this by just 1 per cent – and, even then, this non-ambition is to be staggered over a five-year period. When it comes to firm commitments this is about all Labour has to offer.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, is doing his best to sound as if he has a reforming agenda. He has declared that within five years no one will be waiting more than 18 weeks for an operation. But isn’t this just a way of preparing us to accept a failing NHS for another five years? Streeting has no coherent policy for NHS improvement. Any plan will take at least a year to devise and another two years to implement.

The 18-week NHS pledge was anyway first made by John Reid when he was Tony Blair’s health secretary as part of the 2004 NHS improvement plan.

What Streeting’s pledge really shows is the staggering decline of ambition in the Labour party. It stands to inherit an NHS that costs £170 billion a year, twice as much as it did under Reid, so why would it need until 2029 to achieve what Labour once promised by 2008?

A sense of inevitability seems to have settled over the election campaign. Conservative proposals are seen as the insincere and desperate attempts of a doomed government and Labour ideas are increasingly accepted as the ‘change’ we need.