Keir Starmer’s policies will not withstand the scrutiny of an election campaign

Labour’s programme for the next election is taking shape – but it is not ready for the voters yet, writes John Rentoul

For once, Labour has a popular policy on an issue on which it has traditionally been seen as weak (PA Wire)

The latest output of Labour’s sudden hyperactive policymaking is a plan to cut student loan payments for new graduates. Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, wrote a carefully worded article on Friday: “The government could reduce the monthly repayments for every single new graduate without adding a penny to government borrowing or general taxation,” she said.

After a long policy drought, the opposition in recent weeks has produced new policies on crime, immigration, buying land for houses and Brexit. The aim is to provide some of the detail of the broad “missions” set out for the party by Keir Starmer in February – and to have an election-ready programme in place by the party conference in October. Labour would then be in a position to fight the “long” campaign for an election the following October.

Some of the policy work now being unveiled shows some ingenuity. Phillipson’s plan to make student loans magically cheaper, for example, can work only if graduates have to repay over a longer period. It will also apply only to new graduates. When these important details sink in, the policy is hardly a vote-winner. But it gives Phillipson something to say, while at the same time insisting: “Labour will not be increasing government spending on this.”

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has produced an even more creative policy on immigration, picking up on a suggestion by the Migration Advisory Committee, the independent body that advises the government, that foreign workers should not be allowed to undercut British ones in shortage occupations. That is significant, allowing Labour to position itself as more restrictive on immigration than the Tories. For once, Labour has a popular policy on an issue on which it has traditionally been seen as weak.

So far, most of this policy work has been going on below the voters’ radar. Most people will not yet have noticed that Labour increasingly has policies that seem credible and reassuringly conservative. The party is in what might be called the Derry Irvine phase of preparing for an election. Lord Irvine, who went on to be Tony Blair’s lord chancellor, was charged with “ripping policies apart”, as Alastair Campbell put it to students at King’s College London recently. “We’d ask Derry to do an intellectual roughing up of everything we did,” Campbell said.

As a result, by the time the voters were ready to pay attention to Labour’s policies in 1997, they had been stress-tested and anything likely to frighten the horses had been thrown out. Above all, Blair and Gordon Brown promised to stick to Tory spending plans for the first two years of a Labour government.

This time round, the Derry Irvine phase is not complete. In central policy areas, Starmer has still not yet decided whether to be cautious or “radical”. Yet Labour’s programme is already beginning to come under heavier scrutiny from the media.

On Wednesday, the i newspaper caused a stir by suggesting that Labour had unfunded spending commitments worth 3p in the pound on income tax. Those spending plans – mainly some loose wording about free childcare – were instantly disowned by the Labour Party, but there is still the question of Rachel Reeves’s £28bn-a-year Green Prosperity Plan. This is a plan for extra borrowing for green investment, so it is different from day-to-day spending on things such as childcare, but it is still money that threatens to break Reeves’s rules for fiscal prudence.

If Lord Irvine were asked to do “an intellectual roughing up” of the policy, he would say that Starmer has to decide what the Green Prosperity Plan is for, and how it would be funded while staying within Reeves’s rules for debt to be falling in the medium term.

That debate is taking place in the shadow cabinet, and in the leader’s office, right now. Some of Starmer’s allies are arguing that the policy should be rebranded as a plan for jobs rather than for dealing with climate change. A spokesperson for Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, was quoted in the Financial Times on Thursday, saying defensively: “For Ed this is all about jobs. It’s about bills, security, jobs, and climate – in that order.”

The problem is that if it is “all about jobs”, it would be an expensive way to try to create them, while the voters might prefer to see investment in schools and hospitals. Labour’s internal debate has become entangled, meanwhile, in Starmer’s pledge, dating from January but reiterated last weekend, to issue no new licences for North Sea oil and gas.

All this has to be sorted out to some extent in the next few weeks, as Starmer prepares to announce more detail on the party’s “green superpower” mission. I don’t believe it would currently survive a Derry Irvine “roughing up”.

John Glen, the chief secretary to the Treasury, senses weakness. He has written to Reeves asking innocent questions about the £28bn-a-year green plan. Glen quotes Paul Johnson, director of the unimpeachable Institute for Fiscal Studies, who said: “Additional borrowing both pumps more money into the economy, potentially increasing inflation, and also drives up interest rates.”

There will be a lot more of this to come as the election campaign, or even the “long” election campaign, draws closer. Starmer has produced some clever policies, some of them more Tory than the Tories’, with others, such as restoring house-building targets, occupying ground only recently vacated by the government.

But on the Green Prosperity Plan, there is so far only an unsustainable fudge. It would not get past the equivalent of a Derry Irvine, who would declare it not yet ready for the rigours of an election campaign.