Missions, first steps and milestones: How Sir Keir Starmer’s priorities have changed since last year
Sir Keir Starmer’s promises to the British people have been evolving since he first outlined his “five missions” in February 2023.
In public, Downing Street denies any tensions between the missions, May’s “first steps” and today’s six “milestones” and three “foundations”.
In private, I’ve been told they have caused divisions, with the focus changing after the original architects left as Labour entered power.
But what really matters is how they have evolved. Here’s how they have changed and what that means.
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The Plan for Change: Economy
Feb 2023 Mission: To secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 – with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.
June 2024 First Step: Deliver economic stability with tough spending rules, so we can grow our economy and keep taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Raising living standards in every part of the United Kingdom, so working people have more money in their pockets as we aim to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7.
Analysis: The new big economic target – to raise living standards in this parliament – is already on track to be met, according to the government financial watchdog.
Some in government hope this will eclipse the existing target – to overtake the growth rate of all other G7 countries – that was promised in February 2023.
Sir Keir said today he was “doubling down” on the G7 target, despite economists doubting it could ever be achieved, with some sources suggesting it would disappear altogether.
But today it became an “aim”, not a pledge, and the PM hinted he knows it will not be achieved in this parliament by promising the living standards milestone first – do we effectively have a target that isn’t a target?
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Starmer unveils ‘plan for change’
The Plan for Change: Environment
Feb 2023 Mission: Make Britain a clean energy superpower to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero.
June 2024 First Step: Set up Great British Energy, a publicly-owned clean power company, to cut bills for good and boost energy security, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas giants.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Securing home-grown energy, protecting bill payers and putting us on track to at least 95% clean power by 2030, while accelerating the UK to net zero.
Analysis: The 2023 zero-carbon electricity supply mission – and the Labour manifesto – made no mention that the party believes it will have achieved the target while still having up to 5% of electricity generation powered by fossil fuels.
However, Labour did say, including in its manifesto, that a strategic reserve of gas is needed as a last resort, and while the party did not put a figure on it, other bodies suggested the 95% target is consistent with being able to claim the UK has a zero-carbon supply.
Read more
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Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has defended the government’s policy. Pic: PA
The Plan for Change: Building
Feb 2023 Mission: Not mentioned.
June 2024 First Step: Not mentioned.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Rebuilding Britain with 1.5 million homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions for at least 150 major economic infrastructure projects.
Analysis: This contains the big new target of the speech – the 150 decisions on major projects. Sir Keir Starmer is on the side of the builders and the makers. But will they happen? This is the big test of whether those in Whitehall have listened to the speech and will get out of their tepid bath.
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Why hasn’t the UK built more houses?
The Plan for Change: Crime
Feb 2023 Mission: Take back our streets by halving serious violent crime and raising confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest levels.
June 2024 First Step: Clamp down on anti-social behaviour, with more neighbourhood police, paid for by ending wasteful contracts, tough new penalties for offenders, and a new network of youth hubs.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Putting police back on the beat with a named officer for every neighbourhood and 13,000 additional officers, police community support officers (PCSOs) and special constables in neighbourhood roles in England and Wales.
Analysis: The idea of a named officer is new and ambitious. The 13,000 target was in Labour’s manifesto and Yvette Cooper said the extra £100m next year would fund 1,200 new police officers.
Tories claim this means officers would be redeployed from other areas.
The Plan for Change: Education
Feb 2023 Mission: Break down barriers to opportunity by reforming our childcare and education systems, to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain.
June 2024 First Step: Recruit 6,500 new teachers in key subjects to set children up for life, work and the future, paid for by ending tax breaks for private schools.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Giving children the best start in life, with a record 75% of five-year-olds in England ready to learn when they start school.
Analysis: Labour is saying the proportion of children who are ready for school educationally and socially at five will rise from 67% to 75%.
Rolling out better early years provision is a government priority but the nursery sector has been left chronically underfunded. Tories point out there is less of a focus on schools.
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Thousands of children missing school
The Plan for Change: Health
Feb 2023 Mission: Build an NHS fit for the future that is there when people need it; with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers; in a fairer Britain, where everyone lives well for longer.
June 2024 First Step: Cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more appointments each week, during evenings and weekends, paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Ending hospital backlogs to meet the NHS standard of 92% of patients in England waiting no longer than 18 weeks for elective treatment.
Analysis: This is an ambitious, stretching target which has not been hit for almost a decade.
It will take focus and cash, and could come both at the expense of other services like A&E and divert away from Wes Streeting’s big reform plan to move treatments from hospitals to the community.
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The Plan for Change: Migration
Feb 2023 Mission: Not mentioned.
June 2024 First Step: Launch a new Border Security Command with hundreds of new specialist investigators and use counter-terror powers to smash criminal boat gangs.
Dec 2024 Milestone: Not mentioned as a milestone but is mentioned separately.
Analysis: Not one of the milestones, which has confused some, given its prominence in political debate.
Instead this issue – of secure borders – is one of three “foundations”, alongside economic stability and national security. But six milestones plus three foundations is a lot of priorities.
Politics
Specialist teams and online investigators deployed across England and Wales to tackle ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls
Specialist investigation teams for rape and sexual offences are to be created across England and Wales as the home secretary declares violence against women and girls a “national emergency”.
Shabana Mahmood said the dedicated units will be in place across every force by 2029 as part of Labour’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy due to be launched later this week.
The use of Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which had been trialled in several areas, will also be rolled out across England and Wales. They are designed to target abusers by imposing curfews, electronic tags and exclusion zones.
The orders cover all forms of domestic abuse, including economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse. Breaching the terms can carry a prison term of up to five years.
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Govt ‘thinking again’ on abuse strategy
Nearly £2m will also be spent funding a network of officers to target offenders operating within the online space.
Teams will use covert and intelligence techniques to tackle violence against women and girls via apps and websites.
A similar undercover network funded by the Home Office to examine child sexual abuse has arrested over 1,700 perpetrators.
Abuse is ‘national emergency’
Ms Mahmood said in a statement: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.
“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life. That’s not good enough. We will halve it in a decade.
“Today, we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks. Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”
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Angiolini Inquiry: Recommendations are ‘not difficult’
The target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is a Labour manifesto pledge.
The government said the measures build on existing policy, including facial recognition technology to identify offenders, improving protections for stalking victims, making strangulation a criminal offence and establishing domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms.
Read more from Sky News:
Demands for violence and abuse reforms
Women still feel unsafe on streets
Minister ‘clarifies’ violence strategy
Labour has ‘failed women’
But the Conservatives said Labour had “failed women” and “broken its promises” by delaying the publication of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Labour “shrinks from uncomfortable truths, voting against tougher sentences and presiding over falling sex-offender convictions. At every turn, Labour has failed women”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will be on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning from 8.30am.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a crypto wallet and custody guide investor bulletin on Friday, outlining best practices and common risks of different forms of crypto storage for the investing public.
The SEC’s bulletin lists the benefits and risks of different methods of crypto custody, including self-custody versus allowing a third-party to hold digital assets on behalf of the investor.
If investors choose third-party custody, they should understand the custodian’s policies, including whether it “rehypothecates” the assets held in custody by lending them out or if the service provider is commingling client assets in a single pool instead of holding the crypto in segregated customer accounts.
Crypto wallet types were also outlined in the SEC guide, which broke down the pros and cons of hot wallets, which are connected to the internet, and offline storage in cold wallets.
Hot wallets carry the risk of hacking and other cybersecurity threats, according to the SEC, while cold wallets carry the risk of permanent loss if the offline storage fails, a storage device is stolen, or the private keys are compromised.
The SEC’s crypto custody guide highlights the sweeping regulatory change at the agency, which was hostile to digital assets and the crypto industry under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s leadership.
Related: SEC sends warning letters to ETF issuers targeting untamed leverage
The crypto community celebrates the SEC guide as a transformational change in the agency
“The same agency that spent years trying to kill the industry is now teaching people how to use it,” Truth For the Commoner (TFTC) said in response to the SEC’s crypto custody guide.
The SEC is providing “huge value” to crypto investors by educating prospective crypto holders about custody and best practices, according to Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, a company that provides services to family offices.
SEC regulators published the guide one day after SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that the legacy financial system is moving onchain.
On Thursday, the SEC gave the green light to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a clearing and settlement company, to begin tokenizing financial assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and government debt securities.
Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom
Greens leader Zack Polanski has rejected claims his party would push for open borders on immigration, telling Sky News it is “not a pragmatic” solution for a world in “turmoil”.
Mr Polanski distanced himself from his party’s “long-range vision” for open borders, saying it was not in his party’s manifesto and was an “attack line used by opponents” to question his credibility.
It came as Mr Polanski, who has overseen a spike in support in the polls to double figures, refused to apologise over controversial comments he made about care workers on BBC Question Time that were criticised across the political spectrum.
Mr Polanski was speaking to Sky News earlier this week while in Calais, where he joined volunteers and charities to witness how French police handle the arrival of migrants in the town that is used as a departure point for those wanting to make the journey to the UK.
He told Sky News he had made the journey to the French town – once home to the “Jungle” refugee camp before it was demolished in 2016 – to tackle “misinformation” about migration and to make the case for a “compassionate, fair and managed response” to the small boats crisis.
He said that “no manifesto ever said anything about open borders” and that the Greens had never stood at a general election advocating for them.
“Clearly when the world is in political turmoil and we have deep inequality, that is not a situation we can move to right now,” he said.
“That would also involve massive international agreements and cooperation. That clearly is not a pragmatic conversation to have right now. And very often the government try to push that attack line to make us look not pragmatic.”
The party’s manifesto last year did not mention open borders, but it did call for an end to the “hostile environment”, more safe and legal routes and for the Home Office to be abolished and replaced with a department of migration.
Asked why the policy of minimal restrictions on migration had been attributed to his party, Mr Polanski said open borders was part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
‘We should recognise the contribution migrants make’
Mr Polanski, who was elected Green Party leader in September and has been compared to Nigel Farage over his populist economic policies, said his position was one of a “fair and managed” migration system – although he did not specify whether that included a cap on numbers.
He acknowledged that there needed to be a “separate conversation” about economic migration but that he did not believe any person who boarded a small boat was in a “good situation”.
While Mr Polanski stressed that he believed asylum seekers should be able to work in Britain and pay taxes, he also said he believed in the need to train British workers in sectors such as care, where one in five are foreign nationals.
Asked what his proposals for a fair and managed migration system looked like, and whether he supported a cap on numbers, Mr Polanski said: “We have 100,000 vacancies in the National Health Service. One in five care workers in the care sector are foreign nationals.
Zack Polanski speaks to Sky News from a warehouse in Calais where charities and organisations provide migrants with essentials.
“Now, of course, that is both British workers and we should be training British workers, but we should recognise the contribution that migrants and people who come over here make.”
I’m not going to apologise’
Mr Polanski also responded to the criticism he attracted over his comments about care workers on Question Time last week, where he told the audience: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” – before adding: “I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.”
His comments have been criticised by a number of Labour MPs, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who said: “Social care isn’t just ‘wiping someone’s bum’. It is a hard, rewarding, skilled professional job.
“This is immigration as exploitation.”
Read more:
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Asked whether he could understand why some care workers might feel he had talked down to them, the Greens leader replied: “I care deeply about care workers. When I made those comments, it’s important to give a full context. I said ‘I’m very grateful to people who do this important work’ and absolutely repeat that it’s vital work.”
“Of course, it is not part of the whole job, and I never pretended it was part of the whole job.”
Mr Polanski said he “totally” rejected the suggestion that he had denigrated the role of care workers in the eyes of the public and said his remarks were made in the context of a “hostile Question Time” where he had “three right-wing panellists shouting at me”.
Pressed on whether he wanted to apologise, he replied: “I’m not going to apologise for being really clear that I’m really grateful to the people who do this really vital work. And yes, we should be paying them properly, too.”
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