How Keir Starmer's missions could shape the way a Labour government works

Keir Starmer has set out “five missions for a better Britain” that he says will drive the purpose of the next Labour government. But why “missions”? And what do they tell us about Starmer’s priorities and political strategy?

Missions are not pledges, or policies. They are ends, not the means to ends. “Securing the highest sustained growth in the G7” may be a goal rather than a policy, but it’s certainly something a future Labour government can be held to account on. They will either achieve this or not, and Labour is already setting itself metrics for success and failure that will, if they win this election, define the battleground for the next one.

The mission to “Make Britain a clean energy superpower” has another clear metric – zero-carbon electricity by 2030 – attached to it. The others, on the NHS, crime and education, do not yet, but we are told they will have them in due course. Whatever else the missions may achieve, they are not going to help Labour escape accountability.

Indeed, because the missions are about defining the most important goals of the next Labour government, the?document?published alongside them is more about structures than policies.?

Labour has been in the curious position under Starmer’s leadership of having announced a huge amount of policy without getting a great deal of credit for it – it is more often criticised for not standing for anything than for having proposed a whole lot of bad ideas. This is perhaps partly because it has done more work on defining the underlying shape of the economy it wants to build than on setting out a retail offer, and we can expect more of the latter as the election gets closer. Part of the job of these missions will be to provide Labour with excuses to remind people of the policies that already exist, not just to provide boxes to fit new policies into.

Nothing about the existence of missions precludes the announcement of granular policies – quite the opposite. It is perfectly possible, even likely, that Labour will still go into the election with some kind of pledge card, separate from these five missions, with concrete and costed policies with stronger consumer appeal. It is absolutely certain that Labour will have no political choice but to say things about taxation, for example, which do not feature in the missions at all except by implication. And the important policy areas which are left out of the missions – notably housing – will still need to be fleshed out, even if their absence today tells us something important about Labour’s priorities.

In the short term, the most important thing about Labour’s five missions is that they do the heavy lifting to give Keir Starmer a morning at the top of the news bulletins setting out a positive story. But in the longer term, they have a real chance of shaping the way the next Labour government works, how it defines itself and whether it succeeds or fails.

By Tom Hamilton