Keir Starmer has defended his five “national missions” against criticism by the former shadow chancellor Ed Balls that they were too vague and “not retail” enough to win the next election.
The Labour leader last week set out the five themes that will form the building blocks of the party’s next manifesto.
Speaking on Monday at a packed venue in the City of London full of business leaders including Dragons’ Den’s Deborah Meaden, Starmer outlined one of those missions: to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 by the end of Labour’s first term in government.
He promised that Labour’s model for growth would increase living standards “everywhere across the country”, as they would “fix the economy in such a way that will actually help people to pay their bills”.
Starmer defended his missions after Balls, who lost his Morley and Outwood seat at the 2015 general election, said the missions would not be remembered or “talked about by voters on the doorstep”.
Speaking on Channel 4’s Andrew Neil show, Balls said: “These aren’t Labour’s pledges, they’re the beginning of a process. Opposition has to fill the space, so there may be more speeches to come.
“I guess I didn’t think they were yet very retail. They weren’t going to be talked about by voters on the doorstep. There’s a lot of work to do to translate [them] into things that will make sense, which talk about nurses, doctors and police officers. I was surprised social care wasn’t a mission. Talking about the fastest growing economy within G7 I’m not sure it will make a lot of sense to people.”
Starmer hit back as he talked about plans to roll out a visa scheme to tackle the “decade-long” skills shortage.
“We will not be anti-business. We will not allow short-term problems to go up the system in a way which further undermines our economy. We want to fix the fundamentals.
“I’m still struck by how many children leave school without the skills they are actually going to need for the jobs they are likely to be doing, the lives they are likely to be leading.
“I know we’ve had this problem for 10 years. But I don’t want to have ideas that fix immediate problems and not really fix the fundamentals because in a sense that goes to the heart of what is a mission-led government is.”
He added: “I know that’s not very retail, well true. But if you want to fix your economy in such a way that actually helps people to pay their bills and raise their living standards, you have got to fix the fundamentals.”
The Labour leader went on to say working on short-term solutions only plays into sticking plaster politics as the Conservatives have waited, “until we’re at a crisis point before putting a sticking plaster on the problem. They’ll wait until the next problem and there goes another sticking plaster.”
A paper detailing the party’s plan for meeting and measuring its progress on its growth mission says a future Labour government “will create stronger links between our evidence-led, points-based immigration system and our skills bodies to make sure we have the skilled workforce we need”.
After the speech, Starmer and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hosted a roundtable meeting of business leaders, including Meaden and Prof Jagjit Chadha of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
