Anyone can say they favour faster growth, of course. For now, there’s a paucity of actual Labour policy meat on the bones of the pledge. What’s interesting, however, is how Starmer sounds very much like the American “supply-side progressives” in his willingness to question his own side’s shibboleths to deliver it.
Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist, says leftwingers have an unfortunate blind spot. They always prioritise government subsidies and more redistribution to poorer families. What they neglect is the “supply side” of the economy — its capacity to actually produce goods and services. This harms their cause. Pumping subsidies into sectors with unresponsive supply merely drives up prices. Throwing funds into unreformed public services entrenches dissatisfaction and stasis. Decarbonisation is undermined as a goal if environmental or planning rules make renewables expensive or slow to build. Progressives, Klein thinks, should therefore focus more on removing whatever barriers exist to getting things done — improving efficiency and bearing down on costs.
Rather than blind ideological commitments to raising spending, he therefore recommends using bold government missions to create a prism of focus. Policy should then be geared towards incentivising the enhancement of the supply of the relevant goods or services — even if this requires institutional or market-friendly deregulatory reforms.
Starmer has clearly been influenced by this narrative. His missions might include airy goals to “build an NHS fit for the future” and to “make Britain a clean energy superpower”. In advocating for them, however, he’s criticised the idea that spending is ever enough. Remarkably, it’s now Labour leading the conversation about modernising central government and using the private sector to enhance the NHS.
Yes, talk is cheap. It’s not clear yet that Labour has good answers to how to prevent vested interests from blocking growth, nor recognises how to trade off its “missions” when they conflict. Just this week, Angela Rayner, its deputy leader, pledged to require firms to publish “menopause action plans”. How does this square with the promise of a relentless focus on the priorities Starmer outlined?
Since Gordon Brown’s premiership Labour has become obsessed with arguing that more money could solve problems. However much remains unanswered, Starmer is clearly taking it in a welcome new direction — one in which regulatory reform and institutional effectiveness are given more weight relative to just splurging taxpayers’ money.