The Labour leader will set out his party’s five ‘missions’ for government in a speech later
In interviews this morning Keir Starmer has been saying more about Labour’s five missions. Here are some of his main points.
Starmer rejected claims that his five missions were vague, or easy to achieve. He told the Today programme:
If you take missions, let’s take that first one — the highest sustained growth in the G7. That is going to be tough. Nobody is going to say, ‘That’s vague, that’s something that is going to be easily achievable’.
An NHS actually fit for the future, so that is not just to get through this winter but the next 75 years.
He said the annual “winter crisis” in the NHS was an example of how the current government was just engaged in “sticking-plaster politics”. He said:
The idea behind [Labour’s five missions] is really based on the frustrations, the everyday frustrations that people have that almost nothing seems to be working, everything needs to be fixed and all we’ve really ever had for many years now is sticking-plaster politics.
The classic example of that is the NHS. We have a winter crisis in the NHS every year. We just about fix it, get through to the summer and then go back into the next year’s winter crisis.
He said his experience as director of public prosecutions made him realise the value of a “cross-cutting” approach to government (which means getting departments across Whitehall to work together addressing problems). When Today’s Amol Rajan challenged the term, Starmer replied:
I know you don’t like the language but I ran the Crown Prosecution Service for five years. I know that among the problems I had was that it was in a silo.
If you want to reduce crime, you have to get to grips with your education system, you have to recognise the mental health element to it, you have to recognise the health element.
Each mission will be laser-targeted on the complex problems which drive our crises. The root causes that demand new thinking.
New solutions born in all parts of our country. New ways of harnessing the ingenuity that is all around us.