Just as I sat down to write this, yet another one thumped into my inbox. “£28bn every year … Labour have not changed – their irresponsible spending plans will result in higher taxes and hard-working people paying the price.” Conservative campaign headquarters is hammering out daily attacks on Labour’s £28bn green prosperity plan.
Seeking any gap in the Starmer-Reeves fiscal armour, they like to pretend there’s been no change since the Corbyn campaign’s surprise £58bn extra spend, mid-election campaign. But that’s a rubber sword after their own 13-year failed stewardship – and Liz Truss’s fiscal fiasco.
However, these Tory assaults make some in Labour’s campaign headquarters jittery, the ones who jump at their own shadows. If you tease them by telling them that without a doubt, Labour is destined to win, they twitch, blench and cross themselves: it’s their job to be very afraid of a 1992 reprise, that shocking last-minute defeat.
In their nightmares, these nervous Nellies see that £28bn flashing red. If they ask focus groups to imagine why they might worry about waking up to find Labour in power, voters – required to think up something – say “the economy”. That’s although Labour has scored well above the Tories on economic competence lately: soaring rent, mortgages and food and energy prices will not be forgiven.
Even if it causes fits of the vapours among some in Labour HQ, here’s why there can be no backtracking. That £28bn is the foundation stone of Labour’s future success. Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have said it over and over again: investing in homegrown green energy is the way to bring in private investment, which is pitifully low. Growth is the only hope of raising Treasury income to repair public services, yet it falls miserably behind similar countries since the Tory chancellor George Osborne’s first axe-swinging budget of 2010, as every Keynesian predicted. Rising to the top of the G7 in growth is one of Starmer’s five missions: that £28bn follows the lead of Bidenomics, state investment that is propelling the US economy well ahead of Europe, let alone the UK.
Far from retreating, Starmer keeps repeating his stated goal of 100% “clean power by 2030” to anyone who asks – both GB News and the Resolution Foundation just this month. The Tories want to fight the next election on the economy? Bring it on, Reeves keeps saying. She asks voters just two questions: “Do you and your family feel better off than you did 13 years ago?” and “Do our hospitals, our schools and our police work better than 13 years ago?”
The pollster Steve Akehurst, with YouGov, recently tested public attitudes to that £28bn. Respondents were divided into four groups; all were shown the usual “aggressive anti-green prosperity plan Conservative attack message”, warning that Labour would bankrupt the economy and levy more tax. These Tory attacks caused no drop in Labour support.
Each group was shown a different Labour argument in favour of the green prosperity plan. Voters responded least positively to the argument linked to climate change. They were keener on the case for green energy reducing their own bills. They were more impressed by new investment to kickstart national growth. But they most strongly backed the idea that homegrown, sustainable green energy would make the UK self-sufficient in energy, free from price rises and insecure supplies from hostile foreign powers. That argument added a 6.6% likely vote share to Labour from those who voted Tory in 2019. So there’s all to gain and little to fear from that £28bn pledge.
In a sign the government is jumpy about this, today it re-announced a 2022 promise of £6bn for energy efficiency, a fraction of Labour’s pledge, only to be spent post-election, in 2025 to 2027. But why would anyone believe it? When Cameron “cut the green crap” in 2013, 92% of home insulation stopped; Labour had previously been insulating more than 1.5m homes a year.
Labour leaders think the £28bn could have been better presented, with more detail on how it would be raised and spent. The party is always unjustly chargrilled on spending, while the Tories get away with anything – who asks about today’s announced £6bn? Looking across the Atlantic, Labour intends to learn from Biden’s failure to glean enough political credit for his remarkable economic success.
That worry led to the party playing down the £28bn pledge in June, to be “ramped up” through the first term. That, too, was mishandled. Why look hesitant on climate change and yet still leave that £28bn out there, if Labour policymakers think it’s a vulnerability? They could have said, with truth, that getting £28bn of spades in the ground for battery and turbine factories takes time. No need to stir up those Labour supporters always primed to expect “betrayal”, or Tories clutching at their freak Uxbridge byelection win on the eve of London’s Ulez clean-air scheme being extended.
In the new year Labour is recasting the plan, with rumours circulating of a windfall tax. Any hint of retreat would be pointless, when Tory anti-green attacks are bouncing off. The number £28bn is meaningless to most voters, so there is no point in cutting it – the political optics would be much the same whatever the sum. Nor are voters these days phobic about borrowing if it’s for investment: they distinguish between borrowing for mortgages and for holidays.
Standing by the pledge is easy, as its purpose is popular. The winning message promises national energy independence and a new GB energy company to capture its value. As for the nervous Nellies, Labour has nothing to fear but fear itself.
Oh, here comes yet another billet doux from Conservative campaign headquarters: “Labour’s £28bn will push up taxes, fuel inflation and mean less money for the NHS.” Just delete it.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
