Keir Starmer pledges to make UK the fastest-growing G7 economy

Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to make the UK the fastest-growing economy in the G7 if his opposition Labour party wins the next general election.

The promise was one of five long-term missions for the country as he set out his vision for government.

The Labour leader, who has dragged his party towards the centre ground after its “hard left” period under his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, offered a vision reminiscent of the New Labour era under Tony Blair, who won three elections for the party a generation ago.

“By the end of Labour’s first government we will deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7,” he said in a speech in Manchester entitled Five Missions for a Better Britain. “It must be powered by good jobs and strong productivity in every part of the country.”

Starmer said “mission-driven” policies to achieve this would include a “credible” industrial strategy, fixing the Brexit deal with the EU, promoting apprenticeships, shaking up childcare and a reformed planning system.

His other “national missions for national renewal” would be reforming the NHS, tackling crime, breaking down barriers to opportunity and making Britain a “clean energy superpower”.

He promised to introduce “clear and measurable” goals for each issue, for example the party’s existing 2030 decarbonisation target for the electricity system.

The five pledges mirror the way that Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister, has also issued a list of five priority areas he wants to tackle before the next general election, expected before the end of next year.

Starmer said a Labour government would use “new thinking” to come up with “new solutions” to the country’s challenges: “New ways of harnessing the ingenuity that is all around us.”

“I’m not concerned about whether investment or expertise comes from the public or private sector, I just want to get the job done,” he said.

Momentum, the grassroots pro-Corbyn campaign group, accused Starmer of having “ditched” the leftwing policies he espoused three years ago — when he won the leadership — in favour of “reheated Third-Way Blairism”.

Interviewed on the BBC Today programme before the speech about why he had dropped many of his pledges from 2020, when he ran for the leadership, Starmer said the circumstances had changed because of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Labour leader said he had dropped policies such as taking water, energy and the Royal Mail into public ownership after analysing the cost to the public purse. “We would have to spend a lot of public money on public ownership,” he said.

Asked about his previous plan to scrap university tuition fees, Starmer hinted that the policy would be watered down given financial circumstances: “I do think the way we do tuition fees at the moment doesn’t work . . . we have to look at what’s affordable in the economy we’ve got at the moment.”

Starmer said that Corbyn, currently sitting as an independent MP, would not get to stand as a Labour candidate at the next election.

The Labour leader said one of his priorities had been to “tear antisemitism out of our party” after a spate of incidents involving grassroots members.

“Jeremy was suspended from the whip because of his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission . . . that found just over two years ago that the Labour party had acted unlawfully in breach of equality legislation, that is a serious position for any party to find themselves in.”