In no particular order, these are the specific policies they say they’re still going to do with some amount less than £28 billion:
- Investment: ‘tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment in green hydrogen, carbon capture, clean steel, renewable-ready ports and gigafactories’ [note that this is private sector investment and they don’t say here exactly how they’re going to make this happen]; ‘borrowing to invest so we can invest to grow’ (particularly notable as I’ve seen lots of people say this is no longer the plan - at time of writing, it is the plan); ‘the funding for Great British Energy, a new publicly owned champion in clean energy generation’
- Jobs: ‘a new national wealth fund that will create half a million good, well-paid jobs’, ‘create more jobs’
- Lower bills: ‘By insulating 5m homes we’ll cut up to £500 from household energy bills’; ‘double the investment into warm homes’; ‘cheaper bills’
- Government spending under control: ‘a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants’; ‘debt down as a share of GDP’
- Greener Britain: ‘the funding for Great British Energy, a new publicly owned champion in clean energy generation’, to deliver ‘clean power by 2030’ [NB: this is the second of the five pledges they’re running on]
There’s other, vaguer stuff in there, but this is the kind of thing you can actually check against delivery. Mostly the article focuses on his first two major pledges (‘Securing the “highest sustained growth” in the G7’ and ‘clean power by 2030’, see above).
The other three of the five main pledges all get a shout out in the last paragraph (‘get the NHS working again, and lead to safer streets and better schools.’).
Apparently, the reason they’ve backed off the £28bn is that they never actually worked out how to spend all of it. So, per that argument, the above is all ‘costed’ in so far as it meets their fiscal rules. Now, if you believe that line of argument (and you’re free not to), that means that none of the actual policies have been dropped; what has been dropped is spending even more on some ill-defined policies. However, we do know that one actual policy has been scaled back, which is the home insulation policy. This strikes me, personally, as a bad decision, given the state of our housing stock.
But I can see why it’s hard to follow, and why it looks like his position keeps changing. Especially when you have folks like @fudoshin posting all sorts of half baked conspiracy theories.
I also don’t support Labour (or Tory). They’re a complete mess, but not because of anything that Starmers done. They’ve been a whole fucking mess for much longer than that.
Thing is I’d like to support Labour on paper they should have been my choice but since they started drifting with Tony it’s getting harder and harder. Stammer seems to be accelerating that processes.
It’s a fuckrd up situation here, good friends have stopped being friends because I didn’t vote Labour thinking it’s somehow labour’s god given right to have my vote not realising that if every single person who votes like me voted for Labour the situation we are in would change very little.