Keir Starmer said he would not be “ideological” about nationalizing public services, after shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves sparked a backlash by suggesting Labor had abandoned plans to bring back rail, the water and energy in public ownership.
On the day Starmer delivered a keynote speech highlighting his intention to focus on “growth, growth, growth”, a shadow cabinet row broke out over the party’s renationalisation policy.
Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh tweeted: “Labour is committed to public ownership of rail”, after both Reeves and Starmer appeared to withdraw from politics.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Monday whether Labor supported the nationalization of rail, water and energy, Reeves pointed to the fact that Starmer had scrapped the 2019 manifesto and suggested the policy would clash with his determination to balance the books.
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He said the policy was “a manifesto compromise that ensured our worst results since 1935”, adding that “spending billions of pounds on nationalizing things, that doesn’t fit our fiscal rules “.
Shadow Transport Minister Sam Tarry echoed Haigh’s message, retweeting footage of a recent speech from the despatch box in which he stressed the case for rail nationalisation. “To be 100% clear, this is the position of the Labor party,” he tweeted.
When Starmer was asked about Reeves’ comments, he said: “I take a pragmatic approach rather than an ideological one. I agree with what Rachel Reeves said this morning. After the pandemic has happened, it’s very important that we have very clear priorities and that is why we have already established fiscal rules as an opposition”.
“This is what I mean by not being ideological,” he added.
Starmer later clarified his position in an interview with the Mirror, saying he agreed with Reeves, but “the railway is probably different to others because so much of our railway is already publicly owned”.
Left-wing campaign group Momentum claimed nationalization was popular with the public and pledged to support a Green New Deal motion at Labour’s annual conference that would include public ownership of key assets.
“As the cost of living and climate crises bite, public ownership is a vital and popular policy – it is counterproductive for Rachel Reeves to reject it in favor of a failed status quo,” a Momentum spokesperson said .
In Starmer’s keynote speech, delivered in Liverpool, he promised that Labor would not be “trapped” in its history and would focus on growth rather than redistribution.
Starmer has called on former prime minister Gordon Brown to look at new forms of economic decentralization and Jim O’Neill, the former chief economist at Goldman Sachs, to look at how Britain “could become the best country in the world to start a new country”. business”.
It evoked the 1996 Blackpool conference speech when Tony Blair said “education, education, education” would be at the heart of Labour’s time in government. This time the three words were “growth, growth, growth.”
The Labor leader said the UK economy was “weaker than our competitors. Less resilient. Fragile. And ultimately we’re all poorer for it. That’s what I’m clear about. Labor will fight the next election for growth economic. There is no task more central to my ambitions for Britain than to improve the country and its people.”
Starmer called former chancellor Rishi Sunak “the architect of the cost of living crisis”, while Liz Truss, Sunak’s Tory leadership rival, was “the latest graduate of the school of economics the magic money tree.”
He said that under his watch, the average British family was £8,800 poorer than their equivalents in advanced economies. “This is not just a failure of politics, it is a failure of philosophy. Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss rage against the death of the Thatcherite right. They don’t understand that economic strength in the 21st century needs collaboration,” he said.
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Starmer said her Labor government would establish an Industrial Strategy Board, echoing Theresa May who created such a body in 2018. Boris Johnson’s government scrapped it last year. The Labor version would have a statutory basis as a “permanent part of the picture that sets out our strategic national priorities that go beyond the political cycle, brings the experience of business, science and trade unions, [and] ask us to account for our decisions”.