Keir Starmer must give the public meaningful reasons to vote Labour

Historically, Labour governments have had an obligation to make it especially clear that they can be trusted to run the economy. No one has done so with more panache than Gordon Brown, who gave the Bank of England the power to set interest rates in his very first meeting with its governor after becoming chancellor in 1997. It was an act of supreme self-confidence, sending a message to the markets that they should believe in New Labour as much as everybody else did.

Whether Sir Keir Starmer is under the same sort of obligation is hard to tell, though it is clear that he believes himself to be. He has now finished setting out his “five missions” for government, as he promised he would at the beginning of the year (though not many people appear to have noticed). He has said that he will not commit to high levels of spending on public services.

Any such commitment would invite the usual attacks from the Conservatives, who still believe themselves to be the party of sound money despite more than a decade of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Such attacks might even be successful.

But Labour has other reasons to fear this timid approach. This is not 1997. Back then, Labour inherited appalling public services but relatively benign economic conditions in which to set about fixing them. John Major had reduced the base interest rate from 14 per cent in 1990 to more like 6 per cent. Inflation was under control. It is highly unlikely that Sir Keir, should he become prime minister next year, will find himself in an even remotely comparable situation.

At the start of this year, Rishi Sunak promised to halve inflation by the end of it. He was derided for setting himself such an obviously easy target, but at the halfway point, he is drastically failing to achieve it. Not because he is necessarily a failure, but because it has proved to be a far harder challenge than he, or indeed anyone, realised.

There is precious little reason to believe that the situation Sir Keir inherits will be any less of a mess. The public will be desperate for change, but it will be hard for much in the way of meaningful change to be delivered.

Yet even from within this context, the Labour leader still has to try much harder to give people a reason to vote for him. Promising very little and then delivering very little may not be enough. The tide may have turned on the Tories, but they will still fight to turn it back. There have been murmurings this weekend about promises to scrap inheritance tax altogether, and to unleash some kind of “war on woke” – the sort of real, tangible things that people can either vote for or not vote for.

Sir Keir’s most recent big ideas seem to involve minimal input on the part of the state. That the housing crisis can be solved by reforming planning laws; that public-sector strikes can be ended through “negotiation”, but without saying whether that negotiation should end with a higher pay offer. There will be investment in green industries, but not the £28bn that was first promised, and nor will he name the number that might replace it.

It is, at this point, very clearly Sir Keir’s election to lose. But he must not forget that he also has to win it.