Care about the climate crisis? Then applaud Labour’s row back on their £28bn green pledge

I once overheard two political journalists engaged in an urgent conversation about how to report a story. After arguing over the details, one of them said in frustration: “We’ve got to get it right.” The other said: “No, no, we’ve got to get it the same.”

So it is with politicians. What was most striking about yesterday’s Labour conference of business people at the Oval cricket ground was not that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves disagreed on the substance of Labour’s green plans, but that they said different things.

The shadow chancellor stubbornly refused to allow the £28bn figure to pass her lips, so obviously that Sky News counted 10 times she dodged a question about the number. Yet the Labour leader happily said it out loud, while qualifying it in such a way as to make it meaningless. “We will ramp up to that £28bn during the second half of the parliament, subject to of course what the government has already allocated and subject to our fiscal rules,” he said to the BBC.

If we had not worked it out already from the endless reports from anonymous Labour sources that the party is about to ditch the £28bn-a-year number, that divergence is proof that something is up. Starmer and Reeves are both cautious politicians, careful with words. That they cannot agree on a form of words and stick to it suggests that the policy is changing, but that its final shape has not yet been nailed down.

It means that every time a Labour frontbencher is interviewed, they say something slightly different and the Conservative press office puts out a news release on “the latest £28bn chaos”. Today it was the turn of Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, who said Labour would decide how much to spend on environmental schemes once it got into government. Again, not different on the substance, but different words.

Does this matter? In one sense, no. Labour is miles ahead in the opinion polls and it was notable that few of the business leaders at Labour’s conference yesterday mentioned the £28bn policy – not even those from companies in the energy sector who have a direct interest in it.

In another sense, it matters a lot. The Tory assault hasn’t done much damage yet, but it could do as the electioneering becomes more intense. More importantly, there is an opportunity cost to a media furore. If every question in every interview is about a meaningless number, that means Labour has passed up the chance to get a positive message across. And it is a meaningless number because, as Starmer said yesterday, you have to deduct from it whatever the current government plans to spend anyway (£8-10bn a year), and what is left is limited by Reeves’s rule that debt must be falling after five years.

There are two things we know about Starmer’s decision-making. One is that he sometimes likes to take his time over big decisions. The other is that he is ruthless and totally focused on maximising Labour’s vote, which is why the £28bn figure will bite the dust before too long. But the reason it hasn’t so far is that Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, is fighting so hard for it. The argument that Miliband is deploying with Starmer, as I understand it, is the vote-maximisation one. He says it is essential that Labour has a costed commitment to a green plan to prove to undecided voters – including young people tempted to vote for the Green Party – that Labour believes in something and would be different from the Tories.

I suspect that Starmer will see through this argument to the real calculation underneath: which is that Miliband needs a number in the manifesto to give him leverage in government. As one of the few Labour MPs with cabinet experience, and as a former Treasury special adviser, he knows how powerful the Treasury is. He knows that as energy secretary he would be sent naked into negotiations with Reeves if he doesn’t have the £28bn to gird his loins.

My view is that Starmer will be swayed by the counterargument: that Labour is more likely to win votes if it ditches the distraction of a meaningless number and presents an optimistic green plan that sets out what a Labour government hopes to achieve rather than how much it hopes to spend.

Instead of questions about “the £28bn”, Labour should be facing questions about how it plans to decarbonise the electricity supply in five years; how we will all have electric cars; and how it intends to insulate millions of homes.

Shadow ministers’ answers may not be totally convincing, but they should all be the same.