Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has given a former Treasury official a February 8 “hard deadline” to finalise his party’s draft election manifesto, with a remit to put the economy at the centre of his strategy.
Rav Athwal, Starmer’s manifesto director, is crunching policy submissions from the shadow cabinet to create a prospectus that Labour hopes will be bombproof from Conservative attacks.
“We will make sure the numbers add up,” said one Starmer aide. “Financial discipline will run through the document. We will fight on the economy and that’s one reason why Rav has this role.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made it clear he will portray Labour as fiscally irresponsible ahead of the general election, claiming Starmer will put up taxes to fund a green investment plan.
One of the key decisions facing Starmer is how to describe Labour’s “green prosperity plan” and whether to explicitly include a pledge to spend £28bn a year by the end of the parliament, subject to the party’s fiscal rules.
The 33-year-old Athwal, a former head of the Treasury’s growth strategy branch and management consultant, has been trusted by Starmer to “hold the pen” on the manifesto, according to Labour colleagues.
Stuart Ingham, Labour’s director of policy and a longstanding Starmer ally, is also playing a key role, although officials said the party leader is closely involved in the detail.
Starmer has accumulated a long shopping list of policies including a £6bn-a-year home insulation scheme, scrapping the House of Lords, making it easier for trade unions to take strike action, eliminating zero-hours contracts, removing private schools’ tax breaks and reforming the planning system to accelerate housebuilding.
The manifesto will be closely watched for any watering down of Labour’s more radical policies, including the debt-funded green investment plan, which has already been revised four times.
The party is also under pressure to explain precisely how it hopes to improve Britain’s cash-strained public services while maintaining its pledge of fiscal discipline.
Starmer set February 8 as the date for finalising the draft manifesto to ensure the party was ready for a May election, although Sunak has indicated he expects polling day to be later this year.
“Even if there’s no election, we will be moving into campaigning mode,” said the Starmer aide.
Apart from submitting policies to Athwal, shadow ministers have also been told to have packs ready to go on their “media narrative” and rebuttal strategies to anticipate and counter Tory attacks.
With the Tories trailing Labour by 27 percentage points in a YouGov survey last week, Sunak seems unlikely to rush towards an early election.
A key task for Athwal and shadow Treasury chief secretary Darren Jones is to make sure the manifesto sums add up, especially given the party is committed to raising only relatively small amounts of money in extra taxes.
Paul Johnson, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, said Labour’s plans to increase taxes on private schools, individuals with non-domicile status and private equity bosses, would raise well under £10bn a year.
Shadow cabinet ministers said they do not expect Labour to announce any further tax rises before polling day, so Tory strategists will be going through the opposition party’s plans in search of fiscal gaps.
Starmer was originally proposing to have a shadow comprehensive spending review led by Jones.
However, the Labour leader has instead initiated a streamlined process where proposals from different policy teams must be road-tested with three different members of the shadow cabinet, including Jones.
Jonathan Ashworth, a shadow minister without portfolio who is due to be deployed to rebut Tory attacks, is stress-testing all of the policies to make sure they are politically viable.
Lucy Powell, shadow leader of the House of Commons, is discussing with each policy team whether their main proposals need legislation and, if so, how urgently they would need to be prioritised.
The manifesto will be grouped around Starmer’s “five missions” for the UK, with some of them reworded to provide more voter appeal. For example, the mission around the “fastest growth in the G7” is now rephrased as “Get Britain building again”.
The other four missions focus on “Great British Energy”, a state-run company to co-invest in renewable and nuclear energy, “Get the NHS back on its feet”, a promise on crime to “take back our streets” and an education pledge badged as “break down barriers to opportunity”.
Individual policies are being culled from a sprawling set of ideas agreed last year by Labour’s national policy forum, the party’s internal policymaking body.
Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary, will set out ambitious reforms of the NHS, including a closer partnership with the private sector, to reflect how an incoming Labour government is likely to be cash-strapped.
The party will also pledge to clamp down on water companies polluting the sea, rivers and lakes by expanding the powers of industry regulator Ofwat.
David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary, sought over the weekend to add detail to Labour’s foreign policy vision, which he summarised as “progressive realism”.
Labour would seek to build a clean power alliance with international partners, while bolstering a push for de-escalation in the Middle East by appointing a new regional peace envoy to work on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
Labour’s manifesto will be finalised when Starmer holds a “Clause V meeting” attended by the shadow cabinet, union representatives and other senior party figures, but that cannot happen until Sunak calls the election.
