Starmer has no vision. Is that a bad thing?

Keir Starmer seems to be most comfortable when he’s pointing out how badly the Tories are doing, rather than when he is setting out his own plans. This afternoon he talked about the importance of long-term decision-making, skills and supply side reform: none of which would sound out of place in a speech by Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak.

The question-and-answer session afterwards was more enlightening than his speech. Starmer distanced himself not just from the Conservatives on public spending, but the Labour party too. There would be no opening of the spending taps, he said in his speech, and he further articulated this in answers afterwards, saying that having run a public service, he knew that ‘if you put more money in the top, you tend to get a better product out, but if you want a really better product, you’ve got to reform it’. Labour had been in a ‘habit’ for a long time of ‘thinking that the lever that is spend, investment, is the only lever that can ever be pulled’.