Sir Keir Starmer Labour campaign launched at Essex event

The Labour leader unveiled a pledge card with six “first steps” his party would take if it were to win power as he spoke at the campaign event in the Backstage Centre, Purfleet, yesterday.

Launch - Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer (Image: PA)The steps include measures to invest in the NHS, education and policing, to set up a new national energy company and an elite border force, and to promote economic stability.

Following the event, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and her sister Ellie Reeves, Labour MP for Lewisham West and Penge, joined Labour’s candidate for Southend East and Rochford Bayo Alaba and councillors in Southend as part of the campaign.
Announcement - Sir Keir Starmer (Image: PA)

Sir Keir hit back at suggestions the pledges were a scaled-back version of his party’s ambitions for government set out previously in five missions for “national renewal”.
He sought to portray the first steps as part of Labour’s wider programme for government, as he attempted to manage expectations about what the party could achieve in power following the UK’s recent economic difficulties.

Rachel Reeves, Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner at the event (Image: PA)

“I’m not scaling back our ambition absolutely at all,” he said.

“The way I’ve set this out has been a strategy I’ve been operating to for four years.”

He said the first stage of the strategy was to recognise the “scale” of defeat Labour suffered in 2019 and to change the party, and the next was to “expose the Government as incompetent”, which he said had been assisted by the behaviour of “several of their prime ministers”.

Rachel Reeves with Southend Labour leader Daniel Cowan, candidate Bayo Alaba and Ellie Reeves (Image: Elliot Deady)

“We’re not reducing the mission,” Sir Keir said.

“I don’t accept that they’re small first steps,” he continued to insist in a Q&A with the media.

Angela Rayner speaking at the event (Image: PA)

“If you’re waiting on an NHS waiting list, this is a change that makes a massive difference.”

He also emphasised the need for economic stability, which Labour’s campaign material says will require “tough spending rules”.

Shadow secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Ed Miliband at the event (Image: PA)

The Labour leader said he had recently spoken to a couple in Wolverhampton who had decided they could not afford to have a second child as a result of the fallout from Liz Truss’s 2022 mini-budget.

“I’m not prepared to let an incoming Labour government ever do that kind of damage to working people,” he told the audience.