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The incredible – needless – tangle that Labour got itself into over its £28bn green investment policy only truly became clear today as leader Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves were killing it.
The flagship policy had been until today that it borrows £28bn a year to turn Britain green.
But at 5pm, Labour announced it would only be borrowing just a tenth of that sum – £2.6bn a year – an extraordinary switch.
Politics Live: Starmer ditches his ‘biggest dividing line’ with Tories
Yet in the same breath, Starmer and Reeves say that they will continue to press ahead with all the projects they were talking about doing before this change, reducing the scale of spending on just one project while keeping all the rest in train.
Over the course of briefings and interviews did the true scale of the underlying mess become clear.
All the agony and pain that Labour has been absorbing over this policy – a bruise the Tories have been mercilessly punching – was for a headline policy that, in reality, didn’t exist in detail at all.
As recently as Tuesday, Starmer recommitted to spending £28bn a year. Last month, he told Sky News that the Tories were trying to “weaponise this issue, the £28bn… this is a fight I want to have”.
Yet even as he said this, it wasn’t true.
Since it was first announced two years ago, this policy has already been changed three times – to delay its introduction in full until the second half of the parliament, make it subject to fiscal rules, and to set this target inclusive of existing government decisions.
This meant that despite repeating the headline figure, Labour was never going to spend anything like £28bn.
Some £10bn of the £28bn had already been committed by this Tory government – so would not need further additional borrowing by a future Labour government.
Read More:
What is Labour’s £28bn green prosperity plan?
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