2024 UK general election speculation and build-up thread

Having seen the news coverage and the melodrama of the last few days and weeks, it did occur to me that I have no idea where the £28bn figure originally came from, whether it was plucked out of thin air or calculated somehow.

That said, it does worry me that Labour is too focused on the short-term finances and not concerned enough about the failure to invest in infrastructure and the impact that failure will have on the ability to grow the economy, and that that may not necessarily change once an election is won.

Starmer and Labour keep claiming that they're behaving 'decisively' in terms of their policies, however the only thing theyve actually been 'decisive' about is their indecisiveness about who they are and what they stand for tbh

So I read/heard an interesting counterpoint to this one recently – suggesting that what really characterises Starmer is (probably excessive) caution. He probably didn't need to make quite as many left-wing pledges to win the party leadership in 2020 as he actually did, because he ended up winning in a bigger landslide than Corbyn got in 2015, so he probably could have promised less and still done enough to win. This is also his strategy (or at least his character trait!) for the general election: to make himself appear as unthreatening as possible to the average voter on as many policy areas as possible, because he's being ultra-cautious. Different electorate (a post-Corbyn Labour Party then, middle England now) but the same underlying approach – but if you look at it from the perspective of policies, he's u-turned or abandoned a lot of stuff.
(I think it was probably Stephen Bush in the Financial Times who said this and I picked up on it, as it usually is! He does a morning newsletter that anyone who's interested in more thought-provoking analysis of the news can sign up for a 30-day free trial for here. It also seems to let you go and sign up for another free trial when the 30 days expire – I've had plenty and have never paid )

Having seen the news coverage and the melodrama of the last few days and weeks, it did occur to me that I have no idea where the £28bn figure originally came from, whether it was plucked out of thin air or calculated somehow.
That said, it does worry me that Labour is too focused on the short-term finances and not concerned enough about the failure to invest in infrastructure and the impact that failure will have on the ability to grow the economy, and that that may not necessarily change once an election is won.

I don't think they can risk it.
Remember that markets don't really care what your spending money on, they care how much they are being asked to stump up.
Those who argue for borrowing to invest may well end up being proven right in the end but not before markets have charged them higher yields in the interim which means mortgage costs increase. I'm not sure Starmer can take that political risk without being willing to cut spending (Labour won't) or raise taxes (Labour won't commit to that). Unfortunately because the Tories did not go hard enough on austerity before Covid (May gave up), we are simply paying too much debt interest to stomach the fiscal punch of higher yields.