THE LEADER of Britain’s Labour Party spoke to The Economist on April 21st in Middlesbrough. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Economist: Thank you first for sitting down with us. We live in an era from Europe to the US in which the idea of activist government, of interventionist government, is really being revived in lots of places. Your contribution to this has been the “missions” speeches and what you call “dynamic government”. Would you give us, in a nutshell, your textbook definition of what “Starmerism” is?

Sir Keir Starmer: Building a better and changed Britain. And doing that by setting out in clear terms, what we’re going to deliver—they are the missions—but also how we’re going to do it. Starmerism is as much about the ‘how’ as the ‘what’. The [what], the five missions have obviously been discussed, and quite rightly so. But the how is really important.

You say about activist government. What I say to businesses the whole time to try and describe this, is that if we have the privilege of being elected to government, saying we’re going to carry out five missions, then we have the legitimacy to make those the central focus of the term of a Labour government. But then we face the question of how you are going to deliver them.

I’m clear that there are three possible ways. One is to suck everything up to central government and nationalise companies and run it from Westminster and Whitehall: we’re not going to do that. The other is to say, we’ve won the election, we set out the missions, we’ll let the market do that, because the market knows best. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to have a core partnership with business. These are intense discussions we have with business, which is that we agree that we will deliver the missions together.

For that reason I wanted a lot of business input into what the missions are, because I don’t think we’re going to get the partnership we need if businesses or other partners—in health, it’d be different partners—don’t think that the missions are the right missions for the country. Then we partner as we go forward. Now, that is active government in the sense that the government rolls up its sleeves in that partnership. But I don’t want a government, a Labour government, to do what business needs to do. I don’t want to suck up their job to government. But equally, I want business to be clear about what their role is and what the role of government is.

To give you an example of that, within the growth mission, and then on the Clean Power mission, we’ve obviously got to go towards clean power 2030, this is going to be a real, ambitious target. For that to work, we need to give businesses the certainty so they’re getting the investment in. If I got one message loud and clear, when I went to Davos with Rachel Reeves from the international investment community, it was: ‘We do not see enough certainty, stability and long-term thinking in your country to invest in your country.’ That’s the fundamentals that we have to provide.

But we also have to provide the right environment. Those who are capable of building wind farms at speed, tell me quite rightly, we’ve got real problems with our planning regulations. So the role of government is to knock those impediments out of the way. We’ve got real problems with the grid not going quickly enough to where it’s needed, which is bound up with the question of the regulator. So government has to knock that problem out of the way. That’s an active government, but working actively in partnership.

I think that bit of “Starmerism” is as important because the missions are intended to be: ‘These are the things that we will be laser focused on, and all other answers will depend on those questions.’ In government, we’ll get thousands of decisions to make every day. There’ll be attempts to blow us off course the whole time. The missions are intended to give us the motors on the ships, and as a way to answer all questions. Are we going to do A or B? Well, economic growth is mission number one, the central most important mission. And therefore, if the answer is it helps with that mission, then the answer is yes. If the answer is it doesn’t, then the answer’s no.

It’s a long answer. But that ‘how’ bit is really, really important. As I think you know, we’ve been having intense discussions with business. That is about building new relations with business, it is about us having the opportunity to say we’re a changed party. We’re pro- business, which is very welcome. But it’s more than that, because what I said to businesses is that we need to model how we would work in government. There’s no discussion that I can have now that I want to have in the first one hundred days of a Labour Government.

TE You’ve mentioned the need to reform the centre of government. What does reform of Whitehall need to do to deliver your agenda?

KS It needs to ensure that we break down the silos. One of the biggest problems in delivery is the siloed approach of the department. I know this first hand, because I ran a public service for five years. Among my frustrations was that you had the silo that is criminal justice, but affecting the outcomes in criminal justice was health, mental health, schooling, etc. One of the reasons in the end, I moved from delivering in the criminal justice silo was because I could see that we wouldn’t bring about the sort of change we needed unless we could break that way of working.

The missions are intended to be a way of breaking that way of working as well, which will be central to what we need to achieve. Too many businesses - we had a big business reception in Stockton last night - will tell you over and over again: “We went to BEIS, but it was a bit in BEIS, a bit elsewhere, and that there were so many people, the change in personnel.” The frustration that nothing gets moved on if you don’t change the way of working in Whitehall. That will be part of the ‘how’ as well.

TE Do you subscribe to the idea that there’s a ‘Treasury brain’ problem that holds Whitehall back?

KS I don’t know about that. If you take the person who will be in charge of the Treasury, if we have the privilege of being elected to government—Rachel Reeves—she’s very clear about what she wants and how she wants it delivered. As I hope you’ll have observed, Rachel and I are very close in our thinking, in the way we operate together. We’ve moved Rachel’s office up onto the same floor, same corridor as mine, and on very many occasions it is now impossible to distinguish between her staff and my staff, so closely are we thinking together. If we are privileged enough to be elected into government, we will continue that very close way of working. It will be a first for many governments to actually have a prime minister and a chancellor who are absolutely in lockstep.

TE On Rachel’s role, we’ve just heard from the student nurses [in Middlesbrough] the demand for higher pay; is Labour really capable of governing in lean times? And how do you transform public services without the major uplifts in funding that we saw in the Blair era?

KS What I say about public service is two things. Firstly, economic growth is the absolute foundational stone for everything. Before you get to tax and spend, the crucial question is: how are you going to grow the economy? If we had had the same growth in the last 13 years as we had under the last Labour government, we would have tens of billions of pounds to spend on public services without raising a single tax. We should never lose sight of that statistic.

Our low growth has been our Achilles’ heel now for 13 years, so we’ve got to turn that around. That’s why we’ve made that the central mission. And we’ve been clear about the sort of growth we want, which is growth everywhere across all regions. I’m well aware that there is a model of growth that says you could turbo-charge even more London and the south-east and then redistribute for the rest of the country. I’m not interested in that model. It’s got to be everywhere. So that’s the first bit of the answer.

The second is on public services. There is always the temptation with public services to think that if you put more money in the top, you necessarily get a better outcome. Now, again, having run a public service for five years, I do know that more money in the top helps, of course it does. But you don’t get fundamentally different outcomes if you’re not prepared to do the change-and-reform bit as well. I’ve long been an advocate of change and reform; it was a big part of what I did as Director of Public Prosecutions.

I’m not new to the idea of reforming public services. It’s obviously central to the argument we’re making today about the NHS, which is, if you’re going to have an NHS fit for the future, then it’s not just about money. It’s about recognising the health needs and mental-health needs of the country, and recognising that prevention, intervention, technology, how you access health, primary care, needs to change. Obviously, we recognise that, given the mess the government has made of change in the last ten years, there’s a reaction to change within our public services. But nonetheless, we have to change and there will always be siren voices saying don’t change anything. I had this in criminal justice: the moment you suggest changing anything, somebody, many people, will say ‘no, no, no, leave it as it is’. Always the wrong answer.

TE So growth is your central mission. Do you have a sense of the hierarchy of levers that Downing Street can pull if you’re in office?

KS Yes. I think one of the first levers we need to pull is to put decision-making closer to communities and people affected. This is the idea of economic hubs or clusters that was at the heart of the Commission on the Future of Britain [a Labour Party policy paper on regional devolution]. I’m a big advocate of the idea that those with skin in the game know what’s best for their place and their community. And that one of the important changes we need to make in government is to move away from the model where Westminster and Whitehall hold a pot of money, and allocate where that money goes for particular projects. And we [need to] have the courage and ambition to push decision-making, resource, closer to where people are.

I’m obviously well aware that there are different structures across the country: we’ve got different mayors, different combined authorities. Their powers don’t match up too well. It’s a different situation, again, in Scotland and Wales. I don’t want to spend five years of a Labour government making that neat and tidy and getting every power in the right place. I think we’ve got to work with what we’ve got.

I think we can do that, and we can pull that lever pretty quickly. Everywhere I go—I mean, we’re in Teesside at the moment, in Middlesbrough—you can feel and sense the ambition and change that local communities want. They know the change they want. They’ve got the ambition. They just want a government that matches their ambition, and can deliver the change that they want. That will have to be one of the first levers that we pull.

TE Does devolution also include fiscal devolution?

KS I’m asked all the time does this involve local tax-raising. That isn’t central to our thinking actually. Our thinking is about how you put the resource that’s available closer to people and use the resource better, because a lot of the resource that’s going in – whether it’s hospital trusts, NHS trusts or our councils – is being delivered in such a way that it’s not very effective. So every year in the NHS, we have a crisis. In the end, the government tries to put a sticking plaster on it—the money for discharging people out of hospital. It’s come so late in the day, that it’s not as effective as it would have been if it had come earlier and been on say, a three-year package. We’re challenged the whole time about why don’t we spend more money, and there is always that challenge. But we could make a lot better use of the money that’s already available.

TE You mentioned planning. One of the biggest things holding back UK productivity is house building. How radical are you willing to be to release land, to impose top-down targets, to take on what’s sometimes called Nimbyism, in terms of people’s objections to more housing?

KS I think we have to take this on. And I think that this government’s been walking around it for years. It’s a central weakness of [Rishi Sunak] the prime minister, that he’s backed down now in the face of opposition on targets. For all the fine words, everybody knows what the consequence of that will be, which is less house building. So we have to have the courage to take that on, and to ensure that we partner with builders across the country to get affordable housing, wherever we can across the country. It will require tough decisions. If we’re going to reform planning, if we’re going to have to look again at regulations, then we need to get on with that to do the house building that we need.

 TE Is anything off the table on that? The greenbelt, is that taboo?

KS Look, we’ll come up with a set of proposals. But I’m absolutely clear in my mind, the status quo is not good enough. We have to change this. That will require us to be bold when it comes to things like planning. That’s the kind of partnership arrangement; you know, if you’re gonna be in a partnership, you can’t have both partners doing what the other partner could perfectly well do. You’ve got to know that you’re doing different things. And so I would require builders to work with us to achieve the targets we need to achieve. But they will get in return for that a government that rolls up its sleeves and removes the impediments and creates the conditions. It shouldn’t take, you know, 13, 14, 15 years to build an onshore wind farm when the construction takes two years.

TE Can we talk a bit about green growth since you mentioned wind farms. Britain’s done pretty well at decarbonising relative to other countries but not generated a lot of growth on the back of it. What is it about your plan that will generate jobs?

KS The first thing is stability and [the] long term. We were talking in Teesside last night with those involved in the transition to hydrogen. They are frustrated that the government came so late to the table with the hydrogen strategy. They already feel that they’re one step behind other countries now in the race. There’s a race on for renewables, whether it’s hydrogen or other renewables, and we’ve got to be in that race. That stability, that long-term thinking and the unlocking of the problems is hugely, hugely important. We’ve not had that stability in government, we’ve not had long-term thinking for a very long time.

I’ve said many, many times my frustration with sticking-plaster politics, the short-term basis of decisions for the last 13 years, has been a massive hindrance to our economic growth. We’ve got to get longer-term thinking. That requires a government that is prepared to say, that’s our plan, and we’re sticking with it. It’s been partly behind the thinking on missions, which is I don’t want a Labour government that just sort of does what it can to fix the problem on a year-by-year-by-year basis and nothing really gets better. We’ve got to be transformative and that means having a plan, a mission that will take five years or more—because some of these missions may well take us into a second period of a Labour Government—and being prepared to stick with them.

When I talk to businesses about this, this is music to their ears. This is what they want to hear. It was inspiring and depressing to be in Davos. It was inspiring, because I was with Rachel Reeves, and very many people were interested in talking to us as a potential government. It was depressing, because in Davos there were fierce arguments about IRA [the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act of 2022] in America, and about the European response to it, and the UK wasn’t at the table. People there were lamenting that because the UK used to be at the table in the heart of those discussions with a plan of its own. The fact that it wasn’t even there was lamented.

There’s a price for that when it comes to investment. If you take the last political year, there’s a wry smile when we talk through the fact that we’ve had three prime ministers and we had four chancellors and four budgets last year. It makes for great political cartoons; for the economy and investment is a disaster, because many investors are saying, “Well, I’m sitting it out at the moment in relation to the UK because they’re not the conditions that I think are strong enough for me to invest a lot of money as we go forward.”

TE Some of this short termism problem reflects institutional and political cycles. You can be very credible over a five-year period. What’s the institutional framework that needs to change to give those investors certainty that things are going to be stable beyond the life of a government?

KS Firstly, we need to be stable within the life of the government. That will be a good first step. But it’s a good challenge. I think if we can build the necessary consensus, particularly with business, that this is the right mission that we should be on, that gives it a solid foundation. These missions haven’t been crafted by me and Rachel sitting in a dark room in Whitehall. They’re alive, they’re active, they’ve come out of the discussions we’ve had with businesses, with health trusts, with mental-health trusts, with schools on education. So they’re live, they reflect on and are intended to build on what we genuinely think is the consensus across the country. For that reason, I think that they would have a long shelf life.

I do think there’s a role for an incoming Labour Government to then reach out and govern in a more consensual way. One of the features of government in the last ten or fifteen years has been this “divide, divide, divide, divide”—if you can find a wedge issue that’s good politics. Well, it isn’t. It isn’t good politics. The best politicians and the best leaders are those that can pull different people together. I personally find that easy, not least, because for most of my life, I’ve been outside of politics. I can tell you outside of politics, if you’re running a business, or running a community, running a public service, and you see a problem, you pull people into the room together to solve it. Not everybody will agree, but that way of working actually achieves a huge amount and more of that in politics, I think will be a very, very good thing.

TE On IRA, there is a scenario in which the UK attempts to go toe-to-toe with the US through subsidy races. There is a risk that it could be a return to some of the mistakes of industrial policy of the past. Are you alive to that concern, and what would your response to that be?

KS Yes. Firstly, about IRA, don’t underestimate the magnet that it is at the moment for investment and businesses. You will be talking to them, I’m talking to them. The pull to say, that’s where the money is, the investment and the action—we have to be alive to that, and that’s why we’ve got to have an alternative plan. At Davos, we were lamenting the fact there isn’t an alternative plan. We do have our Green Prosperity Fund, which does mean that we will have our answer to IRA.

I’m not going to do a running commentary on IRA. But I’m very clear in my own mind what we need here. There is the mission, which then has features to it. Partnership is one of those features. GB Energy is another. The money that we want to put behind this is a third. But not money just in the way of: “Let’s decide which winners we’re going to reward.” I don’t mean that. What I mean by that is money that will be used in the partnership. Every pound that we put in, I want that to be triggering private investment of many times the amount that we’re putting in as part of the delivery on the mission. So without a running commentary on IRA, this would be a model for Britain that will work for Britain and allow us to take advantage of the things that we’re good at.

We want to be in the race, but I particularly want to be in the race in the things that we are good at with the models that will work for us. So: partnership, GB Energy, putting money and investment in, but only where it’s matched by the private sector. Rather than just sort of sitting picking out winners—that isn’t what I mean by partnership.

TE If you’re going to be seeking to crowd in private capital, rather than crowd it out, what’s the implication of that? You’re looking at early-stage industries in particular? Where does something like steel fit, for example?

KS Firstly, we’ve got to have an ambition for what we do with steel, which is green steel of the future. And if we don’t do it by the way, I don’t think there is a future for steel. And there should be—it’s vital, the future for steel in this country. I think that in all my discussions on green steel, and this is the same in pretty well every discussion - there’s that stage at the early stages where government support is most needed to de-risk something, to provide the ability for companies to get their foot in the door.

Very few businesses I’m talking to say: “What we really need is a subsidy over five or ten years, Keir.” What they are saying is, “this is the journey that we want to be on”---decarbonisation came up last night in my discussions here in Teesside over and over again—”these are the stages on the journey, that’s where we know we can get to. But this is the bit of the journey where we need to partner with government in order to get the stability, the foot in the door, to make the whole journey.” That’s the sort of way in which I want to operate. That’s where I think will be most effective, not just a cushion over a five- or 10-year period.

TE Do you think that the pension funds should be forced or encouraged to invest a certain amount of funds in domestic assets?

KS I think “encouraged” is always better than “forced”. And yes that will be a good thing. That’s about creating the conditions of certainty for that investment. But yes, we need to talk to pension funds, yes we need to have that encouragement.

TE What does that look like?

KS Having the discussions, making sure the strategy is clear and having the stability that we need. There’s a reason why Rachel Reeves is absolutely focused on fiscal responsibility and stability. That’s because we know it’s a precondition, an absolute precondition. It’s not just a nice to have; it’s not just “here’s the polling numbers”. It’s the reality of the sort of government that we want to run.

TE The big picture is that the UK’s tax burden is at historically high levels, but lower than what is found in western European states. Isn’t there a fundamental truth in our politics that if we want European-style public services and European industrial policy, do we not need to accept that Britain needs to move to a tax burden which is structurally closer to a European average?

 KS Firstly, I accept the proposition that the tax burden is higher now than I think it has been at any stage for I don’t know how many years. So businesses and individuals are really, really feeling the strain. I resist the idea that the first place you go is tax, and I think that it’s very important for me to say that as Leader of the Opposition wanting to be the Labour Prime Minister, heading a Labour government. Because the instinct is always to think that’s where Labour wants to go first, and it isn’t because we’ve got to get economic growth.

I do think that through the model I’ve been describing we have the potential for that [growth] which doesn’t involve huge change to the tax regime. We have obviously set out some changes that we want to make: what we do about the non-dom status, which we said we would get rid of and use the proceeds to fund the expansion of the NHS workforce; the private-equity loopholes; private schools. So we’re prepared to say when we are looking at tax changes where we want to go. Quite often we’re challenged on capital-gains tax. We don’t have plans actually on capital-gains tax. It’s important that I make that clear. But I, and Rachel, intend to resist the pull that so many people urge on us that the first place a Labour government goes is to tax. The first place the next Labour Government will go is to grow.

TE I understand the politics of the Labour Party means that things like VAT on private schools is important; the windfall tax on oil profits is important. But a lot of people look at that and say, is that the floor on ambition, or a ceiling? Is this a signal that this is going to be a “soak the rich” approach?

KS No, quite the opposite. They are carefully calibrated decisions on particular tax loopholes. And in each case explaining what we would do, how we would do it, what it would yield and what we would use the money for. The wider project is not to simply go down the tax route; it is to go down the growth route. Talking to many businesses, that’s where they are at.

I think businesses have changed in the last 10 years fundamentally. The sense of purpose, of direction, has changed. Not every single business, but many, many businesses have – even to the point of changing their articles of association to put in other things that matter and that will be measured within their business. Of course, you’ve got to make profits. Of course, you need a return. Everybody understands that. But I do think business has changed on this. That’s why they’re very open to this discussion with us.

Of course, every party wants to have business engagements and wants to have a cup of tea and get people in a room, etc etc. But that kind of engagement only gets you so far. By the third or fourth time you’ve had the same people in the room having the same conversation, it doesn’t go very much further than that. Which is why as soon as I get the opportunity, I’m talking to business [and saying]: “how’s it going to work?” Last night to each of those business I was saying: “You tell me what the impediment is that is stopping you from pushing forward for the next five years. And then tell me what government might be able to do within reason to deal with that. And also, give me an example of what’s working well, because I don’t want to just tear up everything that’s working well. That’s the conversation I have with pretty well every business I’m talking to. And this is a very dynamic discussion. Obviously, it varies from sector to sector, business to business. So a completely different way of doing things for government. It is active government in the best possible sense of the word. That’ll be the sort of hallmark of the next Labour Government.

TE Are you hearing things in those conversations that are surprising or new? Because I’m sure if someone was here from the government, they’d say, we’re constantly talking to business. We know what the problems are, but—sotto voce—it’s very hard to solve them.

KS You will talk to businesses as well, so you’ll pick this up. There is a deep frustration at government—a deep frustration. [Boris] Johnson and [Liz] Truss did huge damage to the relationship between government and business by giving the very strong impression that they didn’t really care much for business. But there’s a deeper frustration that for all the words, nothing really changes and nothing really happens. And they’re yearning for a long-term strategy that will allow them to get on with what they need to do. Even last night, there was a sense of people saying ‘well, the hydrogen strategy’s come out, why didn’t come out sooner, it’s not ambitious enough’. So I don’t doubt the government is talking to business, but I think they’re talking past business at the moment.

TE Can I ask about the constitution? Your career as a barrister was defined by restraining the executive, civil liberties, rights. What will we see of that in government? And do you think that this has become an overweening executive, and if so, how would you address that?

KS What I’ve always been concerned about is getting the balance right, and ensuring that the executive doesn’t overreach, and that individuals have rights that are properly respected. That’s a fundamental belief for me. The history for me is at the end of the second world war, the world had to grapple with a problem, which is what do you do when governments and executives abuse their powers? What’s the restraint on that to ensure that terrible things don’t happen again? That’s where the modern idea of rights came from, and I’ve always held it very, very dear. It obviously means that we need to get the balance right as we go forward.

I’ve never seen this particularly as a conflict, by the way. I think this is wrong. Within the criminal-justice system, to take an example, if you have a system that fully respects the rights of those who are going through the criminal-justice system, you’ll get a better outcome. If you’re able to convict people having given them due process, that conviction will be upheld on appeal. This is a good thing, because it means people who should be in prison are in prison.

But equally—and we’ve not paid enough regard to this—I spent a lot of time on victims, particularly in criminal justice, who didn’t have a voice. It’s an example of my way of thinking: for too long, the prosecution and the defendant were the only two players in the process of criminal justice. The victim, the person who in many ways was most affected, had a sort of walk-on part to go into the witness box, give their version of events and then walk off again, notwithstanding the traumatic effect on them. I think that human rights, and rights in the constitution, provide a framework for the basic respect and dignity that’s needed.

TE Do you still want to reform the war powers? [The legal ability of the British prime minister to commit troops to war.] When you were running for leader you were talking about granting the Commons control of that.

KS What I made clear then was I think uncontroversial because it’s practice. Which is to say, if you’re going to use force as a country, you’ve got to have a legal basis. I don’t think anybody quarrels with that. And that you should have the consent of Parliament, save in urgent cases, of course. I think all prime ministers are pretty well-subscribed to that now. I know David Cameron strongly felt that these were the basics. This is not controversial; it is actually a good, common-sense way to approach this legal basis and, as it were, the consent of Parliament. I remember in my early days as an MP, in that year 2015 to 2016, the way David Cameron did that. I would want to build on that, because I think he was right. He said there needs to be a lawful basis and was prepared to set out what it was, and also to get the consent of Parliament by setting out what you want to achieve. So I think that’s good, sensible governance, rather than anything actually very different. It is bringing current practice into one place. I do acknowledge there’s a footnote to that, of course, in extreme circumstances, in great urgency, then what might otherwise be sensible steps need to be fast tracked in order to get to where you need to get to.

TE Very quickly, just tell us the role of Sue Gray in your operation. She’s a fascinating figure. How does she fit into the missions?

KS Well, look, I’m not going to comment on Sue Gray until the committee [vetting her appointment] has had the chance to make their decision. But I’m very happy to have a further discussion with you or interview in the event that we can then have a discussion on that.

TE Thank you very much. ■