Now, there’s not a conveniently straight forward answer to all of this, so bear with me. But for my money, in terms of the headline of each pledge, all of them still stand. If things were simple, I’d be 10 for 10. Unfortunately for my argument, things are not so simple.
Starting at the top, with pledge 1: Economic Justice. Starmer is still pledged to economic justice, it’s the raison d’etre of the Labour Party, but the devil is in the detail:
Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations.
The only one of those three policies that still stands is the tax avoidance clampdown. However, things are, again, not so simple. The income tax pledge has been dropped, but the money that was going to raise has been replaced with a different tax on the rich (VAT on private schools and, till the Tories nicked it, abolition of non-dom status). So, is that a ‘broken pledge’? Or has he found a better way to achieve the same goal? Should he really be held to a policy if he thinks it won’t work and he can do it better in a different way?
I’m not going to go through all the pledges like this. But, 3, 7, 8, 9 and 10 all still stand, I would argue in pretty much every detail. That’s 5 out of 10. For the others, #2 and #5 has been scaled back, but replaced with I would argue similar policies that achieve similar goals. #4 and #6 are very different in all but the headline. I think the changes are justifiable, but it’s perfectly understandable if you don’t.
Now, my questions to you is: Should Starmer stick to promising to deliver all ten things in every detail, even if: he sincerely changes his mind (which people do); the circumstances genuinely change (which they have); or he sincerely thinks some of those things, good ideas or not, will lose him the election? Should he keep promising ten things at the risk of delivering none of them? Or, should he stick to five of them, and modify the other five, in order to deliver some of them?
For me, not getting elected would actually, definitively break all ten pledges, because it would mean he’d categorically failed at his job.