Sharing this mainly because it pointed me towards FullFact’s Government Tracker, which looks handy. According to them, only one pledge has not been kept, on the National Wealth Fund:
“Capitalised with £7.3 billion over the course of the next Parliament, the National Wealth Fund will have a remit to support Labour’s growth and clean energy missions”
And three others are ‘Off track’, while six are ‘Unclear or disputed’.
Those that have been achieved include:
delivering an extra two million NHS operations, scans and appointments, recognising a Palestinian state, introducing a Football Governance Bill, ending the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax and abolishing non-dom status.
I think saying you’re “on track” to not doing things (e.g. not raising income tax and VAT) and then counting it as making progress is taking a rather optimistic view. There’s also In progress items like this one.
And I don’t think “establishing a supervised tooth brushing scheme for 3-5 yo” is on the same scale as nationalising the railways or a Gaza peace plan.
If they’d raised those taxes in their first Budget, everyone would’ve described it as a broken pledge; since they haven’t, it’s accurate to say that it’s been kept so far, and ‘on track’ is a fair gloss of ‘true, so far’, I think. Also notable that it’s FullFact’s gloss, not mine or Labour’s.
Again, I don’t see how it’s inaccurate for FullFact to describe this as an ‘in-progress’ situation. We know the number of teachers has increased and, from the same source, that the rate of recruitment has also increased, but we don’t yet have all the data. We clearly can’t describe it as broken, and it’d be a bit much to assume that none of the new teachers were experts in key subjects. Equally, we can’t say it’s ‘On track’ because we just don’t know yet; not because it’s unclear, but because the data doesn’t exist - which is not the same thing. We do know, though, that we are recruiting more teachers, which is certainly part of what was promised. Specifically meeting the details? We’ll see. Is that not ‘in progress’?
Difficult to see what your complaint is, here, to be honest. No one said they were the same scale! The point is that the tooth brushing scheme has been achieved - good! Nationalising railways is on its way - good! And a Gaza peace plan… wasn’t actually in the manifesto. But the promises about Palestine that were in the manifesto have been met, and a peace plan is happening.
On the last one I’m saying that not all pledges are equal. You’re not ⅔ of the way through your list if the ⅓ left is all the difficult stuff (which it will be).
On the others, your perspective is a lot less critical than mine.
Not necessarily. Some things just take longer than others!