Yeah they've tapdanced round this for a while - it's been known for a bit that they were worried finances might not allow them to be too ambitious initially, they'll try and ramp up to it later when (or if) the economy improves. Unfortunately, that makes it a lot easier to keep pushing the targets back which waters the whole effort down.

24h before the election they will admit they actually are the Tories

My hope is that this is all posturing so that Starmer will look electable to the public. The UK is a surprisingly right-wing country, and a good chunk of the country will see Labour pumping money into green initiatives as acting against their interests. Making few promises outside of easy ones is likely the way to get elected.

My fear is that Starmer is as populist as all the other Tory PM's we've recently had, and that we'll essentially see austerity again...

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said on Friday Labour would decide how much to spend on environmental programmes once it got into government, depending on the individual schemes and the state of the economy.

Party officials have been discussing for weeks what to do about the £28bn commitment, which was made by the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in 2021, but which has been steadily scaled back since then.

Asked earlier this month by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg whether the promise would make it into the party’s manifesto, Starmer said: “In the way I’ve just described, then yes, of course.”

A party spokesperson told the Guardian two weeks ago: “We are committed to Labour’s green prosperity plan to drive growth and create jobs, including our plan to ramp up to £28bn of annual investment in the second half of the parliament, subject to our fiscal rules.”

Jones’s comments on Friday, however, reflect a new strategy by the party to drop the £28bn figure and focus instead on the schemes they have already announced, including a home insulation rollout and a new publicly owned energy company.

Those schemes however, add up to just under £10bn a year, meaning the party’s ambitions have now, in effect, been scaled back by two-thirds.

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