THE Prime Minister recently came forward with what was billed as a “reset” for the Labour government.

It has not been plain sailing since the new government came into office in July, with public approval ratings steadily falling after a series of broken election promises and a Budget which massively increased taxes.

It is understandable Keir Starmer feels the need for a refresh.

But there was little in what the Prime Minister said that would suggest they yet have any ideas about how to get back on track.

The priorities he chose to set out were a mixture of reheated existing pledges, some carried over from the previous Conservative government, and targets most of which are far from stretching.

The first pledge was simply for living standards to be rising.

If living standards were to be lower at the end of the parliament than at the start then we would truly have been despairing - that would have been unprecedented outside of a global pandemic or war.

And it is rich to hear the Prime Minister saying he wants to put more money in people’s pockets after the Budget piled tens of billions in taxes on jobs.

In fact the independent Office for Budget Responsibility confirmed that they expect the policies announced in the Budget to leave disposable incomes lower in real terms than they otherwise would have been.

Another pledge was to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament.

That amounts to the same as the previous Conservative pledge to build 300,000 homes per year. Another was for 13,000 neighbourhood police - but less than a third will actually be new officers.

And more telling still were the omissions from the Prime Minister’s speech.

Despite his claims to be taking the issue seriously, there was no mention in the pledges of either legal or illegal migration.

It is astonishing to me that Labour can claim to be setting out priorities which align with those of the British people when immigration is left out altogether.

It is clearer than ever that, now the election is out of the way, Labour have little by way of an effective plan for taking the action required to bring down the numbers coming into our country.

All of this does once again bring into question what thinking Labour had actually carried out prior to taking office.

Normally when a party returns to power after a long period in opposition, it comes with a ready-made prospectus for government, a clear sense of what has been going wrong and what it wants to achieve.

This government still does not seem to know what it wants to do - beyond warms words about wanting to make us better off and improve public services (who could possibly disagree?).

My experience is it takes a very clear set of plans to really get things done in government. Labour are not in that place at the moment.

They may think they have time - but it will quickly run out.