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SIR Keir Starmer will today ditch a flagship pledge to spend £28billion each year on green projects – marking one of the biggest u-turns of his leadership.
The Labour boss is officially abandoning the eye-watering figure following relentless Tory attacks on how the party will pay for it without hiking taxes.
It comes after weeks of chaos over the plan since The Sun first revealed the intention to drop the £28billion figure last month.
The confusion saw Sir Keir commit to the pledge just this week after Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves refused 10 times to do the same, sparking speculation of a split.
And only yesterday Labour shadow ministers and spokespeople insisted the Green Prosperity Plan remained their policy.
But this afternoon Sir Keir and Ms Reeves will together junk the £28billion figure in a bid to draw a line under the carnage.
The mission to reach clean power by 2030 will remain, just without the enormous price tag.
Ms Reeves first made the pledge to invest in low-carbon infrastructure at the party’s 2021 conference with a borrowing hike.
She had already downgraded the pledge to “ramp up” to the spending ambition in the second half of a first Labour government .
Today Tory MPs accused the party leader of another “flip-flop” which has become a regular attack line.
Laura Trott, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: “This is a serious moment which confirms Labour have no plan for the UK, creating uncertainty for business and our economy.
“On the day that Labour are finalising their manifesto, Keir Starmer is torpedoing what he has claimed to be his central economic policy purely for short-term campaigning reasons.”
Even Labour MPs put the boot into the u-turn, with Barry Gardiner calling it “economically illiterate”.
The Sun first revealed in January that Sir Keir would ditch the £28billion following a row with shadow climate minister Ed Miliband.
A senior source had said: “We’re going to drop the figure altogether. We’ll keep the promise to turn Britain into a clean energy superpower, but the £28billion has just become an albatross around our neck.”
Green u-turn a bruising episode for Labour
By JACK ELSOM, Chief Political Correspondent
WHEN The Sun revealed last month that Sir Keir Starmer was going to abandon his flagship pledge to spend £28billion on green policies, all hell broke loose.
High-level talks within Labour had concluded the figure had become “an albatross around our necks”.
Dropping it would be a painful – but necessary – move to blunt relentless Tory claims of a cynical tax-grabbing plot to make the sums add up.
With shadow ministers in furious disbelief at the impending u-turn, Labour apparatchiks were sent out to rubbish our story as “complete nonsense”.
But slowly and surely, over the next few days the position shifted and party frontbenchers were starting to flail when grilled on the airwaves.
It came to a crux when the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves refused 10 times on Sky News to even say the £28billion pledge.
The next day her deputy Darren Jones confirmed the number was no longer set in stone, and the pledge was all-but presumed dead.
The final nail in the coffin was expected to come after the Budget, when Starmer and Reeves could blame Tory policies on their decision to reluctantly scale back their ambitions.
But Starmer himself then resurrected the £28billion in an interview on Times Radio saying it was “still desperately needed”. Had the plan been spared the noose at the final moment?
Only yesterday lunchtime Labour spokespeople were confidently telling journalists the £28billion figure remained.
Yet it transpired to be a disasterclass in political communications rather than a sudden change of heart.
The plan is being junked, and this bruising episode for Labour asks serious questions of Starmer’s leadership.
Had he ripped off the plaster early, he might have neutralised Conservative attacks on the plan and weathered a brief row over flip-flopping.
But the chaos and mixed messaging of the past few weeks leaves him in the worst of all worlds.
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