On the face of it, the Labour Party manifesto looks pretty good. Nationalisation of the railways, the power companies and the Royal Mail all seem reasonable enough. Significant investment in health and social care is greatly needed too and who wouldn’t support initiatives to build more affordable housing and end rough sleeping? There are plenty of flaws in the proposals – I’ll come to those later on – but Labour’s offer is going to be a million times better than anything Theresa May’s increasingly right wing Tories are going to come up with. In every election since I started voting, which was in 1979, and this manifesto might be enough to swing me in that direction again. There’s a qualification with that, though.
Having not yet read the minutiae of the document, for the obvious reason that it hasn’t been published yet, I also fear that it could be the son (or daughter) of “the longest suicide note in history”, the Bennite manifesto of 1983 which hastened a Tory landslide. That manifesto promised to take us out of the EU and NATO, as well as getting rid of our nuclear deterrent, and a host of unpopular policies which encouraged Margaret Thatcher to destroy both our manufacturing base and the power of the trade unions, or to be more specific the ability of working people to defend their pay and conditions.
Labour leader Michael Foot, a serious intellectual and fiery orator, spoke to packed public meetings up and down the land and the hard left did their best to persuade us that their hard left manifesto would power Labour into office. The night before the election, I attended a public meeting at Wick Road School in Brislington, Bristol where the speakers, Tony Benn and Bill “Compo” Owen, told us to ignore the grim looking opinion polls because “we’re going to win”. The comrades roared their approval and gave both men extended standing ovations. Benn puffed merrily on his pipe. Victory was ours until people voted.
Fast forward to 2017 and we have a hard left leader, who is definitely not a serious intellectual, but is a very poor speaker who addresses packed public meetings up and down the land. I don’t know whether there are direct parallels with 1983, other than the fact that Labour is going to be wiped out in a few weeks time.
My concerns about the manifesto are many. First of all, I am very unhappy with Corbyn’s approach to Brexit. He has always been a Eurosceptic and I take his half-hearted conversion to being a remainer with the pinch of salt it deserves. And the fact that he led his MPs through the lobbies to support Theresa May’s hard Brexit is the most unforgivable action during his miserable time as leader. A pledge to retain the benefits of the single market and customs union is simply not good enough. We were promised, even by the racists and bigots of Ukip, that we would not be leaving neither the single market or customs union. Leaving both will, undoubtedly, work against the interests of the people Labour purports to represent. Weak, weak, weak.
I agree too that university tuition fees should be abolished but I worry that if it is not done properly, we will end up with a public subsidy of more affluent students. And, is it really a priority given the terrible crisis in the NHS and with social care? People will wonder how we can afford all this.
And what about taxes? John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, says that Labour will soak the rich in order to fund public swerves. Okay – I agree with those with the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest part of the load, but don’t we all share the benefits of the NHS? We all own it, we all fund it. Can we not come up with a formula that ensures we all pay a bit extra? I am not advocating a policy of soaking the poor – of course I’m not – but surely there is a formula that all those bright sparks can come up with to let us all feel part of funding what is ours? The poorest might own contribute a few extra pennies and they might even be reimbursed for that.
I have concerns about many more of Labour policies but my main one is that Labour does not appear like a party of government. Firstly, look at the leadership team. Does anyone outside Jeremy Corbyn’s tight circle and perhaps members of his cult following see him as a potential prime minister? His performance as leader of the opposition has been pitiful. Can he really be expected to morph from hopeless opposition leader to prime mover on the world stage? Then look around the shadow cabinet table. The sneering and hopelessly out of her depth Emily Thornberry? The not very nice John McDonnell? The stunningly useless Diane Abbott? As a lifelong Labour supporter and now, once again, member, I cannot remember a worse front bench. Even Michael Foot’s team from 1983 was light years better than this lot. In short, this is a matter of credibility. Labour doesn’t look like a party of government and in no way does Corbyn look like a prime minister.
Secondly, the message. “For the many, not the few” sounds all right (I’d argue that it should be “For the many, not just the few”, but still) but I can’t see what Labour is saying to us. I appreciate that the Tories are riding on a wave of repeated soundbites which are resonating with an electorate which, generally, doesn’t obsess with politics. Ask your average swing voter what they feel Labour’s message is and I am not sure they will be able to answer. A manifesto is, by its very nature, a mish-mash of different policies and ideas but the best ones have an overriding theme. This is how we will make your life better. But it’s not there. It could be that the messengers aren’t any good – and there is obviously something in that – or it could be that the messengers are not bright enough to bring us a vision.
When Labour was slaughtered in 1983, Tony Benn informed us that actually it had been a great victory because over eight million people had voted for a hard left manifesto. That it gave us 14 more long years of Tory government which almost destroyed everything we hold dear, dividing the country so badly that we still suffer today from her pernicious legacy, didn’t matter to Benn and the comrades. Defeat is victory, something that must have been a great comfort to those waiting years on hospital waiting lists, being taught in over-sized classes in schools that were falling down and to the millions who lost their jobs. That is the mentality of Labour today.
The most important thing in politics is to win. If Labour does not win, it cannot represent the working class for whom it was founded. And in order to win, Labour needs to reach out to voters from a wider section of the political spectrum, including Tories. Tony Blair’s Labour realised this and whilst remaining true to its working class heartlands, it embraced the aspirational and ambitious middle classes. (This is not to say that working class people are not aspirational: quite the opposite, actually.) It was a vast coalition and New Labour remained in power for 13 years. If Labour does not embrace a wider group of the population, it cannot and will not win.
To succeed, Labour must work incrementally. It must win the confidence of the people that it can make the country better and fairer and then, at subsequent elections, seek to embed that better and fairer country by making changes that would be very hard, and highly undesirable, to reverse. That, in my view, was the main failing of New Labour. Once they left office, it was all to easy for the Tories, with their new Lib Dem friends, to unpick Labour’s good deeds.
Half decent manifesto or not, Labour is going to get battered and from 9th June the voices of the mainstream centre left need to reclaim the party. The Corbyn experiment will have failed disastrously and millions will suffer as a result. Use this manifesto to put together a coherent package for 2022. This will require those of compassion and vision to think outside the box.
There’s not much at stake here, apart from the very existence of the Labour Party and the future prosperity of our country. The three quidders who gave us Corbyn have, inadvertently, given us at least five more years of a hard right Conservative government. Hopefully, they will learn what will have been a very painful lesson and help transform Labour into a mainstream left of centre party that embraces the centre ground. That’s how Labour wins, that’s the only way Labour can win. Under Corbyn Labour is doomed. 9th June 2017 can’t come quickly enough for me.
