Labour’s manifesto
Labour unveiled spending pledges worth almost £50bn this week, in its most radical election manifesto in decades. The document includes plans to renationalise the railways, Royal Mail, and parts of the water and energy utilities; to invest billions in public services; to scrap tuition fees; to abolish some of the most unpopular recent cuts to working-age benefits; to increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour; and to build 100,000 affordable homes a year. Labour has also pledged to support the renewal of Trident and to refuse to leave the EU unless there is a trade deal in place. The party said its plans would be funded by higher taxes on companies and high earners. It would restore the 50p top rate of tax for those earning more than £123,000, and slash the threshold for 45p tax from £150,000 to £80,000.
Jeremy Corbyn called the manifesto, which was leaked in draft form last week, “a programme of hope”. But the Tories – who this week unveiled a package of measures that Theresa May claimed amounted to the biggest expansion of workers’ rights by any Conservative government – said it was a lurch back to the 1970s that would “unleash chaos on Britain”.
What the editorials said
“General elections are not generally won or lost on the basis of manifestos,” said The Observer. But these documents are still “illuminating”. Labour’s contains many good ideas: the plan to invest in infrastructure, for instance, and to boost spending on health. But while its “lack of queasiness” about state intervention is welcome, its belief that the state is “always a force for good” is naive. The document deserves careful analysis, in any event, said The Guardian. After all, Theresa May has adopted Ed Miliband’s policies on housing, corporate governance and energy price caps, “despite Tories having branded them as ‘Marxist’ when Labour offered them”.
Pay caps, rent controls, pay rises for public workers – “Comrade Corbyn’s” manifesto is a return to tax and spend, said the Daily Mail. “They call it redistribution, but fundamentally, it’s the politics of envy in its purest form – and it never works.” The party even wants to revive the Ministry of Labour, last seen in 1968, to empower trade unions, said The Daily Telegraph. Corbyn was heavily involved in drawing up Labour’s 1983 manifesto, which was famously described as “the longest suicide note in history” and took Labour to its worst postwar defeat. He has learned nothing.
What the commentators said
Laugh at Corbyn’s plans if you like, said Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph, but “for those of us who lived through the 1970s, this isn’t funny at all”. We remember all too well the reality of the “glorious age of nationalisation”, when getting a phone line installed by the Post Office routinely involved a six-month wait. Corbyn’s prospectus isn’t that extreme, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. It’s just an amplified version of Ed Miliband’s offering. Whereas Miliband wanted to trim tuition fees, Corbyn wants to scrap them; whereas Miliband proposed putting up taxes for those on £150,000, Corbyn would do so for those on £80,000. People are calling this manifesto radical, but “re-plating a double helping of the dish that two-thirds of the electorate declared unappetising just two years ago” hardly amounts to “bold thinking”.
Labour’s manifesto is a “fiscal fantasy land”, said Ross Clark in The Spectator, but it contains some ideas that the Tories should emulate. The party is right, for instance, to propose a new National Care Service, to prevent social care eating up ever more from council budgets. Banning unpaid internships also makes sense. All sorts of problems are holding our country back today, said Owen Jones in The Guardian. There are not enough homes or secure, properly paid jobs; the young are saddled with debt; the NHS has been reduced, in the words of the British Red Cross, to a state of “humanitarian crisis”. Labour is proposing a “moderate, common-sense set of antidotes” to this “broken model”. To fund it, the top 5% of earners would be asked to pay a little more tax. Corporation tax would also go up, but still remain below the rate in the US.
It’s true that many Britons are unhappy with the way that many public services are being run, said Bagehot in The Economist. “Labour had a genuine chance to reverse some of the basic tenets of the Thatcher revolution by calling for public ownership.” But the backward-looking solutions presented in the manifesto, and the document’s chaotic leak to the press, have completely undermined the message. The manifesto was “politics as ‘narrowcasting’”: designed not to win converts but to secure the allegiance of Corbyn’s core constituency of supporters.
What next?
One of Corbyn’s biggest trade union backers, Len Mccluskey, admitted this week that he did not expect Labour to win the general election on 8 June, reports the FT. The general secretary of Unite said that, partly due to hostile media coverage, such an outcome was unlikely. But he insisted that if the party managed to hold on to 200 seats – which, given that it currently holds 229, would represent the party’s worst result since 1935 – it would still be a “successful campaign”.
Corbyn’s team, says The Times, seem less concerned with winning seats than with securing a larger share of the popular vote than was won by Ed Miliband in 2015 (30.4%).