Saturday 13th May

The very word seems incredibly old-fashioned now.  Manifesto.  A proposal for Government or a list of beliefs and a confirmation of the ideals of the cause.  It makes the news for a couple of days but then the agenda moves on and by Voting day very few people actually remember what was in the Manifesto at all.  Occasionally a Government is reminded of its Manifesto commitments a year or two in, especially if it was about taxes – but mostly Manifesto’s are simply wish-lists, manna for true believers but they usually leave ordinary voters cold.  Elections are becoming more and more Presidential, with so much being invested in the perceived strengths or weaknesses of the leaders of the parties, the prospective Prime Ministers.  In fact it is now the like-ability, the personality of the Leaders which is the most potent weapon in our Celebrity driven culture.

But for those of us who think about these things the radical-ness, the bravery – or the paucity of ideas, the timidity of a prospective programme is of great interest.  And Labour’s Manifesto was leaked a couple of days early; whether this was deliberate to create a buzz or an accident is debatable.  It certainly did them no harm.  The right-wing press of course were horrified – “Back to the Seventies” they cried.  But actually, it was mostly the Tories who caused chaos in the Seventies with their three-day week; Labour were, as Harold Wilson so succinctly put it “the natural party of Government’.  It was only the Winter of Discontent, largely a newspaper invention which painted the Seventies as bad.  In fact it was a time of constantly rising living standards, colour televisions, fridge-freezers, motor cars and foreign holidays became the order of the day.  Yes, we had a bit of inflation, largely brought about by the quadrupling of oil prices after the Isreali-Arab conflict but Callaghan made sure that pay-rises were limited and benefited the poorest most.

And a few years later Michael Foot’s Manifesto was declared ‘the longest suicide note in History’ by the press, but it was really the Falklands which won Thatcher her second term not the radical ideas of Labour.  So, we will just have to see if the nightly exposure of Labour policies and ideas will do anything to dent the seeming in-surmountable Tory lead in the polls.  And it may well end up being the collapse of UKIP which helps them more than an actual drop in Labour votes.  We will see, but for now let us at least enjoy the Labour Manifesto, and hope it resonates with at least a few people.