Jeremy Corbyn says Labour manifesto will transform people's lives

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged Labour’s election manifesto would “transform the lives” of many Britons , after the radical blueprint was adopted by the party at a fractious meeting.

After four hours of talks in central London, involving both the shadow cabinet and Labour’s governing national executive committee, the Labour leader emerged, to announce that his colleagues had “just unanimously agreed the contents” of a manifesto whose contents had already been largely leaked.

The document, widely regarded as Labour’s most leftwing programme for government since Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto, contains promises to abolish university tuition fees, boost infrastructure investment, renationalise the railways and increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour.

Labour would also seek to create new local energy providers, reverse Conservative cuts to schools budgets and cap rents for tenants.

Minor changes were made during the course of the meeting, including more generous pledges on supporting early years education – after what one person present described as a furious outburst by the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, who confronted the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, one of the report’s key authors, over the issue.

Detailed costings are expected to be published alongside the full document early next week, but sources who attended the meeting said McDonnell claimed he had identified £57bn worth of revenue-raising measures and £55bn of extra spending.

The party has made clear that the extra spending will be financed by raising taxes on company profits and on the top 5% of earners. Borrowing would also increase to fund investment, including in infrastructure.

Paul Johnson, director of thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies, described the agenda as the most radical in decades. “This is about the state getting deeply involved in much more of the private sector than it has been, certainly since the 1970s, and perhaps since the 1940s, with respect to, say, telling banks which branches they can’t close; setting minimum wages for a quarter of private sector workers and about 60% of young people, and dramatically increasing labour regulation. All of those things are utterly different from anything we’ve experienced in many, many decades.”

Speaking outside the meeting, Corbyn said: “Our manifesto will be an offer and we believe the policies in it are very popular – an offer that will transform the lives of many people in our society and ensure that we have a government in Britain on 8 June that will work for the many, not the few, and give everyone in our society a decent opportunity and a decent chance, so nobody’s ignored, nobody’s forgotten and nobody’s left behind.”

He had kicked off the tense gathering, known as a clause V meeting, by telling colleagues the leaking of the party’s draft manifesto was “unacceptable”.

The party will hold an independent inquiry into how the information made its way into several newspapers on Thursday night – but it will not report until after the general election, to avoid further souring the atmosphere in the party. Privately, each faction in the Labour party blames the other side for the embarrassing leak.

Senior insiders say the drafting process involved a very small group, led by Corbyn’s policy chief, Andrew Fisher, in close consultation with McDonnell. Individual shadow cabinet members were only given details of policies in their own area; while the political officers of the affiliated trades unions were allowed to come and see the entire document, and discuss its contents with Fisher, earlier this week, but were not allowed to take a copy away.

Labour will aim to get its campaign back on track on Friday, with a foreign policy speech by Corbyn at the Chatham House thinktank in London.

He will insist he is not ideologically opposed to war, but contrast his cautious approach to foreign intervention with what he will call the “bomb first, talk later” approach of recent years.

“I am not a pacifist,” he will say. “I accept that military action, under international law and as a genuine last resort, is in some circumstances necessary.

“But that is very far from the kind of unilateral wars and interventions that have almost become routine in recent times. Waiting to see which way the wind blows in Washington isn’t strong leadership. And pandering to an erratic Trump administration will not deliver stability.”

Separately, the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, uses an article in Friday’s Guardian to spell out how Labour would distance itself from Trump as part of a new ethical foreign policy.

“From day one, we will stand up to his administration, making clear that the special relationship with America is based above all on shared values, and that if Trump continues to ignore and abuse those values, we will criticise him openly, as we would do any other leader,” she says.

In the manifesto, the wording of key passages on defence has also been changed since the leaked draft, after objections were raised by the shadow defence secretary, Nia Griffith. She was said to have been angry that the version that emerged in several newspapers did not include changes she thought had been agreed.

However, it is understood that the final manifesto, agreed on Thursday, struck out several phrases she had raised concerns about, including an exhortation for a future prime minister to be “extremely cautious about ordering the use of weapons of mass destruction which would result in the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent civilians”.

A fracking ban, mooted in earlier drafts, was also removed; while the wording on Heathrow expansion – which McDonnell, a west London MP, opposes – was softened under pressure from unions.

On Friday, Theresa May will seize on Labour’s manifesto to accuse Corbyn of “deserting proud and patriotic working class people”, using a stump speech in the north-east to caricature the document as a plan to “go back to the disastrous socialist policies of the 1970s”. Underlining her determination to make gains deep in traditional Labour territory, the prime minister will say: “Millions of people here in the north-east of England, and across our country, have loyally given the Labour party their allegiance for generations. I respect that.

“We respect that parents and grandparents taught their children and grandchildren that Labour was a party that shared their values and stood up for their community.

“But across the country, traditional Labour supporters are increasingly looking at what Jeremy Corbyn believes in and are appalled.”