Labour has sown the seeds of its own destruction
Labour and the Conservatives have both now launched their manifestos. So, here’s a question for you: given their relative position in the polls, which party would you expect to produce an easily-navigable document, and which an odd choose-your-own-adventure website full of nice promises?
I’m not saying the Tory offering was great. On the areas that matter most for our future prosperity – housing, planning, energy, and infrastructure – the headline policies, such as extending Help to Buy, were anything but. The pledge for a Baron Hausmann-style total rebuild of central London was implausible.
Yet they did produce an actual booklet, and although it needed at least a couple of A4 pages of quite small print, further down there are a surprisingly large number of good, detailed proposals for useful changes to planning, consultations, and so on.
Labour, on the other hand, simply tell us that they’re going to change the planning system. That’s a good start (under the current building regulations, the pretty streetscapes Angela Rayner was touting last week are illegal) but they don’t say how.
Ditto on energy. Where the Tories promise two fleets of Small Modular Reactors and targeted interventions to make power plants easier to build, from Labour we get this: “New nuclear power stations, such as Sizewell C, and Small Modular Reactors, will play an important role in helping the UK achieve energy security.” There’s scant detail on how they’ll come into operation.
Likewise, the manifesto pledges to “work with industry to upgrade our national transmission infrastructure and rewire Britain.” Is that code for bulldozing through the up to 460,000km of new overhead pylons we’ll need for Net Zero?
Yes, Sir Keir Starmer can afford to be vague. It isn’t going to stop him getting into Downing Street. Perhaps the opposite: Labour will be acutely aware of how Theresa May threw away a 20-point lead when she tried to use it to win a mandate for a controversial policy.
The Conservatives, understandably, have zeroed in on the idea that such a vague manifesto, combined with a massive majority, might allow Labour to do whatever it likes once it gets into office.
However, I think this portrait of an all-conquering, take-no-prisoners government (which, frankly, this country could use right now) is wide of the mark. In fact, Starmer might be storing up future trouble for the exact opposite reason.
Manifestos discipline MPs. Even if they don’t like this or that policy, most of them will support a policy if it was explicitly included in their party’s platform at the election. This is very important when trying to drive through controversial changes – such as loosening the building regulations or forcing infrastructure projects past local opposition.
If Starmer wins a so-called “supermajority”, a lot of his MPs are going to represent areas where his government wants to get things built. Is a manifesto promise to “rewire Britain” going to persuade them to face down their constituents’ objections to pylons?
If Rachel Reeves really wants to raise living standards, that means creating conditions where business has to raise wages (or invest in productivity-enhancing technology) rather than endlessly demand more foreign labour. When both progressive activists and the CBI are shouting their heads off, is a commitment to make the points-based immigration system “fair and properly managed” going to cut it?
When Starmer was elected Labour leader, the party wasn’t expecting to return to office until the end of the decade, at least. Even now, picking through this maze of a manifesto, you can tell.