The importance of party manifestos has been increasingly downgraded in modern elections. Slippery parties do not want to make promises that they can be held to subsequently. Manifestos are now launched late in modern campaigns these days, at hollow events mainly staged for the cameras.
Listening last summer as Keir Starmer droned on for what seemed like hours in the sterile foyer of the Co-op’s headquarters, I wondered why I had bothered to make the journey to Manchester. Nothing that the party “unveiled” there was going to make much difference to who won on polling day.
The thin platform of policies were insignificant compared with the empty promise of “Change” daubed on the front cover, and sprinkled liberally through the pamphlet.
It turns out I was wrong – it was significant, in that it is causing endless problems now the party is in government.
Labour’s struggles to stick to what it said in its manifesto, and its difficulties getting those measures through parliament, have become the signature moves of what looks like a rudderless government with no clear sense of direction.
This state of affairs is all the more gobsmacking because the vagaries of first past the post in a multi-party system gifted Starmer a near-record 169 MP overall parliamentary majority with only a 34 per cent share of the vote.
The root of this government’s trouble is, of course, the pledge not to raise the main instruments of taxation, VAT, national insurance and income tax. In the aftermath of Rachel Reeves’s second Budget this week, both the Prime Minister and Chancellor were seen in stand-up rows with Beth Rigby of Sky News, pleading that they had not broken their own promise – if you read the small print.
Ministers can beg to disagree with TV inquisitors and independent arbiters such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies on the letter of their tax promise. But the Government is bang to rights on the accusation that they have U-turned on workers’ rights.
The manifesto and the bill introduced by former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner explicitly promised protection from unfair dismissal on day one of employment.
Yet on Thursday evening, Business Secretary Peter Kyle announced that the unprotected qualifying period would go up to six months. This is in line with most European countries but less than the two years currently in UK law.
Relatively new in his job, Kyle had suffered relentless ear-bashing from business representatives on the proposal, including at the Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) conference this week. The CBI chair Rupert Soames proclaimed he was “delighted” by the U-turn. Several Labour MPs, including John McDonnell, denounced a “sellout” .
Kyle hopes his climbdown will make it easier to get what remains of the bill – merely a “shell”, according to union boss Sharon Graham – into law. It has been bogged down in the House of Lords – with repeated rounds of “ping-pong” between the two houses of parliament likely.
The Labour Government’s problems in the Lords are a further reflection of its manifesto-related troubles. Labour does not have a majority in the House of Lords. Its 210 Labour peers are overshadowed by 283 Tories and 230 others. This means that it relies on convention to get its work through. But the Lords are in revolt and the niceties are not being observed on either side.
The Labour manifesto promised wholesale change: removal of hereditary peers, retirement at age 80, mandatory attendance and eventually total reform of the Chamber. In government, for its own partisan convenience, this has been watered down. Labour has pressed ahead only with kicking out the hereditary peers.
The Government finally got its abolition bill through with much bad blood spilt, although the hereditary peers will not actually leave until the end of the current session next summer. In the meantime, Conservative peers are making life as difficult as they can for Labour in the Lords.
Difficulties getting legislation through has put much proposed legislation on life support. This includes the end of life bill on assisted dying. While not a government measure, it is backed by the Prime Minister, but will be killed off unless Lords choose to work through more than a thousand obstructive amendments.
Full Fact’s “Government Tracker” reckons that this Labour government has so far only “achieved” 18 of more than eighty pledges extracted from the dense prose of the Change manifesto. Sixteen others “appear to be on track” and 21 more uncertainly “in progress”. That leaves a total of 27 pledges, “off track”, “disputed”, not acted on or broken.
This is slow progress for a government in possession of a majority and which should have had plenty of time to plan, because it was widely expected to win the election. Instead of working to a blueprint, the Government keeps tripping over it one way or another.
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Starmer is entitled to protest furiously that his manifesto declared ending child poverty as one of Labour’s economic priorities. Equally glaringly, his manifesto avoided mention of lifting the two-child benefit cap – the Chancellor’s big welfare move this week, much applauded by Labour MPs.
There was one other star at that manifesto launch in Manchester: ex-Deputy Leader Angela Rayner. Resplendent in red on her home turf, Rayner was both a leader and a physical embodiment able to explain in her own terms how Labour policy can raise up the disadvantaged.
That launch day feels like ancient history now. Rayner has lost her official positions since, and the Government has abandoned the headline of the legislation she championed. The next move could be Rayner’s if she wants to take it – this government is self-destructing.
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