Reading the Labour Party manifesto was no trivial undertaking. It covers a lot of ground in 107 pages. It leaves you in no doubt about the kind of Britain that Labour wants to create. It is an appealing vision and it is a far reaching one. To reset the agenda for the country is no mean ambition. If Labour wins it could lead the country in a different direction from the one it is on and this document could be looked back on as heralding that change.
As a piece of writing it doesn’t really fit such a lofty ambition. It has rather more clichés than an historic text should. Some pledges are highly specific, others vague in the extreme. And there are plenty of them. Reading the whole thing in one go was exhausting. Even fulfilling half of them would make the next Labour government the busiest in history. Some indications of priorities and timescales would have made it much stronger.
And to make the complaint I have made in my other commentaries again, it gives way too much attention to the Tories. I’d have preferred if they had never been mentioned at all.
I don’t actually think this is a winning manifesto. The Conservative Party will find it valuable ammunition to portray Labour as unrealistic. I wonder if the Labour Party leadership even regard winning the election as a feasible goal. They might be trying to win the argument rather than the vote. If so, they have given themselves - or rather the left in general - a good set of ideas to draw on in the future. At the very least, it shows that Labour is interested in the issues facing Britain in the 2020s and has ideas about how those issues can be tackled. I don’t see any other political force of which you can say the same. It
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