By aiming big and challenging the Tories’ monstrous cuts, British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has put the onus on Prime Minister Theresa May to respond.
What a cornucopia of delights is here. The leaked Labour manifesto is a treasure trove of things that should be done, undoing those things that should never have been done and promising much that could make the United Kingdom infinitely better for almost everyone.
No, this is not a repeat of the “longest suicide note in history” 1983 manifesto. There is no reprise here of the killer pledges that caused the party to split back then — pulling out of Europe, out of Nato with unilateral disarmament, protectionist exchange and import controls, or nationalising pharmaceutical, building materials and many more industries. Reluctantly, no doubt, here is a pledge to keep Trident and spend Nato’s required 2 per cent on defence, an essential backstop against those who regard Labour as perennially weak on national security.
Celebrate all that is urgently needed — repairing the National Health Service (NHS), social care and school funding. Restoring working rights to the bogus self-employed, and those on zero hours, and bringing back collective bargaining, without which pay has fallen sharply since the 1980s as a share of gross domestic product, while profits and top pay take a soaring share. Bringing back mail and rail to public ownership, as contracts expire, not full-scale energy nationalisation, but one state energy company in every region to make the comparison. Investing in a million homes. Borrowing £250 billion (Dh1.18 trillion) over 10 years for urgently needed infrastructure is good capital investment we can well afford. Free tuition fees, educational maintenance allowances for poor families, free school meals — all these should please.
If the country would welcome and consent to all of this, it would undoubtedly be a better place to live and bring up children, and probably more prosperous too. How welcome to see Labour reject a “no deal” Brexit, and insist on staying in the single market and the customs union. If the country would agree to restoring the cruellest benefit cuts and to an open, “fair” migration system, Britain would be a nicer, kinder, more optimistic nation than what it currently seems to be. But that is not the place, not right now in Brexit Britain.
Politics is the art of the possible. How Labour rebuilds economic trust and cajoles the country into a less fractious, individualistic, often xenophobic, state of mind will be its long future task. A leader’s first job is to counter their party’s negatives from the start. May, bidding for leadership, pretended not to be from a nasty party for the privileged few, but working for the “just about managing” whom she nonetheless skewered in her first budget. Labour always has to work a hundred times harder to counter its perceived negatives against the blast of an overwhelmingly Tory press. To counter the untruth that it “maxed out its credit card” last time in power, Labour needs to prove absolutely iron-fisted fiscal probity. A manifesto that is a banquet of glorious spending will be a very hard sell. Voters may like the look of much of the feast, but they suspect the food may be a mirage and they fear the bill. However, it may also encourage them to complain at May’s pitifully empty pauper’s table.
Hold your breath and wait for the blowback from the Tories and their bully press. Headlines in the Mail and Telegraph already blare that it will “take us back to the 70s”. There are few figures in the leaked manifesto, but though Labour claims everything is costed, recent embarrassing ignorance on numbers by Corbyn’s top people raises the worry that their accounting may not survive ruthless broadcast interviews or the neutral scrutiny of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Let’s hope each item is watertight, and all can be paid for only by corporations and the top 5 per cent, with a risky pledge of no tax rises for anyone else.
Here’s the real peril: If these costings fall apart, then the Tories can claim it proves all these policies are unaffordable. Already the right-wing drumbeat pretends that falling funding proves the NHS is an “unsustainable black hole”.
Liking elements of his manifesto won’t reinvent Corbyn: That’s why most MPs knew he couldn’t become a winner and overcome his old negatives. The die was cast long ago. As Ben Page of Ipsos Mori has always said, very few people change their minds during an election campaign. His language is not reassuring to many: He threatens “a reckoning” against the greedy, allowing the Mail to charge him with class war.
But as Corbyn is Labour’s leader there’s no point now in producing some mean little manifesto with minuscule timid pledges. It’s quite right to go large and please Labour people with a dream of what might be: This is no manifesto for Marxist revolution, whatever the Tories will claim. And never mind who leaked it — it has probably done Labour a favour in extra publicity. This manifesto rightly challenges the monstrous cuts that are shredding the entire public realm and it will force May to respond. She will win, but as she dodges everything and everyone, she looks less strong and stable by the day, and here’s a reminder of all that she avoids. The long-term danger is that good policies in this manifesto will wrongly go down in history as “rejected” by voters — when all they will have rejected was Corbyn.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Polly Toynbee is a columnist for the Guardian. She was formerly BBC social affairs editor, columnist and associate editor of the Independent.
