Labour’s manifesto must speak to the challenge of the age

The Paul Richards column

There are times when a manifesto answers the questions of the age, when political prose transcends the page and captures the popular imagination. The Liberals managed it 1906, Labour in 1945, and the Tories in 1979. In each case, the manifesto was more than a collection of policies; it set a new course in politics.

A successful manifesto need not contain detailed prescriptions. The Tory manifesto of 1979 was not a detailed blueprint of the privatisations that followed, any more than Labour’s 1997 manifesto outlined the distribution of wealth and opportunity that took place in the early noughties. You’d be hard-pushed to find a detailed blueprint for the NHS in Labour’s 1945 manifesto, because none existed. But a successful manifesto can signal a shift of priorities and echo people’s needs and desires. This is what Labour’s 2010 manifesto needs to do.

There is always a danger that Labour’s manifestos are simply a shopping list of policies, each one the product of tough negotiation and compromise. The early promise of the national policy forum (NPF) has not been fulfilled with the birth of genuine members’ democracy. At the NPF session in July 2008 (the so-called ‘Warwick II’ meeting) it was clear that the trade unions had the upper hand, and it was clutching a list of demands.

A few policies, such as Votes at 16, were passed thanks to pressure from the constituency reps and Young Labour. The bulk of the session was a negotiation between the government and the unions, ahead of an election which was being planned for October that year. The final demand wrested from the No.10 negotiators by the unions at the NPF was another NPF before the election. But the signs are that this won’t happen. Nor will the ballot of every member which Gordon Brown announced in his first days in Downing Street, another casualty of the party’s near-bankruptcy. We’re promised a ‘consultation’ instead. Form a queue here.

The problem with the party’s federal structure is that policies become bargaining chips, and our manifestos can become incoherent. It’s a little like the Prime Minister’s speeches to conference, which are the work of many hands. Each announcement is designed to appeal to disparate audiences, from Dave Prentice to the Daily Mail. The result can be a patchwork quilt, rather than a clear pattern. That was one reason why the ‘longest suicide note’ was so long and so self-harming in 1983. The other was that the Labour moderates let the Left write whatever nonsense they wanted without demurring, to give them enough rope to hang themselves.

When manifestos work well, it is when they have a single ‘voice’ and a clear narrative. Every manifesto is the product of its times. Whilst Michael Young is credited with writing the 1945 manifesto, it was really written by Beveridge and Keynes, by the Fabian Society and Co-op, by the TGWU and NUM, by Evan Durbin, and by a generation who wanted no return to the slums and dole queues. But a manifesto should read like a single document, written by a single author not a committee. That’s what we managed in 1945 and 1997. Whoever ends up being charged with the authorship – currently it’s Ed Miliband – they need to turn off the ‘cut and paste’ function on their laptop and start with a blank page. Is it too much to ask for some poetry? Perhaps a phrase which rings out and lingers in the memory? If it reads like a Government White Paper or the deficit reduction plan, we are in trouble. It must appeal to emotions, not intellects. There must be stories, not statistics. No graphs, just visions of a better Britain.

The policy detail should to tell a bigger story, and describe a broader attitude or approach. If you cast your mind back to the 1997 pledge card, the policies were not ends in themselves. Our promise to half the time for young offenders from arrest to sentence was our way of saying we understood people’s frustrations with the criminal justice system. Our pledge to create smaller class sizes by scrapping the assisted places scheme was all about saying that we wanted decent education for the many not the few. Policies should be sellable in ten seconds on a doorstep, and speak volumes about who we are.

Above all, the manifesto needs to answer the age-old question WIIFM: what’s in it for me? It is right that our manifesto addresses the big issues: climate change, the recession, the rise of violent extremism, trade justice and Britain’s place in the world. But none of this wins many votes on the streets of Slough or the estates of Essex. These issues are what Labour activists care deeply about, but they don’t play in Peoria.

The manifesto needs to be packed with practical bread-and-butter ideas to answer the concerns of the pensioners plagued by noisy neighbours, the parents petrified that their children are getting into gangs, the patients desperate for more choice and voice within the NHS, the passengers sick of packed, slow trains, the young people who want to do more than flip burgers.

This week Gordon Brown named the troika in charge of the election campaign: Mandelson, Harman and Douglas Alexander. Soon we will have Labour candidates in every seat. No-one in the Labour Party is booking a holiday in the weeks before 6th May. Now we need a manifesto which matches our determination to win.