Inside Croydon columnist ANDREW FISHER, pictured, who was the author of Labour’s General Election manifestos in 2017 and 2019, takes a look at what the major parties are offering this time round ahead of polling day on July 4
Manifestos are vital documents. They set out each party’s vision for the country over the next five years, and they become a means to hold them accountable for the promises they made.
His father was a toolmaker: Keir Starmer, sleeves rolled up, at yesterday’s manifesto launch
Given Labour is 20% ahead in the polls and looking destined to become the next government, let’s start by scrutinising their manifesto, which was released yesterday amid much fanfare.
No one was expecting fireworks from a Keir Starmer manifesto, but even I was struck by the sheer poverty of ambition. I was one of the guests on BBC’s Politics Live yesterday lunchtime, where host Jo Coburn asked me whether it was ambitious enough.
“No, nowhere near enough” was my immediate reply.
And it’s not just me saying that. The National Education Union, representing hundreds of thousands of teachers, said Labour’s manifesto “offers no plan to reverse current education cuts”.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies was brutal: “Delivering genuine change will almost certainly also require putting actual resources on the table… Labour’s manifesto offers no indication that there is a plan for where the money would come from to finance this.”
This graph illustrates just how little Labour is actually promising to spend:
With record NHS waiting lists, a crisis in social care, a shortage of teachers, massive backlogs in the law courts, councils, not just Croydon’s, collapsing around the country and our universities on the financial brink, it is frankly a dereliction of duty for a Labour Party not to be making the case for redistributive taxation. And that’s before you get to rising unemployment, rising child poverty and rising homelessness.
That being said, there are some decent policies in Labour’s 2024 manifesto: the New Deal for Working People means “banning exploitative zero hours contracts; ending fire and rehire; and introducing basic rights from day one” for all workers. The further strengthening of trade union rights will also help to drive up wages and improve job security.
Labour is also committing to take the railways back into public ownership, reducing the voting age to 16, abolishing hereditary peers in the House of Lords and removing tax breaks from private schools to boost funding available for the schools used by 93% of our children. It also promises no increases in income tax, National Insurance, VAT or corporation tax.
The Conservative manifesto has its plans for a National Service, more cuts to National Insurance and it had this interesting commitment, which will feel salient for Croydon residents: “We will protect residents from excessive Council Tax rises by ensuring that local people have the final say on Council Tax”.
Sky’s the limit: Rishi Sunak’s campaign has not got any better
You don’t need a long memory to recall Croydon Conservatives jacking up Council Tax by 15% last year, 21% in the space of 12 months, and Michael Gove waiving the already existing legal requirement to hold a referendum!
At the launch on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak declared “the plan is working”.
On the same day the Office for National Statistics contradicted the Prime Minister with fact over opinion, when it revealed the economy failed to grow at all in April.
The previous day, figures were released that showed unemployment was up and employment down. Despite overseeing rising unemployment and rising levels of poverty and homelessness, the Tories have also pledged to cut another £12billion from social security, mostly to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest. As Theresa May once said, “The Nasty Party”.
Reform UK, the limited company that has Nigel Farage as its leader, has just one policy: blame migrants. If you’re looking for a scapegoat, they’re your party. If you want serious solutions, look away now.
In last night’s ITV debate, Nigel Farage said immigration is making us poorer. Ask yourself if that really is the case, or is it a useless government, rip-off landlords, banks hiking your mortgage rate, and profiteering energy, water and rail companies jacking up costs and making bumper profits?
Taking the plunge: Ed Davey’s LibDems dropped us all in it with the austerity coalition
The Liberal Democrats – led by fun-loving Ed Davey (who’d rather you forgot about his time serving in the austerity-imposing coalition government after the 2010 elections) – have as the centrepiece of their manifesto a commitment to fund free personal care for all adults in the social care system, and to introduce a minimum wage for care workers of £2 per hour more than the minimum wage.
Many care workers are paid at the national minimum wage. Some decide to give up, because they can earn more stacking shelves in supermarkets. This has left a shortage of care workers, and our elderly and disabled people neglected. Funding for those policies came from increasing taxes on the super-rich, the oil and gas giants and big tech.
The LibDem manifesto also contained the most ambitious housebuilding targets with 380,000 new homes per year, “including 150,000 social homes”.
Ambitious: Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer
There was no specific council homes target within that, but at least recognition that tenure matters, and not just numbers. It is worth noting that the Labour Party manifesto had no mention of “council housing” specifically at all, possibly the first time ever.
The Green Party’s manifesto is the only one to promise adequate funding to public services to end austerity and begin to tackle staff shortages, backlogs and service cuts.
While it is admirable in making the case for higher taxation on those who can afford it, it is also quite opaque about how its carbon taxes will be levied and how. Given these are a £90billion tax take by the end of the next Parliament, some more scrutiny is needed to understand who will be paying these large sums.
The Greens match Labour’s commitments on workers’ rights, with a £15 per hour minimum wage (with offsets for small businesses), while also pledging “the railways, the water companies and the Big 5 retail energy companies” will be brought into public ownership.
You can read all of the manifestos online via the links below:
- Labour: https://labour.org.uk/change/manifesto-accessibility/
- Conservative: https://manifesto.conservatives.com/
- LibDems: https://www.libdems.org.uk/manifesto
- Green: https://greenparty.org.uk/about/our-manifesto/
For more information on where to vote on July 4 and for the full list of who is standing for election in your constituency, use our widget here:
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
Fisher is also a regular, welcomed pundit on The Croydon Insider podcast, and is a guest on our latest episode – Why Vote? – answering a range of questions on the election and politics. This is FREE to download now from iC’s Patreon page or Spotify. Click here for more info
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- Splash and purge: just another five weeks of campaigning to go
- ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others!’
- How myth of shared ownership has made housing crisis worse
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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It’s a sad state of affairs that a party like Reform seems to be to the left of Labour economically on policies such as raising the minimum threshold to £20k and potentially scrapping the two-child limit. I expect Labour to win in a landslide and on paper it almost looks like a continuation of this Tory Party, there doesn’t look like much to be excited about.
I enjoy reading Andy’s analyses but think the traditional left-right political spectrum he and Jeremy Corbyn had to contend with is gone. ‘Red Andy’ and ‘Even Redder Jeremy’ are yesterday’s men and the future, for now, belongs to wots-is-name. God help us all.