They eat trees, drink ink and burn airtime. They come loaded with dangerous hostages to fortune and yet they are regarded as indispensable. They cause no end of angst for party leaders during the build-up to elections and massive trouble after them. David Cameron got so bored reading an early draft of his that he sent his people away to rewrite it. Ed Miliband’s team has agonised over Labour’s version for months. This week, the parties will launch their manifestos.
In an age of deep and often highly justifiable public cynicism towards politicians, the formal publication of party pledges can seem out of time. There was a point during Labour’s internal debates about its manifesto when some asked whether they should bother with one at all. But the traditional rituals will be observed. Labour will unveil its prospectus in Manchester tomorrow followed by the Tories on Tuesday. The parties will make a big event of these launches and journalists will reciprocate by reverencing the rival documents with lots of attention. Voters may be a bit less engaged. And that might be common sense when many promises turn out not to be worth the paper they are printed on. Nick Clegg got screwed by a pledge he made in 2010. Nigel Farage entirely disowned his party’s last manifesto.
Manifesto week is nevertheless regarded as the most crucial one of the campaign so far. The Tories are desperate to get back on the front foot. It is too much to say that the Conservative campaign is in crisis, but there is a definite sound of wobbling in the Tory ranks. If the purpose of a campaign is to accentuate a party’s positives and neutralise its negatives, then the Tories achieved pretty much the exact opposite last week. They were wrong-footed by Labour’s surprise announcement that a Miliband government would abolish non-dom privileges. That left the Conservatives stranded on the wrong side of public opinion. Whatever the detailed arguments about the revenue implications, it is simply not a good look to be the apologists for the super-rich avoiding tax. In an attempt to distract everyone by letting off a detonation somewhere else, the defence secretary was then armed with a dirty bomb and fired off a personal, smeary attack on Ed Miliband that was as crude as it was desperate. Michael Fallon has been denounced not just by Labour people – that you would expect – he has also been rounded on by Tories for being counterproductively ad hominem and by Tory-sympathising generals for playing petty politics with national security. To Labour’s delight, the Tories managed to reinforce their two worst negatives: as the party of the rich and the nasty party.
Mr Fallon was only obeying orders. Orders from David Cameron. And the Tory leader was only obeying orders. The orders of Lynton Crosby, the Australian hired gun who is running the Conservative campaign. One senior Tory recently lamented to me: “David is completely in the grip of Lynton.” There is a growing volume of discontent from Tories about the “Crosbyisation” of their party and the way they are conducting their campaign. One complaint is that their robotically repetitive and narrowly negative messages are not offering voters any attractive reasons to shift into the blue column. What bothers them even more is that it is not working even in its own terms. They wait in vain for the fabled “cross-over” moment when, according to the Crosby strategy, the Tories are supposed to pull into a decisive lead.
These jittery Tories are looking to the manifesto launch to give them a lift by offering voters more than a continuation of austerity. Those hoping for a document radiating a sunny vision seem set to be disappointed. “This is not a time for painting the sky blue,” says one of Mr Cameron’s senior aides. “People won’t believe it.” What the Tories will do is reveal more positive offers to induce voters to come their way. They’ve already begun the release of sections of their manifesto, including promises to freeze rail fares, give workers three days of paid leave for volunteering and a commitment to increase the funding of the NHS. Tory strategists deny that they are rebooting their campaign in a panic and insist that they always planned to move into a more “positive” gear at this stage of the campaign. Which is what they would say whether it is true or not.
Labour’s manifesto preparations have exemplified the dilemma that the party has wrestled with over the past five years. Throughout Ed Miliband’s leadership there has been a tension between being different and being credible. If Labour is not different enough, where’s the incentive to prefer them to the Tories? That problem has been sharpened when the message from the Scottish Nationalists, their Welsh cousins and the Greens is that Labour is Tory-lite. If Labour is not credible enough, its promises won’t be trusted. The fiercest internal arguments over the manifesto have been about where to strike the balance between allaying doubts about Labour and offering inspiring reasons to vote for the party.
I’m told the Labour manifesto will not be a laundry list of policies. The bulk of the party’s “retail offers” to the voters are already on the table. They added another one yesterday when they promised pregnant women one-to-one care by a designated midwife. I expect that, like many of Labour’s promises, will be popular when tested on voters. In fact, Labour wouldn’t have made the promise if it had not gone down well in its own focus groups. What has handicapped Labour is a sense that the sum has been less than the parts. The big test of the manifesto, says one senior Labour MP, is whether it “joins the dots” of the individual pledges by conveying a compelling argument about how Britain can be better.
There is always pressure at this stage of a campaign to make a splash with the manifesto. That pressure to try to beguile the electorate with promised goodies is the more intense when an election is so tight. Which increases the temptation to make pledges that can’t be kept. Last time around, the Tories said they wouldn’t put up VAT – and then promptly did – and wouldn’t touch child benefit – and then did that too. The Lib Dems have paid an enduring price for promising to abolish tuition fees and then agreeing to triple them when they unexpectedly found themselves in government. In the course of the interview with Nick Clegg which we publish in today’s Observer, the Lib Dem leader sighed: “Boy, have I been there. You shouldn’t say stuff before an election without spelling out what it means. I’ve learnt my lesson.”
It doesn’t look like everyone else has, especially not his current coalition partners. The Tories are treating their lead on economic competence as a licence to toss promises around like confetti. The party of supposed financial rectitude is the worst offender when it comes to making unfunded pledges. Will the Tories say how they are going to finance their new commitment to the NHS? Or their promises of tax cuts? Will they reveal how they expect to locate £12bn in savings from the welfare budget and who they are going to take that money from? I suspect we already know the answer to those questions. It begins with an N and ends with an O. Will Labour and the Lib Dems spell out where they will find the money to meet their deficit-reduction targets? None of the parties is being honest about that. What the manifestos do not say will often be more instructive than what they do say. The furtive silences will speak more eloquently than the flowery words.
The Lib Dems’ traumatic experience – SNP take note – is a warning to the smaller parties to take care when writing their wishlists. Reckless pledges made in manifestos can come back to bite them. The high likelihood of a hung parliament hangs over these launches in another way. David Cameron and Ed Miliband will vaunt their promises as if each is destined to be a prime minister enthroned at the apex of a majority government with the assured votes in parliament to turn all their pledges into law. Yet every poll continues to tell us that, of all the possible outcomes of this election, a government in command of a solid majority is among the least likely of results. These manifestos are best regarded as opening positions for post-election bargaining. In continental countries, where familiarity with coalition has educated voters in this reality of multi-party politics, that is well understood. In Britain, we are still on the nursery slopes of learning what it means.
Whoever gets the keys to Number 10 is going to be confronted with a legitimacy problem. Whether it is David Cameron or Ed Miliband, unless there is a dramatic shift in opinion before polling day, they will probably get there with the positively expressed support of not much more than a third of the voters. That legitimacy problem will be multiplied manyfold if the country subsequently concludes that the prime minister cheated his way to power on a fraudulent prospectus.
Old-fashioned as they may seem to be, these manifestos will matter. Not just during the election, but even more so for what happens after it.
