When Ed Miliband sits scribbling Labour’s manifesto for the forthcoming general election, he will do well to have in mind the highlights and lowlights of its illustrious forbears. By the time of the next election, he will be hoping that Labour’s poll ratings will have improved from the depths they have plumbed in recent months – depths which have brought unfavourable comparisons with Labour’s disastrous electoral performance at the 1983 general election.
The 23,000-word manifesto for that election was dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’ by the waspish tongue of the then shadow environment secretary Gerald Kaufman. Famously it called for unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community, abolition of the House of Lords and the renationalisation of recently denationalised industries like British Telecom, British Aerospace and the British Shipbuilding Corporation. Less famously it had an almost poetic foreword by Labour leader Michael Foot: ‘Let’s put a stop to defeatism, and put a stop too to all those sermons about Victorian values. The labour movement – the Labour party and the trade unions acting together – came into being, as one of our poets, Idris Davies, said, to end “the long Victorian night”. It was a fight to introduce civilised standards into the world of ruthless, devil-take-the-hindmost individualism.’ I would reproduce it here in full but for lack of space.
And that was part of Labour’s problem in 1983. Most people didn’t take the time to read Foot’s poetic allusions – although Conservative HQ did purchase 1,000 copies of the manifesto to hand out to Conservative activists to stiffen their resolve. Most voters reacted against Labour on what Steve Hilton likes to call ‘defining issues’: at the height of the cold war they distrusted a party that wanted to unilaterally scrap the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and having suffered the growing unreliability of UK-made cars they were sceptical of Labour’s plan to use import controls to stop them from buying anything else!
In truth, Labour’s defeat in 1983 was about more than just its manifesto. It was about the madness of Militant and the self-indulgent fratricide of the Bennite left. It was the same story in 1987. The manifesto opens with a powerful attack by Neil Kinnock on the broken society created by eight years of Tory rule, and continued with myriad plans to build a better Britain, including the not immodest pledge: ‘We will reduce unemployment by one million in two years.’ But voters weren’t listening: despite the improvements in Labour’s campaign professionalism wrought by Peter Mandelson and his team, the complex notes of Kinnock’s plans were drowned out by the noise of Labour’s defence policy falling apart under media scrutiny.
One lesson from previous manifestos is to avoid having policies that make you unacceptable to such a large swathe of voters as to make victory impossible. Indeed, as a general rule, the best manifestos avoid needless hostages to fortune. The 1929 manifesto carried a fairly large hostage to fortune with Labour’s commitment to ‘No pledges we cannot fulfil’, followed by pledges such as raising the school leaving age to 15 that by 1931 Labour had found very hard to fulfil indeed.
If Miliband is looking for inspiration in previous Labour manifestos, he will find some more useful than others. Suffice to say that Labour’s opposition in 1900 to compulsory vaccination, and antagonism in the 1906 manifesto to immigrant Chinese workers, are unlikely to find themselves rejuvenated as headline pledges for Labour’s 2010 manifesto.
Miliband must avoid the jargon and managerialism that has colonised the speeches of far too many ministers who should know better. But flowery rhetoric on its own is not enough either, as Labour’s leader Ramsay MacDonald found in 1923 when through the party’s manifesto he unsuccessfully urged voters ‘to refuse to make this general election a wretched partisan squabble about mean and huckstering policies … to believe in the possibility of building up a sane and ordered society, to oppose the squalid materialism … to hold out their hands in friendship and good will to the struggling people everywhere who want only freedom, security and a happier life’.
The best manifestos capture the spirit of the times. They are the product of a leadership that knows where it wants to go, what it wants to say, and says it. They have a core theme, and policies that cohere around it and are not, as Herbert Morrison described the left’s early 1950s obsession with creating an ever-longer list of industries to nationalise, simply a ‘shopping list’. Labour’s 1945 manifesto promised ‘social provision against rainy days, coupled with economic policies calculated to reduce rainy days to a minimum’. To voters, it made sense. Nineteen-sixty-four’s ‘Lets go with Labour’ was an optimistic paean to planning, a call to action to ‘the go-ahead people with a sense of national purpose, thriving in an expanding community where social justice is seen to prevail’; 1966’s ‘Time for Decision’ was about saying ‘you know Labour government works’, about saying ‘this is a government that governs: it does not flop along from crisis to crisis as the Tories did’, and asking voters for a larger majority than the wafer-thin majority of three seats Labour had secured in 1964.
In 1950, though part of the manifesto was a defence of Labour’s record, there was a clear case put forward for another five years of Labour. Moreover Labour’s strategist, Herbert Morrison, shrewdly ensured that rather than looking inwards towards only the working-class core vote, Labour reached outwards to the middle-class swing voters on which the election depended: ‘Social legislation has benefited all sections of the community, including members of the middle classes. Hundreds of thousands of middle class and professional families have been relieved of one of their worst anxieties – the fear of the sudden illness, the expensive operation, the doctors’ crippling bills. What is needed now is not so much new legislation as the wise development, through efficient and economical administration, of the services provided by these Acts’.
In contrast, Labour’s manifesto for the 1951 election was more of an apologia for not having done more, and an attack on the Tories for being likely to do less. It was far more simplistically ‘Forward with Labour or Backward with the Tories’, and gave far less of a ‘forward offer’ from Labour, though memorably it did pledge to cut taxes on middle and lower earners: ‘As soon as tax reductions become possible we shall still further reduce taxation of wages, salaries, moderate incomes and moderate inheritances.’
In several elections at which Labour has been defeated, the manifesto has been less focused on the brass-tacks issues facing voters than it should have been. The 1951 manifesto, like that of 1955, opened discursively with a focus on foreign policy and the importance of securing world peace. Likewise in 1959, the manifesto concluded with a peroration that implied that the hopes of the world rested upon Labour’s narrow shoulders: ‘At this historic moment a British government with a clear policy based on the ethical principles of socialism can exercise a decisive influence for peace. Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world still look to Britain for moral leadership and eagerly await the result of this general election.’ Labour lost.
Where Labour has won elections, as in 1997, the manifesto has combined a clear vision of relevance to voters with practical policies to achieve it, in plain English. And it has been underpinned by a clear political dividing line with the opposition. It is not good enough, as Labour found to its cost in 1970, to assert that a Labour government will run Britain better than ‘yesterday’s men’: the discredited Tories of the past. John Major made the same mistake in 1997 when he tried to claim that the lack of ministerial experience of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made them unsuited to lead Britain.
If Labour’s manifesto in 2010 clearly encapsulates what a fourth term is for, in a way that inspires sufficient voters, and explains simply and convincingly how those objectives can be achieved, and why Conservative claims that their policies too will deliver better schools and healthcare are untenable, then Miliband and his team will have done a good deal of the work necessary to help make it possible for Labour to win.