Poetry or prose?

Greg Rosen identifies lessons for Ed Miliband from past Labour manifestos

It was in 1983 that Mario Cuomo, famous for his observation that ‘you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose’, was first elected governor of New York. That same year, taking Cuomo’s words to heart, the Labour party sought to win the British general election by endorsing the poetry of Welsh bard Idris Davies. Labour’s manifesto for that fateful election opened with a 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.’

But voters paid little heed to the poetry of either Davies or Foot. And its 23,000 words is remembered by posterity chiefly for its waspish characterisation by the then shadow environment secretary Gerald Kaufman as being ‘the longest suicide note in history’. ‘All those who voted Labour in 1983 were voting for our socialist manifesto,’ as the late Tony Benn subsequently put it to this author. Unfortunately, far more voters were not voting for Labour’s manifesto.

In 1983 Labour might have campaigned in poetry, but it did not govern at all, for its manifesto process failed to recognise the primary purpose of an election manifesto: signalling a willingness to compromise with the electorate. Labour’s 1983 manifesto called for unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community without a referendum that voters simply were not prepared to accept. Indeed, so unhelpful were the pledges contained in Labour’s 1983 manifesto that the Conservatives purchased 1,000 copies to hand out.

Most voters reacted against Labour on what Steve Hilton, former director of strategy for David Cameron, likes to call ‘defining issues’: at the height of the cold war they distrusted a party that wanted to unilaterally scrap the United Kingdom’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.

It was the same story in 1987. The (shorter) 1987 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 were not 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.

If there is a lesson for Labour at the 2015 general election from past manifestos, it is to avoid having policies that make you unacceptable to such a large swath 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 that Labour could not fulfil, such as raising the school leaving age to 15.

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, written under the guiding hand of Michael Young (who later founded the Consumers’ Association and whose son Toby is a prominent advocate of free schools), promised ‘social provision against rainy days, coupled with economic policies calculated to reduce rainy days to a minimum’. To voters, it made sense. ‘Let’s Go with Labour’, the party’s 1964 manifesto, 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’. ‘Time for Decision’ in 1966 was about saying ‘you know Labour government works’, arguing ‘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.

For the general election of 1950 Morrison, Labour’s strategist, shrewdly ensured that, rather than the manifesto looking inwards towards only the working-class core vote, it reached outwards to the middle-class swing voters on which the election depended: ‘Social legislation has benefitted 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 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 credible, practical policies to achieve it, in plain English. Noble aims are insufficient, 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’. Voters did not doubt that Labour wanted to build a better, fairer, society – but they were unconvinced that Labour knew how to achieve it and did not want to risk a government without a clear plan to achieve its goal. This problem, a lack of governing credibility, was again to bedevil Labour following the implosion of the 1929-31 Labour government and was solved only by the party’s participation in the 1940-45 wartime coalition. In the context of austerity which a 2015 Labour government would inherit, given the coalition has backloaded many of the cuts to fall straight after 2015, Labour’s manifesto will need a clear and credible plan to achieve better economic growth than a Conservative government in order to avoid having to explain how a Labour austerity programme of equivalent scale would be implemented.

If Labour’s manifesto in 2015 clearly encapsulates what an Ed Miliband government is for, in a way that inspires sufficient voters, and explains simply and convincingly how those objectives can be achieved, how spending commitments will be paid for and austerity better managed than the Conservatives, then Miliband and his team will have done a good deal of the work necessary to help make it possible for Labour to win.

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