How should we interpret Labour’s manifesto?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/labour-manifesto-ed-miliband

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Anne Perkins: I am struck by how feminised the agenda is

Labour’s ambition is to give voters the confidence that even in austerity, change is not just desirable, but possible. Ed Miliband lined up the party’s heroes, Attlee, Wilson and – yes – Blair, as the leaders who have won the country over to a new idea of what it could look like. It’s the need to convey a sense of optimism about the achievability of change despite the obstacles that makes Attlee, on whose watch the NHS was built, despite the real and financial wreckage of war, the most name-checked of the Labour pantheon.

But Miliband faces a bigger challenge first: overcoming voters’ doubts about Labour’s economic competence. Hence the triple lock on fiscal rectitude that was his leading commitment.

There’s plenty in the manifesto that could be branded old Labour, or at least Blue Labour. The calculation – supported by plenty of poll evidence – is that there is an abiding communitarian spirit in the country that will respond to a genuine commitment to promoting solidarity and shared success rather than putting individual aspiration first. So not just electricity but all the privatised utilities which used to embody a sense of shared good, will be reformed to deliver greater accountability with more attention paid to their social obligations.

Alongside the reiteration of the popular promise to freeze energy bills made two years ago there was also an answer to the Tory pledge of a freeze on rail fares, with a one-year freeze and then a cap. Anyone hoping for a late conversion to the idea of renationalisation of the railways will be disappointed but there will be legislation to allow public service operators to challenge franchise holders, and a promise of more public control over the way privatised transport is run.

There is disappointingly little new on climate change, and plenty to indicate that there is no enthusiasm for challenging Britain’s profligate carbon consumption. The Davies review is used as a figleaf to avoid talking about airport capacity in London, odd when Miliband’s most high-profile contribution to the 2010 manifesto was the no third runway at Heathrow pledge.

The promise of a tough new environmental and regulatory regime for fracking is fine, if fracking is to take place at all, but there’s also a commitment to do what it takes to help North Sea oil and gas through the price downturn. Against that, pledges on the Green investment bank, along with more green jobs and the proposal for insulation for 1m homes in the course of the parliament are necessary but not quite sufficient to tackle our contribution to global warming.

What really struck me was how feminised the Labour policy agenda has become, and what powerful evidence it provides for the shift in perspective that comes from having a significant body of women at the top of the party.

Apart from the emphasis in Miliband’s speech as well as the manifesto on the primacy of public services, he highlighted the launch of a new national primary childcare service. It may look familiar to those who remember the 1998 national childcare strategy, but it is maybe the policy area that could make the biggest difference to families with young children, and an area where successive governments have struggled to succeed. There are good (if vague) words on diversity and the gender balance in parliament and in public bodies.

The most worrying section of the manifesto is its tough message on welfare. The household benefit cap will be retained, and may in some areas even be lowered. Total social security spending will be capped too. Labour would argue that it is a necessary part of what seems to be the under-emphasised message of the manifesto, that community is about mutual obligation. Expect to hear more about that in the next three weeks.

Owen Jones: What Labour has to do is emphasise a vision of hope

Labour’s monumental strategic error, the ball and chain that has dragged the party down over this entire parliament, is the consistent failure to rebut the lie that overspending caused Britain’s economic disaster. The Tories backed Labour’s spending plans pound for pound until after Lehman Brothers came crashing down. The failure to control the banks was, of course, the real culprit, but the Conservatives wanted even less regulation. Perversely, critics of the Blair and Brown era – such as myself – have been forced to defend New Labour’s economic record in a way that the Labour leadership has failed to do. That’s why Labour’s economic credibility has polled so poorly over the past five years, the weak point that may yet help deprive the party of victory. And that’s why we end up with Labour’s manifesto launch screaming: “We will account for every penny – we promise!”

Any emphasis on austerity is a real risk. Conventional wisdom among the commentariat says that Labour has to emphasise it will indeed cut, and mean it. But there have been remarkably few defections among Labour voters to the Tory camp over the past five years. Will those who have defected to the Greens, the SNP or even Ukip be won back by promises that Labour will make cuts? A confession: I’m not convinced, to say the least. What Labour has to do – above all else – is emphasise a vision of hope. Today we saw an assured performance from Ed Miliband for those who put a premium on style. But a convincing and genuine alternative that wins back Green, SNP and even some Ukip voters has to be offered, not more and more cuts. Excessive focus on the deficit will force the political debate on to terms that are most favourable to the Tories. Labour should emphasise tax justice, a living wage, secure jobs, a resolution to the housing crisis, and shifting the economy from one rigged in favour of those at the top in favour of working people.

Matthew d’Ancona: Voters like free schools: Miliband tampers at his peril

The manifesto launch was more impressive than the manifesto itself, but that’s no bad thing in a grand drama. Ed Miliband seemed liberated, confident, firmly on the front foot. He is smart enough to know that he has taken a great gamble in planting his standard so late in the day in the enemy terrain of “fiscal responsibility”. This is Tory turf, whether Labour likes it or not – which is precisely why his brother, David, would have made credibility on the deficit his first objective rather than his last (see the speech he would have given had he been elected leader in 2010). However, Ed cannot rewrite history and later is better than never. His central contention – that the recovery is not reaching enough people and is not matched by a general improvement in quality of life – is a powerful riposte to the principal Tory claims regarding the economy, competence and unfinished business. Above all, he chose a good moment to come into his own. Oddly enough, this is something he shares with Cameron: they both play the big shots well.

In terms of detail, though the accelerated commitment to raise the minimum wage to more than £8 an hour by October 2019 is the only significant new policy on employment, Labour’s commitment to decent-paying jobs is the spine of this manifesto. It knits together Miliband’s declared intent to end the “cost-of-living crisis” with his fresh emphasis upon fiscal responsibility. “Too many [working people] have been driven from secure, full-time work,” says the manifesto, “into precarious, badly paid jobs – many working on zero-hours contracts … Over five million people are in low-paid jobs, earning less than the living wage. There are 1.8m zero-hours contracts; 1.3 million people are working part-time because they cannot get a full-time job.”

Better jobs will not only improve the quality of life of British voters: they will generate the tax revenues that will fund public services and pay off the deficit. Or so, at least, Miliband insists. The objection, especially from smaller businesses, will be that red tape strangles the very growth prime minister Ed would depend upon. A Miliband government would intervene more in the labour market than any administration for decades.

Alongside a ban on “exploitative zero-hours contracts” – not an outright ban, please note – he promises “1m additional green jobs”, a “British investment bank” to assist small and medium-sized businesses, “a guaranteed, paid job for all young people who have been out of work for one year, and for all those over 25 years old and out of work for two years”, and support for the job-creating potential of universities (or “knowledge clusters”). There will be a tax rebate for those businesses that sign up to pay the living wage in the first year of a Labour government.

Too much, or too little? Those who hanker for a national incomes policy and full-throated Keynesianism, or (at the other end of the ideological spectrum) for a government that steps aside and leaves the labour market alone will be equally disappointed. But the Tories’ so-called “jobs miracle” is one of their strongest suits: Miliband’s strategy – to attack quality, rather than quantity – is the logical centre-left response.

In another of the big manifesto areas, education, as always after a period of Tory government, Labour promises to roll back what it regards as structural fragmentation and an assault on the teachers’ unions.

So it was in 1997 and so it will be again in 2015 if Miliband wins: the free school system will be abolished and qualified teacher status made compulsory. The director of school standards in each area will police quality of education – a revival of local education authorities by the back door, the Tories will claim.

As expected, the entire education budget will be ringfenced, just as class sizes will be capped for five- to seven-year-old pupils.

This is an area of clear differentiation between Tory and Labour. Conservatives believe in school autonomy and the primacy of parent power. Labour puts its trust in qualified teachers and in regional officialdom. Voters have grown to like the individual character of academies and free schools. Miliband tampers with this at his peril.

Emma Burnell: It offers market reform in ways that won’t cost the taxpayer money

The Labour manifesto wasn’t full of surprises, but it was a very different Ed Miliband presenting it than many had expected. Calm and confident, he was charming with reporters and in control (even command) of the room, in a way that has sometimes been missing. He looked prime ministerial. This perhaps provided the answer Labour needed to the biggest question this election has been asking of it: can Ed lead?

This was a steady-as-you-go manifesto. Word has it there may be a few more surprises to come as the campaign takes shape. It is the culmination of the journey Labour has taken over the past five years. This has taken them away from the New Labour years of commitment to a light touch approach to the economy. But this journey has not gone back to old Labour promises of a tax and spend approach either.

This is the manifesto of a party that does not shy away from championing active government. It is the point at which government intervention takes place that is new. Labour is seeking to reform the market in ways that won’t cost the taxpayer money, but could have a transformative effect on the way our lives – at work, at school and in communities – are shaped. This “predistribution” has always been Miliband’s (and policy chief Jon Cruddas’s) big idea and now – in policies such as large and earlier than expected increases in the minimum wage, and employee representation on remuneration committees – it is made real. No longer the product of academic discussion, this is how Labour plan to change the country for the better, for good.

Zoe Williams: Questions that remain unanswered

Most of the Labour manifesto proposals that relate to social security have already been announced: the parsimonious and economically senseless two-year cap on child benefit (there are no ancillary plans to make children cheaper to run, for the period) has already been announced by Ed Balls. The two-year period during which migrants cannot claim benefits has already been broadcast quite widely, though it is yet to be determined whether it’s legal. The banning of the bedroom tax is possibly the key element of Labour’s “nicer-than-the-Tories” offer, and as such has been very widely discussed.

On “making work pay”, Labour starts from a significantly different value proposition to the Tories who, when they use this language, mean it to justify cutting unemployment benefits. Labour’s manifesto, conversely, seeks at least in principle to ensure that jobs pay enough to live on, so that supplementary benefits are not needed.

This is a welcome departure from the rhetoric of poverty being created by individual fecklessness, to a worldview in which employers are creating those negative conditions. However, the proposals never follow through on the worldview – if it is a priority to get this “benefits bill under control”, moving the deadline for an £8 per hour minimum wage back to 2019 (from 2020) isn’t, by anybody’s calculation, going to do it. Likewise, the plan to tackle housing costs is weak and piecemeal; the housing benefit cap is to be left in place; local authorities get new, non-specific powers to lobby for rent reductions on behalf of their constituents. It is really unclear how this will work to the benefit of tenants, rather than simply giving them ever less power and leverage in an impossible market.

Disabled people will be the most disappointed – there is no plan to reinstate the Independent Living Fund, and the changes made to the Work Capability Assessment are too vague to count for anything. The young have the most to fear, this line especially: “We will replace out-of-work benefits for 18- to 21-year-olds with a new Youth Allowance dependent on recipients being in training and targeted at those who need it most”. What does that mean, “those who need it most”? That there will be some people in the age group who no longer get out-of-work benefits, but aren’t in the target group for a youth allowance either? What will the training consist of? How much will the youth allowance be? The opacity of all this suggests a very high confidence that 18- to 21-year-olds don’t read manifestos.