On Labour and Conservative: Manifestos

Not a Spanish dish, but finally the parties' manifestos are out; the Labour one here, and the Conservative one here. Stephanie Flanders has a very interesting post analysing the financial implication of the promises, and works out (amongst other things) that the difference between Labour and Conservative pledges on financial matters are £7bn by 2015-16, which amounts to 1% of GDP. Essentially neither party are being open about their plans for government spending and taxation after the election. Flanders makes the very obvious point that an opposition without access to the government machinery would not be expected to give the answer the party sitting in power with access to the full resources of the Treasury won't give.

Bagehot in the Economist compares the two main parties' manifestos here.

Either way, the difference between the two on this matter is more style than substance - until fairly recently, Brown's attack on the Conservatives has been that they were going to "cut" while Labour "invested". Now Brown's approach is to say that the Conservatives would hurt the recovery, while Labour would protect it (he doesn't say how he'd do this). Conservatives have been claiming that Brown has served Britain badly in the recession (funny how politicians claim that an economy in a boom is all thanks to them, while an economy in recession is someone else's fault, guv. I seem to remember that Norman Lamont, a previous Tory chancellor, saying the same thing during the recession of the early 90s).

Any answer to the AS questions about political parties (there is likely to be a "b" and "c" question about the Labour party and its traditions vs "new" Labour, and one about the Conservative party and Thatcher vs Cameron) should mention the election and some of the current strands. I would consider it highly unlikely to achieve a high mark without mentioning this crucial event.

I cannot claim that the following will be an exhaustive account of the competing ideas of the parties. In no particular order, the Labour party is a left of centre political party, with traditions of socialism, although it is moderate and has moved away from the extreme ideas evidenced with the 1983 Manifesto ("the longest suicide note in History"), and in the "Militant" tendency of the Labour-dominated Liverpool council of the 1980s. See here for a short news item about Labour expelling militant from its ranks in 1985. I can't find the extraordinary clip of Neil Kinnock speaking at that year's conference, but if I do I'll post a link:



Labour moved away from the 1970s policies of high taxation and high government spending (see for example the policies of the Labour Chancellor Denis Healey). High taxation and the calling in of the International Monetary Fund to save the country from bankruptcy lead to Labour's critics for years portraying them as unable to run the economy well. The traditional Conservative Party criticism for years was that Labour was the party of "Tax and Spend".

New Labour under Blair and Brown benefited from the collapse of trust in the Conservative Party's stewardship of the British economy thanks to the exit from the ERM. In addition, they both attracted the support of business (as mentioned in this post by the BBC's Robert Peston), and promised at successive elections not to increase Income Tax. In addition, "new" Labour promised to increase spending on Public services starved of funds under previous Conservative administrations, while using market mechanisms to promote efficiency.

It is not without irony that Brown has seemingly managed to loose the support of business leaders, and his belief in the power of markets to promote efficiency and good practice (for example in the dropping of Royal Mail privatisation from their Manifesto). In addition, Brown and Darling have decided to raise the top rate of Income tax in the recent Budget. Robert Peston has said that in some ways it is the end of "new" Labour, with the party reverting to type, with the country's finances in a very bad way and a Labour government increasing taxes (Stephanie Flanders has said here in her analysis of the Labour Manifesto that the IFS notes since 1997 Labour has increased net taxes for families).

Health care policy has changed in recent years too - under Blair, spending was increased and targets were introduced. A certain amount of market-orientated reform was introduced. Current policy on health is to increase central control by introducing Rights to the NHS which give patients the right to a certain degree of service.
However, it is still a moderate, left-of-centre party who are trying to appeal to middle-class swing voters who supported them in droves in 1997. Plenty of detail here for any relevant question, hopefully, and that's without mentioning "education, education, education", "tough of crime, tough on the causes of crime" and the change to Clause 4.

More soon on the Conservatives in a similar vein. Let me know if I have missed anything significant.