Labour Makes Its Move

This isn’t going to be a full analysis of today’s Labour manifesto, just the bits that interest me most, and whether they tell us anything useful.  Let’s start with the most revealing.

Defence

Notwithstanding we can all read between the lines, they’ve gone for maximum respectability vis-à-vis the casual reader hoping not to find a knock-dead reason for spurning Corbyn.  Support for renewing Trident (sic); 2%-of-GDP minimum expenditure; “The primary duty of government is to guarantee the security of people in the UK“; “We will maintain our commitment to NATO“; “The UK defence industry is world-leading“; etc etc.   

In short: if they’ve succeeded with their bribes elsewhere in the document, they’re hoping this nose-peg job of their own is enough to avoid a million patriotic vetoes in marginal constituencies.

There’s also a continuation here of the workerist strand that runs throughout: the defence industry is lauded for providing skilled jobs; to be encouraged as such.  There’s many a Tory who’d salute that particular flag. 

You can bet there’s an entire closed-session briefing for dyed-in-the-wool Generation-Wuss Trots that starts: “don’t worry about the Defence section, it’s for older-generation comrades who are suffering from false consciousness; we don’t mean a word of it“.  So far, so thoroughly, power-seekingly pragmatic.

Energy

If anybody’s paying attention, this is a real bugger’s muddle.  On the one hand they are hoping to bask in the greenwash they’ve splattered over everything in sight (though they’ve realised committing to zero-carbon 2030 is ludicrous, much as that will disappoint some).  Then there’s the crazy distraction they propose to bring upon themselves by nationalising not only the wires and pipes (which we’ve known about for months) but now also the energy supply business, but handing it over to local authorities.  This guarantees (a) a decade in the courts, and (b) power-failures and general chaos.  Or, more likely, a big U-turn in due course.

But overhanging it all is that workerist theme. 

A thriving steel industry will be vital to the Green Industrial Revolution. Labour will support our steel through public procurement, taking action on industrial energy prices, exempting new capital from business rates, investing in R&D, building three new steel recycling plants and upgrading existing production sites. We will ensure that new technologies aren’t just invented here, but are engineered, manufactured and exported from here. We will put British innovation at the heart of our procurement to support local sourcing and reshoring, so that every investment we make strengthens our manufacturing and engineering sectors and supply chains and creates hundreds of thousands of good, unionised jobs here at home. We will use the power of public procurement to strengthen local jobs and supply chains and will require all companies bidding for public contracts to recognise trade unions, pay suppliers on time and demonstrate equalities best practice… we will ensure the UK’s automotive sector isn’t left behind … by investing in three new gigafactories and four metal reprocessing plants. By supporting UK-made electrical steel we will ensure robust support for an end to end UK supply chain. We’ll also take on the global plastics crisis by investing in a new plastics remanufacturing industry creating thousands of jobs …

Square that with yer zero-carbon future!  And I think we know which one would get priority, in the party that currently supports a new coal mine in Cumbria.  It has a name, by the way: the “Just Transition”.  That’ll be used to cover just about anything.

It’d take a bit of squaring with EU rules, as well.  And they wonder whether Corbyn & McDonnell want In or Out!

Overall

Received Wisdom solemnly reminds UK politicians of two sobering manifesto data-points.  First is Labour’s very own Longest Suicide-Note in History of 1983; and more recently Mrs May’s equally ill-judged 2017 version.  Both suffered from being unable to resist sticking down everything they’d ever dreamed of – and highly counterproductive they were.

Has Labour committed the same mistake again?  The franchise for immigrants and 16-year olds is being smuggled through with all the rest of the bribes, and an adroit Tory counter-campaign should be able to make that alone fatal to Corbyn’s cause.  (I did say ‘adroit’.)  Is this really the election for a compendium of everything the Left has ever dreamed of?   On the Beeb at 1 o’clock, Norman Smith’s only point was, what makes them think this lot can be financed?  Not the reaction they were probably hoping for.

Do they really just want to see it all written down in black and white, so that they can go to their graves saying “if we’d won in 2019, it would have been great“?  And “no-one will ever accuse us of not thinking big: we emptied the tank“.

We don’t have long to wait.

ND