Tried to be everything to everyone

The argument

Voters are not fools. They understand something manifesto writers can forget: when a government enters office it has a finite amount of political capital, and every policy it pursues draws that reserve down. Legislative time, ministerial attention, party discipline and public patience are all limited, and a government must use this capital to fulfil the most important policies of its election manifesto rather than everything it once promised. This is why most parties put one or two signature policies in the manifesto. A short list is a statement of priority, and priority is what makes a promise credible. Labour's 2019 manifesto did the opposite. Its decision to include many big-ticket policies at once, including its free broadband policy, increased NHS funding, more spending on the elderly population, and the eradication of university tuition fees, meant that each substantial undertaking had to compete with the others for the same finite reserve. Taken together they exceeded any plausible account of what a single government could carry through, and the effect was not to make the offer more attractive but to reveal the hollowness of the policies. A list that long cannot be a list of priorities, and voters were left with no way to tell which pledges the party would actually fight for and which would quietly fall away once the difficulties of government began. The judgement voters made followed directly from that. They could see that the government would not have the political capital to bring all of these policies to fruition, and they drew the natural inference: by promising the world, the party would deliver nothing. What was intended as generosity read instead as an attempt to be everything to everyone, and a large manifesto that attempted to do too much alienated many potential Labour voters in the 2019 General Election.

Context

The manifesto tried to do too much. It featured policies to appeal to the elderly, free broadband, the eradication of university tuition fees for students, and a promise to reduce the voting age to 16. In trying to make everybody happy, the manifesto made nobody happy.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Labour’s manifesto needed to do something for everybody. Under the Conservatives, everybody has seen their economic floor lowered and their safety nets dismantled. The Labour manifesto didn’t attempt to people please, it merely identified social and economic injustices and called them by name. The manifesto set out to empower renters, increase support for pensioners, improve the lives of disabled people, tackle in-work poverty, restore dignity to the NHS and reduce income inequality. These policies set out to roll back the Conservatives’ austerity program and provide a remedy to many of the injustices that plague modern Britain. Many in the country saw the manifesto for what it was, a prescription for Britain’s many ills, not a people-pleasing, everything-to-everyone wish list.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The voters did not "see through" the manifesto. Many of the policies were highly popular.