Four Hard Thinking Pieces to read to interpret the Labour Manifesto

Labour's manifesto is not a surprising document. That does not mean it's not a potentially radical one

I was going to write a piece in response to the Labour manifesto, but as I started setting out my thinking on Labour’s manifesto. But as I was thinking about it, I kept coming back to the phrase “as I have said before”.

I think that Labour’s manifesto can be read through the prism of these pieces as a potential permission document for a quite radical transformation of what government and running the UK’s economy could mean.

That doesn’t mean it will happen. But the pieces are in place for it to do so. And the arguments I have made for that are all ones I have set out previously:

Small change? The generous and ungenerous interpretations of Labour's policy stance

“The generous interpretation of Starmer’s reform agenda is not about spending to fix a broken system but truly getting under the hood to fix the machine itself. That could be quite exciting and make big changes to the way the UK economy is run - and who benefits from it. Because in a more self-sustaining Britain, with a more productive economy, we could see a government better able to enact a proper redistribution of the income that productivity brings. We could see a government that shapes that economy so it empowers workers of all kinds. We could see a government that invests in the things that make a nation healthy and saves money on less acute need.”

Securonomics is the right plan. How should it be sold?

“The key difference is that Labour tends to describe houses and Tories tend to describe homes. Building houses is absolutely what Labour should be about. But speaking in the language of homes is the way to get permission to do so.”

Keir Starmer's Thatcher Problem

“I have no real problem with Stamer invoking Thatcher. Nor do I have a problem with him saying that he would like to make changes to the country that are on the scale of those that Thatcher made. We need wholesale change - not least to make up for the changes that she wrought and the long-term damage that still echoes today in our lack of housing - particularly social housing; in our filthy rivers and beaches which can be taken back in a straight line to privatisation of water; and in the austerity brought in by her acolytes as a response to an overmighty city that was started with her ‘big bang’ reforms.”

Pragmatic Values

“This pragmatism might sound quite Blairite in terms of the “what matters is what works” approach that was core to Blair’s government. But I think the book makes a different argument than Blairism did. It’s an argument about deeper, more structural change that if it works, could genuinely be transformative.”

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