The traditional view of electoral politics in the UK is of two parties, one of the Centre-Left and one of the Centre-Right, who struggle with one another for control over the establishment. The one that succeeds is expected to implement their manifesto, a vision of the policies for the coming years - diametrically opposed to those of the opposition.
Yet the reality is that there has been - for some time, and accentuated in this election campaign - a lot of pretty obvious similarities between, and almost imitation of each other by, the supposedly fundamentally oppositional traditional Left and Right parties, Labour and Conservative (Robinson, 2015; Peston, 2015).
In many ways, though, that is kind of the point of majoritarian electoral competition. If the parties are competing for votes, rather than purely representing them, then by necessity they must appeal to the broadest possible audience. That broad vision, for which both parties try to sell their manifesto as the best representative, is called the political consensus. In the UK, that consensus has leaned slightly to the Right-of-Centre over the last five years -
in response to thirteen years of Centre-Left government (NatCen, 2015).
So when both of 2015's main parties offer to be tough on immigration, harsh on welfare, and efficient with the public finances - particularly in needing to find £30bn to balance the budget (Peston, 2014), and when they talk about working people and families, they are trying to appeal to what they believe to be the issues that reflect the hopes, fears, concerns and values of the broadest possible audience.
With the expansion of Britain's political system over the last five years, from a two-party system to a multi-party system, a new element has been added to what a political manifesto has to achieve. As the number of parties represented increases, the chances of a major party claiming the number of seats needed for a majority decreases. By making one-party majorities difficult to achieve, alliances become essential. The manifesto becomes a means of communicating with other parties as well as with voters, as the starting point for future negotiations (Rawnsley, 2015).
To fully comprehend the manifesto released by any of the parties in 2015, the reader now has to consider all of these factors.
The problem is that, for many, it is hard to distinguish between the message being sent out to voters by each of the different parties. The protected and increased funding for the NHS, the clampdowns on immigration and on working-age welfare, an increase in house building, and a commitment to balancing public expenses and revenue: the four largest parties - in terms of support in the popular polls across the UK - all fall clearly within these parameters.
But it would not be right to say, however, that there are no differences.
Conservatives and UKIP
Conservative and UKIP plans have both been criticised for offering all sorts of tax cuts, alongside additional spending, even as they commit to going further and deeper with austerity cuts than has already been seen.
The Conservatives have been singled out, in particular, for repeatedly failing to address what will be targeted for spending cuts (BBC, 2015). David Cameron himself has even gone so far as to say that voters should simply trust the Conservative record (Gage, 2015). Aside from cuts, the Conservative manifesto places a hard focus on convincing people that the party cares about working people - from extending Right-to-buy to housing association tenants, and offering some discounts; to taking minimum wage workers out of tax, raising the minimum wage and creating more apprenticeships. But all of these are offset by other policies. There is a commitment to cutting taxes on businesses, increasing the legal threshold required for strikes and taking welfare away from young people.
UKIP seems set upon tax cuts as well - acting as little more than the
extreme-wing of the Conservative Party. Their plans include what Nigel
Farage termed an £18bn tax give-away. Their manifesto also contains a
greatest hits compilation of the other parties' most popular policies,
their own obsessions like anti-immigration, and plans to cut funding to
the EU, to international aid, to Scotland
and Wales, even to axe infrastructural projects like HS2 - seeking to
save some £29bn in the process. But all the talk of saving money from
withdrawing and scrapping all seems very
short term and short sighted (Elliot, 2015).
£29bn in cuts to
address the deficit and fund the NHS, plus another £18bn to be found in
tax cuts, constitutes a lot of money to be found without taking into
account the fact that these cuts could result in damage to Britain's
economic and financial interests. The money spent on the EU and
International Aid in particular go to facilitating better conditions,
here and abroad, for ourselves as well as others. Much of the EU
spending notably returns to the UK, in the form of grants to support
local councils and scientific research.
With Conservative plans to take less revenue - a reduction on inheritance tax, more spending on opening free schools, more funding for the NHS, a doubling of the free childcare allowance, taking minimum wage workers out of tax, building 200,000 homes, extending right-to-buy for tenants of social housing, keeping museums and galleries free to enter, freezing the BBC license fee, and, on top of all of it, finding around £30bn in order to eliminate the deficit - it is a glaring omission that we do not clearly know where the money will come from. While some Conservatives have offered the vague answer that a recovering economy would increase tax revenue and so offset any tax give-aways (Ridley, 2015), it would seem that a voter would be gambling on quite a lot with a vote for a Conservative government.
Labour
The traditional alternative to the Conservatives would seem to be offering a different kind of gamble. While Labour have consistently rejected the suggestion that they will cover spending commitments with borrowing, their slower and steadier approach to lowering the deficit and debt would certainly leave them room for a little greater flexibility (Peston, 2015{2}). The party appear to be aiming to use their focus on raising living standards, by doing things like raising the minimum wage to £8 an hour by the end of the next parliament and promote the living wage, to ultimately increase tax revenues - in a manner parallel to Conservative plans dependent upon economic growth - and offset any spending commitments.
This kind of attention to the fiscal details is all part of Labour's attempt to rebuild its credibility (Elliott, 2015{2}). After the economic crisis began on the party's watch, there seems to be an understanding that Labour needs to re-establish its credentials. Yet that determination to be seen as credible has meant the party has signed up for an economic orthodoxy run very much according to a conservative narrative (Eaton, 2015), and faces accusations from other parties, such as the SNP, of offering little more than austerity-lite (Wintour & Mason, 2015).
That means trying to find different ways of doing what Labour previously relied upon the state to do. Promises to reinstate the 50p tax rate and to end Non-Dom tax status signal a move away from New Labour, but the commitment to austerity refrains the party from moving to the traditional ground of taxing, borrowing and spending (Peston, 2015{3}). Instead, by increasing the minimum wage, proposing ways of tackling rising rent and energy costs, and capping private profits from NHS contracts - rather than simply replacing market solutions with public control - Labour seems to be suggesting that it has learnt its lesson when it comes to trying to micromanage everything from central government.
Liberal Democrats
For those that agree with the mainstream consensus, the safe option would seem to be the Liberal Democrats. The party has reduced its need for particularly deep cuts, as they try to balance the books, by promising to raise taxes on the wealthier, to restrict some of their benefits, and to introduce new levies like the Mansion Tax on their homes. Meanwhile they still leave themselves free to expand spending later in the Parliament, once the deficit is eliminated and the economy is growing - particularly on the NHS to which the Lib Dems were the first to commit to funding by a full £8bn more per year by the end of the next Parliament. Yet beneath the surface of the Lib Dem manifesto policies themselves, there is the appearance of an interesting division.
In some ways it would seem to be a revealing tale of two liberalisms. The manifesto was prepared by a group headed up by David Laws and constructed with the help of the party's usual process of democratic policy creation. The overall content of the manifesto itself represents the Centre-Left social liberalism of the party membership at large - protections of rights and liberties, combined with action to ensure an 'opportunity for everyone' - and contains many policies green in colour and libertarian in flavour (Wintour, 2015). Priority is given to investments in industrial regeneration - particularly digital and green energy based - and to the introduction of their 'Five Green Laws', along with indulging the party's love for rights and liberties - this time with protections for digital rights and for the rights of journalists (Elliot et al, 2015).
However the priorities from that manifesto, and the tightly controlled message constructed around it (The Guardian, 2015), are right out of Laws' Orange Book Market Liberalism, seen by many as the Lib Dems' Right-wing. The presentation of the Lib Dem manifesto - which sets it aside from the two traditional political powerhouses by having their coalition negotiation priorities on the front cover - focus heavily upon the narrative used to justify the coalition and represent the party's main policy successes therein. The fact that the majority of the front cover commitments have been copied by the Conservatives - and the absence of a mention of the UK's membership of the Europe Union - is notable.
Yet there is still plenty of common ground to which Ed Miliband can pitch - his main compromise will be meet the Lib Dem priorities already co-opted by the parties of the Right. The rest of the Lib Dem manifesto looks like it would integrate with that of Labour quite neatly. From a commitment to staying in Europe, to the introduction of a Mansion Tax and increasing taxes on the wealthier, there is much that a Lib-Lab accord could agree on without a fight. Labour action on letting agent fees and the Lib Dem policy of help-to-rent tenancy loans represent what might well be easily integrated, pretty comfortably, with a Labour system.
While the the priorities and message make it easy to see another term with the Tories, the manifesto at large appeals to a coalition with Labour. Sitting between the two, Clegg's team are working hard - favouring a controlled strategic message over openness and idealism (Green, 2015) - to present the Lib Dems as the more attractive prospective governing partner to all sides, when compared to the SNP or UKIP (Robinson, 2015{2}).
Greens
Yet not everyone is convinced by the conventional wisdom, however balanced and reasonable it may be presented. The Green Party represents the progressive alliance group of parties - including Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland - in its opposition to the dominant pro-austerity, deficit-reduction narrative.
The Green Party's pitch to voters represents the Left-wing ground that some feel Labour has abandoned (Behr, 2015). Renationalisation of the railways, completely excising privatisation from the NHS, the introduction of a £10 living wage, a 60p top rate of tax, an expansion of the public sector, the abolition of tuition fees and the abandonment of the economics of austerity, growth and balanced budgets - these all represent an occupation of political ground Labour clearly feels it cannot win from.
The problem facing the Greens is that their pitch also means far more spending and far more borrowing to pay for a complete change of direction in terms of the size of the state. As the election gets closer and gaps get tighter, they will probably be squeezed out in favour of a safer option. That will mean a best case scenario of picking up only a very few seats, with which they can do little but pressure a minority government. That means deciding how to balance their idealism against the reality of what they can actually achieve (The Guardian; 2015{2}) - the very thing upon which the Lib Dems ran aground in 2010.
'Sooner or later, idealism and realism have to come to some sort of accommodation.'
For the Greens, according the MP and former leader Caroline Lucas, that means crafting a set of priorities that can at as an anchor to restrain Labour's move to the Right (Mason, 2015). Yet it is the commitment to some deeply idealistic policies found in the Green manifesto that will be the main attraction for many - chief examples amongst them being the Citizen's Income with its promise of an end to poverty and the abolition of tuition fees. But those are not the priorities of all supporters and members, many of whom put their vision of environmental sustainability first. Managing those tensions will be key to this manifesto, and how it is applied in the next parliament, not pulling the party apart.
The Underlying Values
Those ideals, lying beneath the often fairly similar priorities and policies, are an important part of manifesto. They can be woven in a co-ordinated into the fabric of the policies contained within it, or for parties like UKIP, remain hidden beneath a deflective surface of popular policies taken from other parties.
For example, behind the Conservative expansion of Right-to-buy - on its surface increasing the supply of houses to help ordinary people onto the property ladder - has been criticised as a Thatcherite sell-off of public property that does little to address the actual problem. It has been accused of instead furthering the lack of access to affordable shelter for the less well off, by depleting reserves of social housing (Jones, 2015). That policy chimes consistent with the Conservative emphasis upon reducing the size of the state, putting the burden of welfare upon the shoulders of the individuals themselves within the private market.
Both of the two main parties share similar approaches to both immigration and welfare - likely reacting to cover political ground opened up by the campaigns against immigrants, and those receiving working age benefits, led by UKIP and the Right-wing press (Greenslade, 2015). But their reasons for doing so are different.
Labour, caught between the arguments of
Blue Labour - that the party needs to recapture working class voters by appealing to their conservatism - and their own attempts to divert attention away from immigration and on to low pay and falling living standards, seem reluctantly to have taken a cynical position as a qualified concession. The party have spoken of some controls on immigration as a campaign priority, but have kept their focus on low pay and living standards.
On welfare the matter seems even less clear. While the Tories talk of rewarding hard work with a plan seemingly based on relative comparison - cutting taxes for low paid workers and punishing those in need of welfare with more and heavier restrictions (Peston, 2015{4}) - Labour have moved to the Right to cover the Tories almost blow for blow in restricting benefits. Young people face particularly severe cuts in support. That move, along with the shift on immigration, is causing some confusion as to what the party is actually standing for (Perkins et al, 2015).
Multi-party politics
Amongst the positives of a shift to multi-party politics is that it allows for the possibility of parties as representatives - if the biggest parties could let go of their lust for power. Parties representing different ideals would represent their supporters in finding alliances and common grounds for co-operation that do not depend everyone being forced under one big tent.
The parties could focus upon representing a consistent set of values or priorities, like those found in the Lib Dem or Green manifesto, values like a free society or a sustainable society, and less on trying to appeal to all audiences. A centrist balance between idealistic visions is then achieved by a coalition after an election, where as broad a group of parties as possible agree to work on achieving their common or compatible ideas.
Right now, though, we are still bogged down in the practicality of majoritarian politics. The Tories and Labour find little room for an idealistic vision, and policies that reflect those values are watered down before they even reach the pages of the manifesto. Their concern is to gather as many voters as possible in order to claim control over the establishment and its power - the same old story.
While the Lib Dems remain the most well adapted to the realities of multi-party politics, with a manifesto that finds room for their ideals but sets them beneath the priorities for post-election negotiations - a mixture of ideals and practicalities - it is likely that only the Greens who have presented a vision of a society, in their manifesto, that truly represents an uncompromising pursuit of their values.
At this election, the absence of major concessions to practicality will likely count against them. But in the future we might possibly, hopefully, see it a little more often - if the traditional parties cannot reimpose their system on 7th May.
