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| What do you think of the Labour manifesto? Join us for a live discussion | |
| (about 20 hours later) | |
| 11.50am BST | |
| 11:50 | |
| Owen Jones | |
| Here’s Guardian Member Eric, via email: | |
| Critics of Labour’s spending plans say either a) they are unaffordable, full stop; or b) the measures used to pay for them will damage the economy in the long run (e.g. by hitting corporations, wealth creators etc). How is anyone supposed to make sense of this and where do we find the truth? In the end, should we just make a gut judgement based on our existing worldview? If so, where does that leave the undecided? | |
| One of the big problems which has caused Labour to struggle is the failure to explain what happened in the financial crash. The Tories backed every single penny Labour spent before the crash: it was only weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed when the Tories began to claim that overspending was the cause of Britain’s economic ailments, rather than the small matter of a global financial collapse. This myth was cemented in the aftermath of the 2010 general election, when Labour embarked on an introspective leadership campaign. The party never recovered, allowing the Tories to ask (convincingly) in the 2015 general election campaign: why hand the keys back to the driver who crashed the car? | |
| Labour’s 2015 manifesto was fully costed in a way the Tory manifesto wasn’t (and the Tories thought they’d negotiate away some of those pledges in a post-election coalition). But it didn’t matter, because the party had been defined in the public eye by the Tories and their media allies, and Labour had failed to effectively combat that myth. | |
| Labour have promised they’ll fully cost this transformational manifesto – but the myth of 2008 still hangs around their neck, and the party (unfairly) will have to fight so much harder to prove its sums add up. And let’s not forget: most voters don’t pour over manifestos, they very occasionally zone in to the campaign and make a gut judgement. | |
| 11.45am BST | |
| 11:45 | |
| Zoe Williams | |
| Here’s a question from Rupert, received via email: | |
| Given the inevitable claims that Labour’s manifesto plucks fruit from the “magic money tree”, how can the left start to change wider public understanding of how the economy works?Hey Rupert. The New Economics Foundation is doing some brilliant analysis of people’s perception of the economy – I’m actually not sure if I’m allowed to talk about this yet, but what the hell – and found the two core misconceptions, driving the idea that we’re broke and we can’t afford anything, were these: first, the economy as a bucket, a finite pot from which too many people were trying to take out and not enough putting in; second, the “functioning” economy as a thing of the past. People often couldn’t name a time when they thought things were going well – we were in a debt bubble in the 90s and 00s, skint in the 80s, on strike for the 70s and in a hedonistic stupor for the 60s. They had to go back to the 50s before they could think of a time when we were a decent, thrifty, exporting, self-sufficient and profitable nation. This, obviously, is driving the Theresa May and the “Keep Calm and Carry On” nostalgia fest. | |
| Part of the problem is a failure of education. A lot of it is media failure, journalists not caring to understand where money actually comes from, and talking scornfully about the “magic money tree” as though QE didn’t exist and GDP expansion was down to the discovery of Graphene. And MPs have a case to answer: Positive Money did a survey a few years back and found that only one in 10 MPs understood how the bulk of money was created. It sounds abstruse, but actually affects their ability to make a case for social spending. Do you know, the only people I see making a real effort here are the student economists (Rethinking Economics and that other gang whose name I’ve forgotten) who run public meetings and have done serious and sustained work to disseminate better understanding, and Momentum, who ran a load of workshops as part of their World Transformed conference, and have done since then. | |
| 11.40am BST | |
| 11:40 | |
| Let’s jump back into the comments now with a question from jameswilliamjacobs2: | |
| I read through the disability section and thought the policies were excellent, however, and it’s a huge however, I found it was a little negative. We know as a Labour Party what we’re against – so yes, we would scrap the WCA, Scrap the Bedroom Tax and make sure disabled people are protected from austerity. | |
| However, I felt it lacked vision as to what the future is. How does Labour view our welfare system on the future? What are our long term objectives? Sadly, all I saw was plan of reversing the Tory measures of the past seven years. We need more than that IMO. | |
| That's my central criticism across the whole collections of proposals: not enough clarity either about what Labour believes post-Brexit Britain should look like, nor new thinking about how to get there. Too many 'easy' answers. For example, there are some good ideas about reforming corporate governance so that employees are in line for some of the proceeds of growth .. but they didn't feel to me as if ithey were embedded in a coherent plan for business .. | |
| What do other readers think? You can click on the link in the comment to respond directly. | |
| 11.35am BST | |
| 11:35 | |
| 'The left needs to work harder to gain a hearing from people who aren’t on the left' | |
| Hugh Muir | |
| Being the all singing, all dancing, multi platform media platform we are, we have also had some questions submitted via email. Many are interesting. | |
| Guardian Member Rupert asked: | |
| Given the inevitable claims that Labour’s manifesto plucks fruit from the “magic money tree”, how can the left start to change wider public understanding of how the economy works? | |
| I think that as with all perceptions that the left would seek to change, it needs to start with a proper understanding of why people take the positions they do. Theresa May, in that Lynton Crosby inspired cynical but clever way of hers talks about “an economy that works for everyone”. Corbyn/McDonnell by contrast, focus on improving the fortunes of one section of society, the low paid and left behinds, but can too easily be portrayed as seeking to achieve that at the expense of other sections of society whose votes they actually need if Labour is to be electorally successful. I think the left needs to work harder to gain a hearing from people who aren’t on the left. | |
| 11.30am BST | |
| 11:30 | |
| 'Labour are committed to ending arms sales to repressive regimes' | |
| Back to the comments, mymadhamster asks: | |
| What would an ethical foreign policy look like in the context of Saudi Arabia/Yemen? | |
| Labour are committed to ending arms sales to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia. I went to a Yemeni refugee camp in Djibouti so I'm very passionate about this issue: British bombs are raining down on Yemen, thousands have been killed in that terrible war, mostly by the Saudi-led coalition. Saudi Arabia not only has a horrifying human rights record: its up to its neck in exporting international extremism which is a threat to our security. The Tories, on the other hand, are committed to even closer relationship with the Saudi regime - so who's really in league with extremism here? | |
| 11.21am BST | |
| 11:21 | |
| 'We’ve started accepting that any social spending is an inherently far-left position' | |
| Zoe Williams | |
| Here’s a question from Richard, a Guardian Member: | |
| Some might say that Labour impotently allowed the Conservatives to apply the stereotype of Labour-as-inept-economists and characterise them as responsible for the entire global financial crisis in 2008. To what extent might this manifesto stand as an overdue riposte to the Conservative agenda-setting of recent years? | |
| I think you’re right: it was an unforced error of the Miliband era to go into an election allowing the financial crash to be ascribed to their profligacy. It was compounded by what I think was a pretty craven attempt to prove themselves “responsible” but going along with the Conservatives’ cuts to social security following the 2015 election, and indeed, during the coalition era. And I’d add that I think this contributed to a catastrophic lack of confidence among Labour MPs who thought of themselves as “centrists” but couldn’t, in the midst of trying to escape their socially generous image, remember what they were actually for. | |
| But the manifesto either does one thing or the other: it either responds to the Conservative agenda-setting, and therefore sits squarely in the same agenda, or it rips the agenda up and sets its own. I think this does the latter, and I think it does it well. The tremendous difficulty in creating a new frame is in conjuring the sense of generosity and plenty that progressives need in order to win. We’re nowhere near that yet, and the problem goes back to that lack of confidence: we’ve started accepting that any social spending is an inherently far-left position. If you look back at the 1997 promises, Labour managed to present spending, on health, education etc, as an act of common sense and decency. | |
| 11.15am BST | |
| 11:15 | |
| First up, reader Annakacat asks in the comments: | |
| Do the panel think that this manifesto will force the Tories to come up with a few headline policies to counter the benefits that Labour is promising, and will that be a good thing? | |
| Hi Annakat, I think the Tories are on to this already. I see there are reports beginning to circulate already about a death tax: good idea, and how else can the many capture at least a small share of the windfall enjoyed by lucky people whose homes have multiplied many times in value. Where are Labour's policies to tackle intergenerational unfairness? | |
| 11.07am BST | |
| 11:07 | |
| Anne, Owen, Zoe and Hugh are with us below the line now. We’ll post some of their answers to your questions shortly. We’ll also be posting some of their responses to a selection of questions which came in from Guardian Members via email. | |
| 10.37am BST | |
| 10:37 | |
| Before our writers join us below the line, a little fun ... if you’re into this sort of thing. Our colleague James Walsh has put together this quiz, which aims to find out which historical Labour manifesto best complements your views. | |
| Let us know how you got – we’d be especially interested to hear your thoughts on the current manifesto in a historical context. | |
| 3.30pm BST | 3.30pm BST |
| 15:30 | 15:30 |
| Post your questions now! | |
| What would rail nationalisation look like in practice? Would the phasing out of tuition fees work? Can the Labour party build 100,000 new council houses per year? These are all ideas proposed in a Labour manifesto, leaked on Thursday – we’d like to hear your thoughts and questions about the policies and put them to our writers. | |
| Zoe Williams, Owen Jones, Anne Perkins and Hugh Muir will join us from around 11am-noon (BST) on Friday. You can post your questions and views in the comments below and they will do our best to address as many as possible. We’ll be publishing some of the responses live in this space and hopefully the discussion will continue throughout the afternoon. | |
| Updated | |
| at 10.22am BST |