So all the manifestos are now out for voters to pore over. Given the amount of fuss the parties have made about these documents, you’d think they might outsell Fifty Shades of Grey.
Sadly the reality is that these verbose tomes are less bonkbuster and more borebuster: they’re not written for voters to read, only for sad politicos who are paid to pore over them for fine details. They are getting longer and longer as the years go on, yet politicians don’t seem to be doing a better job at impressing voters, or indeed winning elections.
The Tory 2015 manifesto has 82 pages and 34,000 words, up from 28,000 in 2010. Nick Clegg may end up with only 30 MPs after the election, but he inflicted 157 pages of promises and 36,000 words on the electorate.
Clegg’s Lib Dems and Ukip were the most self-indulgent parties, producing around 36,000 words each. Labour’s was shorter than its 28,000 offering in 2010 – but even that was 20,000 words and 83 pages. The SNP clocked in today at a ‘concise’ 19,000.
All are longer than most student dissertations – and than the sort of manifestos that used to win great politicians majorities. Labour won in 1945 with just 5,000 words, and Margaret Thatcher turned the country blue in 1979 with 8,000. Tony Blair droned on for a bit longer with a 17,000 pitch when he won in 1997.
And ever since politicians have been going on, and on, and on. Oddly, they’ve been saying more but winning less.
The 1945 Labour government set up the NHS and the welfare state. The Tories in the 1980s brought Britain back from the brink. Both managed to set out all their game-changing plans in under 10,000 words. So why can’t today’s cautious campaigners?
If anyone has enough time to read the manifestos properly, they’ll find at least half the words are a waste of space. They include statements of the painfully obvious. The Lib Dems ‘want young people to face the future with optimism and confidence’. Does anyone want the opposite?
The Tories said ‘the chance to own your own home should be available to everyone who works hard’ but neglected amongst the waffle to say how many homes they want to build each year. Presumably that’s a reasonably important detail that you might want to fit in when you’re already into the tens of thousands of words.
At least those platitudes make sense. Labour says ‘the common life we share is who we are as a country’.
One perceptive Tory cabinet minister was unimpressed after finally finishing the manifesto. ‘Far too much text to say too little of real substance,’ they moaned.
Polling by YouGov for the Sun last week asked voters how much they’d seen of the policies each party had announced in their manifesto. Many voters said they hadn’t seen very much or had seen nothing at all from these launches. And they struggled to place 11 out of 12 key policies with the correct parties.
This is an era when voters are no longer tied to one party, where they shop around for politics. Surely manifestos should matter more? If the parties did think they mattered more, then they’d spend more time crafting documents that are worth reading. Given tabloids like the Sun and the Mirror manage to explain complicated stories like the Budget and even the EU Budget to their readers in very few words indeed, the argument that the parties are dealing with complex issues which need space to be discussed doesn’t stand. It would have more validity if the parties also used their manifestos to set out why a policy is better than another and how it would actually work, rather than a vague headline announcement.
There are some independent websites like Vote for Policies that help curious voters work out who they should support based on the policies they like. And a new site launched this week, ShouldWe, tries to set out the evidence behind policies so voters can judge if they’ll actually, you know, work. But the parties themselves should make this effort, too. Otherwise the charge so often levelled that Westminster appears interested only in talking to itself will continue to stand.
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