Labour’s manifesto is the most detailed, radical blueprint in decades – but it will be worthless until Brexit is solved

Editorial: As with all the other parties, whether they’re bold or timid, their proposals will be virtually meaningless in the context of an unknown outcome as huge as leaving the EU

One of the many deeply corrosive consequences of the Tories’ current disinformation spree is that legitimate criticism of rivals’ policies can be dismissed as propaganda.

If fact-checking and sober analysis are hijacked by a desperate Tory headquarters, then it undermines the authority of those who are actually trying to do their job and give the public the best possible view of the reality of the parties’ offerings, including Labour’s. No wonder the civil service and HM Treasury wanted no part in Boris Johnson’s fake news machine.

How can anyone believe a word of any manifesto when the major players are more interested in negative campaigning and making things up about their opponents than they are about being frank with the voters about what their plans will actually entail?

In 1983, the Labour Party launched a vast and unwieldy manifesto of self-contradictory, mostly uncosted policies that was soon famously dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”. Such a claim cannot be easily laid against the 2019 version. This time, it is the most detailed and radical blueprint for government, at least since 1945. If Labour does lose this time, it will not be for lack of vision or reforming zeal.

There is certainly ambition in the 107-page document. There are familiar commitments to a National Education Service; a National Care Service (an extensive programme of public ownership, from buses to broadband); a revolutionary commitment to national collective bargaining across industries; a Green Industrial Revolution creating one million jobs; scrapping university tuition fees; the National Transformation Fund, with hundreds of billions committed to new infrastructure and transport schemes, including extending HS2 to Scotland; a Social transformation Fund; a Sustainable Investment Board; a National Investment Bank; regional investment banks; 150,000 new council houses a year; a Right to Food; eradicating in-work poverty in the first term; carbon neutrality, and a ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030; ending the gender pay gap by 2030; scrapping universal credit; votes at 16; free broadband for all; and some substantial increases in taxation on the rich and the corporate sector.

One of the refreshing things about the Labour plan is that there is no attempt to disguise the breathtaking sums involved; another £83bn a year in taxation, for example, at a time when the proportion of the national income taken in taxation is running at a 50 year-high (one reason why the budget deficit is at least coming under control).

“A manifesto of hope” it is called, and no detail is too small to escape the attention of the architects of this New Jerusalem. If elected to power, Labour would, for example, enforce a “maximum departure” in workplaces; bring in a zero-carbon standard for new homes; an “NHS Forest” of one million trees to make the service carbon-neutral; a tobacco control plan; a more representative judiciary; a Post Office Bank; supporters’ directors on the boards of football clubs; banning unpaid internships; abolishing hereditary peers; an inquiry into “fake news”.

And all of this is costed and balanced in an accompanying booklet, Funding Real Change. And yet the real question about the affordability and practicality of Labour’s plan really rests on whether its proposals would increase or reduce the national growth rate.

Certainly, there are some aspects of it, such as infrastructure investment, which almost everyone agrees would lift the UK’s long-term rate of productivity growth and economic growth over time – and this allows some of those laudable social objectives to be met in due course.

Yet there are many more uncertainties. Would the public services be able to absorb a rapid increase in funding? (They were not able to after the 2001 boost to the NHS, for example.)

What will the replacement for universal credit look like?

Do the skilled workers exist to build the houses, instal broadband, and make new roads and rail links?

Why, precisely, would nationalised enterprises run more efficiently than under private ownership?

The tilt in the balance of industrial power back towards workers and trades unions also looks like it would mean a substantial – but not costed – increase in labour costs for many companies. Some would not be able to withstand that, even if the economy is growing at the rates Labour would wish to see. Adding in ever-higher cost for meeting enhanced workers’ rights, restricting the ability of management to manage, and accelerating the national living wage would severely hit some sectors such as catering, agriculture and, in fact, the care and health sectors that Labour desires so much to repair.

This wage inflation effect would be exacerbated if the UK did leave the European Union, as the supply of labour available to fill the current vacancies and gaps in public services and private industry would evaporate. Of course it might be made up for in increased migration from outside the EU, or from it continuing from the EU too – but Labour is refusing to make any clear commitments on scale or type of migration – but that is by no means guaranteed. Wage inflation is not usually a route to sustainable national prosperity.

There remains, without any unnecessary alarm, a real question of whether the public finances could cope with the financial strain of a Corbyn government. It is true that interest rates in sterling today are relatively low, and many projects look eminently affordable and worthwhile, as indeed they are. But borrowing for current spending – day to day rung costs of public services enterprises – is another matter.

History again shows that overseas investors, in particular, can soon demand an increased “risk premium” if they fear a country is unlikely to meet its debts, and its credit rating is soon damaged. Labour administrations elected in 1929, 1945, 1964 and 1974 all eventually found themselves in a sterling and/or inflation crisis and having to make emergency cuts in spending and borrowing. Only under Tony Blair’s New Labour was this cycle broken – albeit that the Brown government found itself overwhelmed by a banking crisis.

At the least, if past experience is any guide, we would soon be met with a severe sterling crisis, a sharp depreciation of sterling that would add to incipient wage inflation and lead to a pernicious wage-price spiral of the kind not seen since the 1990s in the UK. Unemployment would rise.

Observers also want to know if the increase in current spending in the public sector will be fully met by the explicit pledges to raise taxation on higher earners, on inheritance, on holiday homes, on corporations, the City and the oil and tech giants. In a globalised world, such impositions are easier to avoid.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the pledges “involve higher tax burdens on people of average incomes” and would give Britain “just about the most punitive corporate tax system in the world”. This is not a bogus fact-check from CCHQ but the word of one of our foremost independent institutions with an unimpeachable reputation.

Still, as with all the other parties, manifesto pans, bold or timid, are virtually worthless in the context of an unknown Brexit outcome. The Tories’ pledge to “get Brexit done” glosses over the hard fact that a no-deal Brexit remains a possibility at the end of 2020 – in which case any pledges by anyone about public spending may be binned.

Labour’s Brexit deal hasn’t even been negotiated, still less voted upon by the people. Convoluted though it is, then, by far the most important, attractive, democratic and fair commitment in the Labour manifesto “It’s Time for Real Change” is that promise of a Final Say referendum on Brexit. If the UK did stay in the EU, then Labour’s ambitions have at least some chance of fulfilment. Outside the EU, even under a Corbynite “soft” Brexit, they are the stuff of pure fantasy.