The difficult second album – first look at the Labour manifesto
Many around the Labour leader credit the 2017 General Election manifesto for limiting the scale of Corbyn’s defeat at that election and their strategy for the 2019 election has placed huge stock in the ability of this manifesto to reframe the campaign. This has been matched by the bold claims the party has made for it, describing it as “the most radical, hopeful, people-focused plan in modern times”. There are undoubtedly significant policy announcements here, many of which are likely to be significant whoever wins the election, but Labour strategists will judge its success by the extent that it shifts the election debate. They have sought to achieve this by a dramatic hardening of tone. Corbyn’s rhetoric has always had a clear ‘us versus them’ dimension but his remarks today place considerably more emphasis on confronting ‘them’, going as far as to welcome the ‘hatred’ of the rich and powerful.
