General election 2019: Nervous Tories prepare manifesto launch

The campaign was dominated yesterday by the unveiling of Labour’s new manifesto in Birmingham. Today, policy announcements have come thick and fast from several parties, both major and small.

If the Labour party’s manifesto unveiled yesterday, at 104 pages, has the potential to become “the longest suicide note in history” – eclipsing even the 1983 manifesto that was first given that epithet, then the Brexit party’s may well become the shortest such document. At a concise 22 pages, leade Nigel Farage has even foregone the name of a manifesto. Instead, he calls it a “contract with the people”. No doubt this is intended to shake off concerns expressed by voters that manifestos are not ultimately worth the paper they are written on.

At the heart of the Brexit party’s pithy “contract” is, you guessed it, a Brexit policy. Farage’s party have changed their tune on the issue of Brexit ever since the party’s leader made the decision to stand down 317 of the party’s candidates in seats won by the Tories in 2017, made earlier this month. Farage’s speech, delivered in Ham earlier today, still emphasised that his party desires what he calls a “clean break Brexit”.

However, he has now shifted from his earlier position, of last month, in which he emphasised that a no-deal Brexit “was the only acceptable deal”. Now, rather than criticising Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement altogether, Farage backs the Prime Minister to negotiate a “Super Canada Dry” (mixed with what?) arrangement with the EU before the end of 2020. His call for a no deal Brexit on WTO trading terms has been altered to a demand that there will be “no extended transition period”.

Farage came under fire in the press conference Q&A, conducted after his speech, when he was asked about the interminable Brexit party dilemma: the possibility of splitting the Leave vote in the Labour-Conservative marginals in which his party is still standing.

Farage dismissed and downplayed such suggestions, telling his audience that exactly the same thing had been said about UKIP in the 2015 general election. Farage believes that UKIP’s presence in several Labour-Tory marginals in this election ended up doing more harm to the Labour party, and allowed David Cameron to snatch a whisker thin majority against the odds.

There is certainly some truth to this argument – in 2015, UKIP helped Cameron’s Conservative party win some crucial marginal seats in the Midlands by taking more votes from traditional Labour voters than from former Tories.

In Warwickshire North, an old mining town, UKIP attracted significant numbers of white working class voters. As a result, the Conservative MP Craig Tracey, who had only just taken the seat in 2010 with a majority of 54, managed to increase the majority to almost 3,000. UKIP managed to take a total of over 8,000 votes, tilting the balance in favour of the Conservatives.

Another key example from 2015 is Nuneaton, which was touted at the time as a crucial bellwether for the overall election result. It was, like Warwickshire North, one of Ed Miliband’s key target seats. Here, the Conservatives won comfortably, with the incumbent MP, Marcus Jones, increasing his majority. Here, UKIP took 6,852 votes. Before 2010, Nuneaton had been almost exclusively a Labour seat since 1935.

This is all very well, but what about the polling for the Brexit party in this election? One potentially important indication of what might happen in December has emerged in the seat of Great Grimsby.

Here, a telephone poll run by Survation for the Economist magazine on 14-15 November (just after the Brexit party candidate’s entrance into the race for the seat) showed that the Brexit party has pillaged the Labour vote. Before 14-15th November, Labour looked like the firm favourites in the seat, leading with 49% to the Tories’ 42%. In the Survation poll, however, the Brexit party vote has surged to 17%, and the Labour vote has plummeted by eighteen points to 31%. The Tories now lead, up by two points to a total of 44%.

The Brexit party manifesto contains an interesting blend of radical policies, some of which are traditionally associated with the populist right and others with the populist left. It includes both a pledge to reduce immigration to just 50,000 people per year, but it also proposes a variety of swingeing tax cuts: VAT on domestic rule and inheritance tax would be put to the sword, and Corporations tax would be reduced. At the same time, the NHS would be protected from privatisation, free broadband would be provided to deprived regions of the UK, and interest would on student loans would be abolished.

There are also some policies which have the hallmark of the Brexit party’s libertarian left, a group spearheaded by Claire Fox MEP. The most obvious example is the call for the abolition of the House of Lords. This cause smacks fat more of the republican reformism of Fox, with its footholds in a tradition of left wing English political radicalism, than the libertarian offshoots of Thatcherism associated with Farage.

Another constitutional reform, one that is designed to unite those who were frustrated with the UK’s Supreme Court ruling in September on Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliaments, is the call for the UK’s judiciary to move towards a US style system of political oversight and appointment.

These are all moves into new territory for the party, which has generally pitched itself until now as a single issue force. It was as this focused force, aimed at allowing voters to express their discontent at the failure of Westminster’s parties to resolve the issue of Brexit, that saw them win the European elections in May 2019.

Rest assured, however, that their compact contract will mean that you will still be able to tell the Brexit wood from all these new policy trees. Quite literally – for, in an overture to the environmental cause, Farage promised that his party would plant as many trees as possible.

Farage hasn’t been the only one to go green today. Beyond the Brexit party’s announcements, other parties have also brought forward new announcements. Before Farage mounted the rostrum in Ham, Plaid Cymru’s leader Adam Price committed his party to a “Green industrial revolution”. Speaking in Nantgawr, Price said that his party will be seeking to press for £20 billion of spending on a “green collar jobs” revolution. In this regard, they would have found much to their liking in the Labour party’s manifesto yesterday.

Shifting from green collar to a blue collar focus, the Tories have won a local council by-election in the Cardiff suburb of Llanishen. The Tory candidate Siân-Elin Melbourne, won the council seat with a greatly increased vote. Now, all of the seats in the Llanishen ward are controlled by the Conservatives. The Tories will be hoping that this result provides momentum for their local party activists in the upcoming general election.

With many of the parties having now released their pitches to the public, the “suspense” now builds for the Conservative manifesto, which is due to be trailed this weekend and published in full imminently. There was one policy released today in advance, another teaser. Speaking to supporters during a speech delivered at Bassetlaw general hospital, Johnson said leaving the EU would allow the Conservatives to implement a plan to impose an extra 3% stamp duty on foreign buyers of UK domestic properties. This is designed to allow first time buyers in the UK to get more of a leg up onto the property ladder than is currently possible.

The Prime Minister said: “I want our market to be open – I want people to be able to buy stuff in the UK – but it is only reasonable when international buyers come in and buy property that they should make a contribution to life in this country.”

Make no mistake: this is an interventionist policy, perhaps too late considering what has happened to the London market in recent decades, but it is one with impeccably Tory credentials. It fits within a long tradition of sponsoring British property-owning democracy. It looks ahead to a manifesto in which the nervous Tories, desperate not to squander their lead, will try to strike a balance between economic dynamism and blue collar spending promises.