The importance of party manifestos has been increasingly downgraded in modern elections. Slippery parties do not want to make promises that they can be held to subsequently. Manifestos are now launched late in modern campaigns these days, at hollow events mainly staged for the cameras.

Listening last summer as Keir Starmer droned on for what seemed like hours in the sterile foyer of the Co-op’s headquarters, I wondered why I had bothered to make the journey to Manchester. Nothing that the party “unveiled” there was going to make much difference to who won on polling day.

The thin platform of policies were insignificant compared with the empty promise of “Change” daubed on the front cover, and sprinkled liberally through the pamphlet.

It turns out I was wrong – it was significant, in that it is causing endless problems now the party is in government.

Labour’s struggles to stick to what it said in its manifesto, and its difficulties getting those measures through parliament, have become the signature moves of what looks like a rudderless government with no clear sense of direction.

This state of affairs is all the more gobsmacking because the vagaries of first past the post in a multi-party system gifted Starmer a near-record 169 MP overall parliamentary majority with only a 34 per cent share of the vote.

The root of this government’s trouble........

© iNews