A left-wing manifesto launch, and ‘Blair-plus’

Labour strategists moonlighting as fortune-tellers. Or is it the other way around?

Manifesto edition #1: Labour

“Make the fat cats pay!” the manifesto screams on the front page. Inside it calls for a 20% windfall tax on ‘super profits’ of British banks, oil corporations, energy utilities and retail monopolies. There’s also a 1% wealth tax for the richest 10% of the population, and the abandonment of ID cards. That’s right, the Communist Party of Great Britain cranked up its election campaign today.

Elsewhere, the Labour Party became the first of the major parties to launch its election manifesto today, but the 76-page document is sadly far less interesting than their comrades’. Entitled ‘A future fair for all’, Gordon Brown claimed it was not a ‘business as usual manifesto’ but was designed to address the challenges, saying somewhat mysteriously that “we are in the future business”. Lord Mandelson gave an insight into his vision of the future by describing the manifesto as ‘Blair-plus’.

With the Treasury’s coffers all but bare and having just had the Budget a few weeks ago, it’s frankly unsurprising that the manifesto contains almost no surprises. Most of the ideas have already been announced, but it did say the proposed National Care Service for the elderly will be paid through the proposals on Inheritance Tax. Conspicuous by its absence though was any real detail on government spending cuts…


QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The Tories are fake, you can't trust them. I mean how can you trust people who say they believe in dealing with poverty and then give tax breaks to millionaires?"

– Nick Clegg dampens any Conservative ideas of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in his interview in The Observer

THE GREASY POLL

Lab 31, Con 37, LibDem 20 (YouGov/The Sun)