Soft soap and suicide notes

The party manifestos are eagerly awaited by the pundittieri keen to tear them apart to show how much cleverer they are than the politicians. In fact they're a more useful guide to party morale than to what any party will do in power.

The Tories are glowing with more confidence than they could have got from a Pelmanism course. They see themselves as gliding to victory. So they've no need to promise anything to anybody. They'll  offer a bland manifesto of "wait and see" with as few promises as possible and lots of strong and stable.

The LibDems can offer anything they want because they're not going to win So they'll promise lashings of good intentions, nice thoughts and lovely things which will never happen; proportional representation, a clean environment, beautiful beaches and lashings of Brussels but without any pictures of Herr Junker, Bulgarian immigrants or any mention of gaping trade deficits.

Labour looks from the latest leaks to be offering a surprise package bumper bundle. It fears defeat so it's attempting to multiply support by multiplying commitments in the hope that it can add enough interests together to make a majority. Purely naive. One man's joy is another woman's poison. So multiplying commitments divides support.

Add to this the further problem that many electors are nervous nellies easily frightened by long lists of things to do. The press will generate fear hoping to create a herd instinct rushing people away from Labour in fear and trembling. Herd instinct is the way bankers and media operate but in the public its usually a rush to the right and away from the radical reforms Britain needs.

Result : a mess. Labour' problem is not good intentions. It's got them in abundance and far more than the Tories. But Labour's naive the Tories ain't. The Tory trick is to promise little and deliver less. Labour promises far more than it can do and this defies credibility. The people tell pollsters they want the railways nationalised. It's obviously good sense but they don't believe that this can be done anytime soon and certainly not carried through with a list of other things to be nationalised. 

A sensible party restricts itself to a few basic policies' ending the crisis in the health service, stopping the cuts in education and curing the mess in social care are enough. Having shown that Labour government works it can then go on to the harder policies necessary to rebuild a strong economy to support the improvements the country needs. Our failure has always been to do that. Blair showed that Labour can win but he thought winning was enough and didn't particularly want to do much with power once he'd got it. That's Labour's great failure .We don't cure it by writing long shopping lists now.