manifesto for #GE2024

What divides the Conservative Party from the Labour Party in the coming #GE2024?

Both the Conservatives and Labour say they’ll be best for the economy … and ‘hard-working families’ and the NHS and so on.

That translates as business as usual, in other words, roughly three per cent per year of economic growth ad infinitum. The maths of compound interest means that this doubles the size of the economy every 24 years. Along with that comes the doubling of consumption, waste and pollution.

Note that the quadrupling of the size of the economy since 1976 has not actually made hard-working families much better off. In theory, if the benefits of economic growth had been distributed fairly and evenly, we should all be four times better off than we were 48 years ago. Instead, the benefits of economic growth have disproportionately gone to the rich. The Gini coefficient, which is a measure of wealth inequality where zero reflects perfect equality and one reflects perfect inequality (where one person has all the wealth), for the UK for this period has gone from roughly 0.25 (highly equal) to 0.35 (much less equal).

Both major parties – and minor ones like the LibDems and Reform UK – support endless economic growth with little support for equal distribution of the benefits. The economic situation of the ‘hard-working families’ that they pretend to care about will not improve much and, sooner or later, economic growth will lead to environmental collapse

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So what else divides the Conservatives from the Labour Party in the coming #GE2024? They are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee when it comes to foreign policy: support for Ukraine against Russia, and for Israel in Gaza, for more US nuclear weapons at Lakenheath in Suffolk; energy policy, such as new nuclear power stations at Sizewell C in Suffolk and Hinkley Point C in Somerset; health, education, social security, transport, migration, Brexit, law reform, electoral reform and so on.  

The gender dividing line

Gender ideology seems to be the only issue on which there is a clear dividing line. Labour wants to make it easier to change gender by allowing a single family doctor to approve a person’s decision to transition. As Helen Joyce of Sex Matters says, this makes it as easy as getting a prescription and:

… amounts to gender self-ID: the principle of people being allowed to pick their legal gender with no medical diagnosis, something Labour has repeatedly said it no longer supports.

Sex Matters has issued a list of ten ‘election asks’. But it is not clear whether gender ideology is important enough to voters to make much difference.

Where are the party manifestos?

Neither of the main parties has yet published its manifesto. It seems to be normal to wait till after the election has been called to publish formal manifestos.

Certainly, the Green Party shows no signs of publishing one yet. But I’m surprised about this. I was on the party’s Policy Development Committee (PDC) until March (when I got suspended) and we were even then just at the point when PDC was reviewing the draft manifesto to make sure it complied with our policies and party leaders were checking it for overall tone and message.

Rumour has it that, rather like the Scottish Greens, the party does not know what to say about the Cass Review, so they won’t say anything.