Today’s release of the Labour Party’s Election Manifesto saw  Prime Minister Brown attempt to readdress the growing the perception of a Labour leftward agenda by including a raft of measures designed to prove both plausible and appealing to Britain’s key voting demographic, its burgeoning middle class.

 

Clearly, the manifesto sought to invigorate the voters with a perception of dynamism and optimism through a series of popularist statements such as  "The future will be progressive or Conservative but it will not be both” and going on to state, perhaps controversially, that Labour were the “party of the lower and middle class families.“  By way of policy, these attempts to create a broad appeal materialised in the form commitments not to raise income tax rates in the next Parliament, raising the minimum wage in line with average earnings and a pledge not to extend VAT to food, children\\\\\\\'s clothes, books, newspapers or public transport fares. This string of inducements were however caveated with the refusal to make a commitment not to raise VAT in the next Parliament.

 

Additionally, in what may be seen as an addendum to these appealing measures was the pledge for meaningful reform of Parliament through polices such as giving voters the right to recall MPs, a referendum on changing the voting system and on removing the last hereditary peers from the House of Commons, and a free vote in Parliament on lowering the voting age to 16. One could speculate that these proposals were also devised to undermine the Liberal Democrats pledges along similar lines.

 

Yet in spite of its broadly popularist narrative , the Manifesto also appeared in line with widespread reports amongst  this morning papers that suggested a more centrist agenda, with the core of the Manifesto revealing a series measures designed to appeal to small and middle sized businesses with the Manifesto itself stating “We will do more to support enterprise and to help those who want to build up a business and get on in life.”   This included the Labour Party’s promise to: drastically reduce the red tape currently facing the business sector, create a Small Business Credit Adjudicator to assist SME’s with accessing bank finance while also recapping the business friendly measures previously outlined in the 2010 March budget, such as the UK Finance for Growth Fund.

 

It should be noted that the media’s immediate reaction is that the Manifesto appears bereft of concrete detail on Labour’s plan to tackle the UK’s overbearing budget deficit, an omission excused by the Prime Minister when saying that Labour had “already done more than other countries to spell our plan to halve the deficit over the next four years” and not based on a "flimsy four page document that doesn\\\\\\\'t add up," the final statement was no doubt designed as a preemptive rebuttal of the Conservatives forthcoming criticisms.