Not long before the 1979 general election the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, privately and soberly predicted his own downfall. “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” he told an adviser. “It then does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”
Sunny Jim had heard the sigh of history. Soon after came the largest electoral swing in postwar history, with Margaret Thatcher boasting a bigger share of the popular vote than any Tory leader since. Labour was kept at bay for 18 years.
Over the past year or so I have spent reporting around the country, it has become increasingly clear to me that the public wants another sea change – and this time it is against the children of Thatcher.
It doesn’t matter how many tax cuts Rishi Sunak hands voters, or how sympathetically his wife is interviewed by Grazia: he and his party are finished. They don’t need another rebrand or a new election guru; at this point, it would be kinder to book a reasonably priced but still decorous crematorium.
It’s not just the parties at No 10, or Liz Truss’s kamikaze budget; it’s the fact that food prices are about 25% higher than they were two years ago, while over a similar period interest rates have jumped from about 1% to above 5%. It’s also how stories of deprivation have gone from being headlines to the stuff of everyday life, the forces shaping the society to come.
When David Cameron moved into No 10, food banks were a foreign concept; today, one in five schools in England have one. In the UK, just over one in 10 pupils, or 11%, go without meals at least once a week. In Portugal, a much poorer country, that number is under 3%.
No wonder Keir Starmer, on the verge of entering Downing Street, stamped his manifesto this week with the title “Change”. That single word runs through the entire document. It begins “My plan for change”, while on the last page is “we can change Britain”.
But what kind of change? Not the kind you can count in cash. The extra money the Labour party plans to spend on local government, say, or to raise in taxes on the wealthy, is judged by the Institute for Fiscal Studies as “tiny going on trivial”.
Yet manifestos are more than costed policies. They summarise the values of our would-be leaders, and lay out visions of what our country could be. And in his direct appeal to voters this week, Starmer crafts an identity as an agent of change. “I have changed my party,” he says right upfront in the manifesto. “Now I want the chance to bring that change to the country.”
So how else to analyse where the next prime minister will take the UK? One expert to ask is Kevin Farnsworth, a professor of social and public policy at the University of York.
Rather than cherrypick policies and pledges, which is the normal business of political commentary, Farnsworth does big-data analysis. He feeds an entire manifesto into a computer, and codes and categorises terms, phrases, patterns: the meanings and sentiments, how often they appear and the contexts in which they’re used. Drawing on the decades-long research of political scientists at the award-winning Manifesto Project, based in Berlin, he gauges where the language is located on the political spectrum: “nationalisation” is more leftwing, say, while “national way of life” is more rightwing.
Analysing Labour and Conservative manifestos going back to 1945, he can illustrate how party ideologies have changed over decades, showing when they are fairly close together – Theresa May’s platform of 2017 was, he judges, “easily the most leftwing Tory offering of modern times” – and also when they are miles apart. Over the past few days, he has been subjecting the latest manifestos to this statistical analysis, shared exclusively with the Guardian. Many of his findings are strikingly different to what you’ll hear and read from Westminster.
In the pantheon of Labour leaders, Starmer has made clear who he is not: Jeremy Corbyn, who represents “the dead end of gesture politics”. His great inspiration, he has said, is Harold Wilson.
Farnsworth compared Starmer’s manifesto with Corbyn’s in 2017 and 2019, Wilson’s in 1964 and Clement Attlee’s of 1945. His first finding is that Starmer’s manifesto, in language and values, is way out of line with Labour tradition. Whether on state schools or universities, progressive taxation or pensioners, Corbyn was the heir to Wilson and Attlee. Where Corbyn’s manifestos are unusual in Labour history is in their emphasis on inequality – which is attacked with more frequency and force than in those of other Labour leaders. But Starmer’s manifesto is the complete opposite: it mentions the word inequality only once.
On Farnsworth’s analysis, Starmer’s platform in 2024 is closer to the Tory Ted Heath’s in 1974 than it is to almost any Labour manifesto. Perhaps that should come as no surprise, given that Starmer’s team mentions poverty only 14 times in 130-odd pages, while “business”, by my count, gets about 60 mentions. So what, you may say: get the Tories out first, and then trust Labour to do the right thing. But if you want a well-funded NHS and a decent social security net, you need a big party to argue for them.
Ideologies change with time, and they react against each other. Leaders can pull their rivals towards them or hold them in check. “A boldly leftwing or rightwing party shifts our views of what is politically acceptable,” says Farnsworth. After the banking crash of 2008, it was no surprise that Gordon Brown veered left in 2010 and Ed Miliband went further still in 2015. But, he notes, the Tories belatedly adopted the same language. From 2015 on, they promised to invest, to level up, to build 40 more hospitals. It wasn’t just Brexit or Grenfell that prompted that change of heart in May and Boris Johnson; Farnsworth says it was also the radicalism of Corbyn. “Without a strong leftwing party, politics drifts to the right.”
That may be the great missed opportunity of this moment: that the public is ready for change of a kind that is simply not on offer. That a political system prizes continuity and stability over reform and fairness. That a Labour leader should boast of how much he has changed his party, so that it will not change the country.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist