Thursday 11 May 2017

Labour Manifesto is a real piece of work, but for who?

Really, where to start with this. After a very quick skim I can see they want to end probation in work, reduce the working year by 2% (4 extra days off), nationalise everything and break up the energy companies to boot.....the list is almost endless.


It reads like what it is, the wish list of a young socialist firebrand in the mid-1970's.


However, I can only see two reasons for its leak and both contradictory so my question for the day is which guess is correct?


1) The leadership leaked it so that the hard-left grasp of the party is maintained and to try to get it favourable headlines in the news (well, headlines at any rate). It shoots the fox of the centrists and shows the Left is in ascendency and in control for the foreseeable, this is all part of the longer term plan (to which the election is irrelevant) to finally keep control of Labour from the Left.


2) The right-wing shadow cabinet members leaked it, trying to undermine the leadership and also trying to show the Country what a bunch of loons are in control. They hope for a destruction at the election that will wake up their membership as to the state of things and the need to move back to centre and ditch the left.




It can only be one of the above answers as the leak was a motivated action, leaks don't happen on their own. So which one was it?

18 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

Option 1 seems good on paper.
But Labour's reaction has been panic and betrayal. Corbyn vanished from his own poster launch.And there has been no coordinated message.
This doesn't look like a well planned intelligence sting.

Option 2 it probably is. But it could have been a cash for secrets leak.

Steven_L said...

Really? What about the most obvious reason? Don't the press pay good money for stuff like this?

All the active old-school socialists I've met over the years have struck me as quite grasping people who like to make big workplace compensation claims, have all manner of fake illnesses and max out on employee perks and expenses etc.

Steven_L said...

Oh, BQ just beat me to it while I was playing 'spot the street sign' :(

Demetrius said...

An unpaid intern on probation at Labour HQ who was hungry and eager to get out to buy cheap offer sandwiches due to be thrown out by the local Tesco made a mistake.

Jan said...

I thought option 1 when I heard the news yesterday but it's more likely Demetrius has it right......

E-K said...

I'm more interested in the Lib Dem manifasto. The clearer it is on *soft* Brexit the stronger the mandate for *full* Brexit when the electorate reject them and the Tories landslide it.

andrew said...


I think it might have been a 'anonymously drop a poo on the table' move.

We all spend a lot of time talking about who dropped it and why.
A vast swathe of people skim it and you quickly spot the completely rancid bits from the comments.

The leadership say it is an early unreviewed draft and no-one should take it seriously.

In a week they issue the version that might fly and we all initially talk about the bits that aren't there, which makes the document sound more mainstream.

I thought this was governmental SOP for the introduction of 'controversial' new policies.

... or it got left on the underground by accident.

Anonymous said...

Option 2, obviously, as I pointed out this am on the last thread. Corbyn's enemies inside the party

a) don't want Labour to win if he's in charge - or more realistically, want the defeat to be as abject as possible.
b) want to encourager les autres in case anyone else wants to get clever about Palestine/Israel. "Look what happened to Jeremy".

Anonymous said...

FWIW, I think the manifesto will have appeal to the young, doesn't mean he'll win though.

Anonymous said...

Why not both?

Option 1 : Leaks to the Mirror
Options 2: Leaks to the Telegraph

The likeliest is they just left it somewhere and someone forwarded it to the Telegraph. They then counter leak to the Mirror to stop it being exclusive. The only surprising thing is that they didn't leak it to the canary instead.

CityUnslicker said...

Man I love the canary, I am addicted to reading it on the train home.

The style is great, I don't know how the writers stop their hands shaking enough to type from all the meds and outrage affecting them.

HarryD said...

I recommend AAV too. How one man can remain so perennially angry and upset at so many perceived slights and conspiracies is beyond me. Britain could look to get into the tin foil game in a big way if we could convince the readsership to buy British.

dustybloke said...

I think it's difficult for readers of this blog to realise how incredibly stupid this lot are.

Abbott proposing 10,000 Old Bill for £300,000 showed not only ignorance of everything from basic arithmetic to law via accounting, but mainly it showed that she simply couldn't be arsed.

Reality does not impinge on these people's lives. They have been living a fantasy for their entire lives and only indulge in reality when they have to eg Abbott choosing a school for her son, or Corbyn choosing the limit of £80,000 for his tax hikes. I can't actually see any of the Labour elite bothering putting pen to paper.

It's surely written and leaked by the compilers. Two or three eager students making a bit of pocket money on the side.

Professor Pizzle said...

If you really want to understand the detatchment from reality of this crowd just watch the clip of D Abbot reacting to the local election losses.

She says ,"At the time of this interview it's about 50,"
Interviewer says it's actually 125.
She – without any expression – says, "Well, the last time I looked it was 100."

It's truly astonishing. A grown woman caught in a ridiculous lie and then, without a beat, pretending that the last 10 seconds didn't happen and simply changing her lie like no one was paying attention first time out.

There is no shame, no guilt, no humanity there at all. It is the deadpan face of an apparatchik at the Ministry of Truth rewriting history. "We have always been at war with Oceania."

Clumsy said...

Cap-X published an article earlier which listed all of the key items in the manifesto related to spending/borrowing. Seeing these without the text padding it out really highlighted the crazy amount of money they are planning to pluck from their magic money tree. I think they probably haven't fully costed their plans, despite telling everyone they have.

Electro-Kevin said...

Some people are capable of such double-think that Diane Abbott is OK.

They should be denied the vote.

Scrobs. said...

I'd say all three choices, and agree with Diane Abbott at least twice - um - no four times.

Look no further than the BBC, they thought it all up!

Anomalous Cowshed said...

Neither of your motivations require the leak to happen though. Both sides of the Labour party get the same effects​ when the manifesto is published on schedule.

That said; strikes me that the most likely source would be amongst the centrists, the aim being to put the kybosh on at least some of the manifesto's wilder elements. That it was done so late in the approval/adoption process, suggests that it was a desperate act, with no real hope of success.

I don't think that it needs to have come from an MP. I assume that the majority of Labour MPs now are of 1997 vintage or later, but the leaker is at least of post 1987 vintage in the party, assuming they're not a Snowden type.