The British General Election of 2017

Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh have disclosed in their book

"The British General Election of 2017"

an internal Labour email which casts rather serious doubt on the claim repeated with great regularity by Labour representatives that they had a "fully costed" manifesto at the last election.

The email privately communicated to Labour's senior campaign team, quote,

some of the problems with Labour’s cost estimates, including the lack of detail on capital spending, as well as some individual costings that were implausible or entirely absent”.

It also highlighted issues with “almost every area of the manifesto, including welfare, health, education, the economy, transport, policing and prisons."

The Labour leader and Shadow Chancellor may have believed that their manifesto was fully costed but some of their close associates certainly didn't.

It is suggested that as much as a trillion pounds of extra uncosted spending would have resulted from the pledges in the manifesto.

Mr Cowley and Mr Kavanagh wrote in the book about the email:

“A prolonged debate including all those around Corbyn and McDonnell as well as longstanding senior party staff was ultimately resolved at McDonnell’s insistence, despite the fears of several of Corbyn’s aides.”

One of the Labour leader’s aides told the authors: “I just kept thinking, they’ll tear us apart on this."

I just keep thinking that we should have.

The Conservatives must fight the next election mainly on positive policies of our own. The public deserves a chance to elect a government who believe in what they are doing and have something constructive to offer, over and above just slagging off the other side.

However, if Labour go into another election claiming to have a "fully costed" manifesto which is in fact riddled with holes you could drive a trillion pounds of spending through, we can't afford to let them get away with it.

The fact that, as of this week's conference Labour have made 37 uncosted spending pledges since the last election suggests they have not learned their lesson.

Two final links on the subject of the Labour party. After today I will concentrate for the next week  on positive policies from the Conservatives.

For those who wondered what Jeremy Corby really meant by some of the words in his speech to conference, John Rentoul translates here.

And Danny Finkelstein

"Corbyn's Grand Plan is to subvert parliament"

what the Corbynista model of democracy would mean in practice. It's essentially the opposite of the idea of democracy put forward by Burke (or Gaitskell.)

Those who don't agree with the idea that parliament is sovereign and MPs are representatives rather than delegates may think at first that this sound like a good idea - but since the Corbyn project would make MPs more answerable not to the electorate, but to the Labour party, I suspect the advocates of direct democracy would like Corbyn-style democracy even less than they like Edmund Burke's.

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