There are manifestos that have led to constitutions, dramatically changing politics in many countries, but never, since Magna Carta (June 1215), in the UK. Roger Scruton, the well-known, right wing philosopher in Britain, imagines this is a result of UK common law. In other words, practical, detailed, day to day judgements are made by judges, 'on the strength of the case', and they become precedents for future decisions. Scruton also imagines that this process has 'protected' British law from ideological schemes that are fomented often in extreme circumstances and which are driven by dogmas. Hurrah!
Scruton naturally loathes European Human Rights legislation. Indeed he rejects the necessity for any conscious, strictly political decision making of state-wide laws that are designed to roll back the oppression of groups, including majority groups across the world - as in the cases of working class people, of people of colour and of women. He is also blind to the historical political and economic interests of the judiciary itself and to the social class, gender and ethnic group from which judges almost inevitably come. He has therefore no answer to oppression because, in his own circle of life, he does not see it. This point of view ends up with the ruthless defence of the status quo and even his risible notion that the 3 or 4% of people who live in the British countryside constitute the real definition of 'Englishness.'(sic)
The tragedy in Britain is that Scruton's self-serving dogma has been the prevailing view for Britain's ruling elites for centuries. And most British institutions, including the Judiciary, reflect that. There are some notable exceptions like the NHS. But such exceptions have been under the hammer almost permanently - in the front line of 'reforms' designed to extinguish their principles and their functions. The Labour Party has experienced a century-long, class-based, civil war - where union bureaucracies and state managers have held fast their pro-system domination - up to now. Parliament itself has long been squeezed into the margins of any real decision making about who should hold wealth and power.
Corbyn's Labour Manifesto is a modest document, in relation to the structure of Britain's modern capitalist society, which it nevertheless challenges. But in June 2017 millions of people, especially younger voters, engaged with Labour's latest General Election Manifesto. This novelty was partly a product of Tory leader, Teresa May's Manifesto disaster. But most mainstream commentators now seem to agree that the main reason that Labour's Manifesto attracted wide-scale support (despite the howling ridicule of 99% of the traditional media at the time of publication) was that it offered a fresh approach to Britain's seemingly endless political and economic failures that were experienced by the overwhelming majority and especially by younger people.
The heart of the Manifesto is a positive end to austerity (i.e. precise additional funding plans for ransacked public services rather than the Scottish Nationalist Party's 'end to austerity' meaning no more cuts.) The Manifesto demands a redistribution of wealth to pay for the new spending, including taxing the top 5% incomes. The economic centre of the Manifesto is a new £250 billion state investment bank, with regional offshoots, to renovate investment in infrastructure. A list of reforms include a limit of 20 to 1 in relation to salaries and wages; the socialisation and nationalisation of Energy, Water, Rail and Royal Mail, 100,000 social homes a year, rent controls, Health and Care to receive an additional £39 billion, etc. Brexit should be friendly and defend workers' rights. The weakest parts of the document (beside inadequate housing targets and vagaries about immigration) are the vague, solely symbolic warnings to private finance and the City of London, the support for Trident, the maintenance of UK support for NATO's dangerous antics and the shadowy shape of Britain's future Constitution.
The latter weakness is, in the end, most telling. Lots of Labour's new Manifesto's implementation will be bitterly resisted by private finance and the City, as well as the major corporations, the EU, the US, and the mainstream political organisations in the UK including the majority of Labour MPs. Each of these opponents, and others not mentioned, will have their own parts to play in the upheaval. There is only one way to manage this deluge. State-wide political institutions have to be reformed, rebuilt or built anew that are democratically constructed to carry out the program that British people, in their large majority, want to see carried out. In other words, a big majority needs first to be built for the Manifesto and then that majority must be enabled, through the political institutions that they support, build and have confidence in, to lead the whole of society in the direction that has been chosen. Nothing less will be enough to breakthrough even to the partial reforms laid out by Labour. Albeit in a different context, Greece's Syriza's collapse demonstrates the weakness of reliance on simply traditional political institutions in the campaigning for substantial reform.
At the moment, Labour's Manifesto suggests that the House of Lords could become democratic in 5 years; that voting should be available to 16+ year olds; that Britain should become 'more federal' and that there should be a Constitutional Convention. In the first place the organisations of workers and youth that are fighting austerity must have representation in its dismantling and its replacement with something better. (Just as the Grenfell inhabitants need to lead the Public Enquiry on the safety of the Grenfell Tower.) Where is their place in the new Constitution? The Labour Party itself needs to prepare its democracy for its Manifesto. The half million members are its sovereign body. It needs to be a model for all those who want and need to be heard in a society where they are currently silenced. How do NHS workers at all levels want their service to work? Where do experienced track maintenance workers get to explain their experience of a proper Railway safety scheme? Where is it, and how do all Briton's decide whether they want Trident?
The interest in and support for Labour's Manifesto is a great breakthrough for the big majority in their experience of Britain's insecure, grim and declining society. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the the MP most supported by members of the Tory Party for leadership. This Victorian buffoon reeks of the stale, shambolic, self-parodies that most of the current Tory leadership reveal. Britain's traditional political caste has never been weaker. The potential political strength in the country lies elsewhere. It will be seen in the Peoples Assembly-led protest at the coming Tory Conference in Manchester; in the strikes of the fast food workers; in the coalition of unions preparing to blow away the cap on pay; when the tenants speak in the Grenfell Enquiry and all of this and all the rest can be brought together by Labour's Manifesto. And the Manifesto itself? It will need to be revised, rewritten, argued over, revised again as the movement and its debates move on. And in due course it will need to help create the first British Constitution.
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