Manifestos Unwrapped: 1. The Conservative Party - a terrible manifesto for the NHS.
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This election season we have been hearing an awful lot about Rishi Sunak. We’ve heard about how he didn’t have Sky TV as a child and seems to consider this a considerable sacrifice. We’ve heard that one of his key aides, his parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams, placed a bet about the election mere days before the General Election was announced, and we’ve heard all about Sunak’s antics around D-Day which caused a furore in the media, and his political ratings to fall. Along with the trips and tumbles of the election campaign, we’ve also been hearing rumours that he might move to California as soon as the election is over. He and his wife own a fancy apartment there, after all, which was described in The Guardian a couple of years ago like this:
“Residents are promised the apartments will provide ‘the epitome of urban Santa Monica beach living’ with ‘stunning views of the Santa Monica mountains’ and where you ‘wake up to the sound of waves crashing against the shore’.”
It sounds very nice, doesn’t it? Just the sort of place you might want to escape to if, say, you’ve just suffered a terrible election defeat and want to unwind. Sunak himself is adamant the rumours aren’t true, and that he will stay put in the UK whatever happens on July 4th. Whether or not you believe him, I think it’s a bit too early to speculate about where he’ll be after the election. Does this make me a cynic, or make me a sceptic? Maybe, but I don’t think anything is set in stone at this point, and I get a bit nervous when I see people speaking with absolute certainty about what is going to happen on July 4th.
The reality is, there are still a lot of undecided voters (this little clip on the BBC website is really snappy and interesting, if you’re interested), and we can’t forget the phenomenon of “shy tories” either. Have you heard of ‘shy’ tory voters? It’s best described here:
“ ‘Shy Tory factor’ is a name given by British opinion polling companies to a phenomenon first observed by psephologists in the early 1990s. They observed that the share of the electoral vote won by the Conservative Party … was significantly higher than the equivalent share in opinion polls.”
This means that some of the current polls, showing that Labour has an enormous lead, may close a bit on closing day, and we’re still 3 weeks away. A crisis or an unexpected event can occur that could turn things on their head in an instant, and for that reason it is incredibly important to focus on the facts. The closest thing we have to facts right now are the political manifestos that are being released by each of the political parties, and so I think it’s important that we look at the details closely.
So let’s get stuck in! This is my first edition of Manifestos Unwrapped, and I’m looking at the Conservative Party’s manifesto. I’ll highlight some of the key points and explain their merits or limitations.
The first thing you notice when you open the Conservative Party manifesto is that they’re very keen on flags, and the second thing is the tone of the messaging. It has that specific essence of condescension and abrasiveness that Rishi Sunak has brought to UK politics in recent years. This manifesto attempts to convince us that the UK’s problems are down to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, whilst also telling us that their plan is working, and that we should stick with it.
There are 3 pages dedicated to the NHS in this document, which seems extraordinarily short given the service is in the worst state of its entire 75-year history and the solution is incredibly complex. In fact, they have written less than one page of information for every 2 million people currently sitting on an NHS waiting list. Still, I thought, let’s focus on the content and see what they have to say…