Johnson and Starmer should beware election manifestos

Election manifestos are rarely read but frequently argued over, and the usual rule is that having one can help a party get elected but make it both harder to govern and to hang on to power at the following election. Manifesto politics are proving unusually troublesome for both the main parties at the moment.

- SEAN O'GRADY

The government, for example, is currently under fire, so to speak, for the reported willingness of the prime minister to break the promise in the 2019 election to increase defence expenditure relative to national income. The document stated: "We will continue to exceed the Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence and increase the budget by at least 0.5 per cent above inflation every year of the new parliament." Now the criticism about the apparent willingness to resile from that comes not only from Labour but from the defence secretary himself. Ben Wallace has written to the prime minister to make his case and someone leaked the letter, which cites such embarrassments as a lack of drones, not enough pilots to fly multibillion-pound stealth jets, and a paucity of crew members aboard Royal Navy nuclear submarines.

The incident illustrates the dangers of even the most safe-looking manifesto promises. On the one hand, back in December 2019, no one would have predicted that there would be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia less than three years later. Nor that the whole of Europe would be vulnerable or that Nato would be sending significant quantities of munitions and troops to eastern Europe. If anything, the case for more military spending is far stronger than it was in 2019. The price of deterrence is far less than the cost of fighting a war, let alone losing one.