Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Corbyn, British labour and policy change

  • Original Article
  • Published:
British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

There are widespread claims that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party has entailed a shift to a more ‘radical’ and ‘left-wing’ form of politics. Yet, many of these claims are untested or lack clear empirical evidence. This article seeks to contextualise Labour’s policy agenda, by focussing on the 2017 Labour Manifesto ‘For the Many, Not the Few’. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we challenge both the media portrayal of ‘For the Many, Not the Few’, and also the existing academic literature concerning Corbyn’s policy agenda. We offer the first detailed and systematic analysis of Labour’s policy agenda. The article uses the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) database to contextualise Labour’s 2017 manifesto and compare it with every Labour manifesto since 1945. The MARPOR data are then linked with a qualitative analysis of Corbyn’s policy agenda in the areas of economic policy, social policy and foreign affairs. The qualitative analysis focusses on comparing the 2017 manifesto with the 1983, 1997 and 2015 manifestos. Overall, the article argues that the wider claims about Corbyn’s radicalism tend to mask some long-standing continuity in the Labour tradition, and these claims tend to simplify understanding of a more complex policy agenda.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Whilst we use the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘social democratic’ to broadly capture Labour’s ideological and policy agenda at specific historical moments, the focus of our article is not to specifically categorise Corbyn’s agenda in these terms. There is an extensive literature on defining social democracy and the broad traditions encapsulated by these labels. Following Keating and McCrone (2015, p. 2), we define social democracy as a multidimensional phenomena, and following Freeden’s (1994) concept of morphology, we identify it as a broad ideological tradition clustered around ideas including tamed capitalism, equality, a focus on social liberalism and internationalism, amongst others. Thomson (2010, pp. 7–13) has a useful overview of some of the key definitions, and we broadly identify socialism as a political project to replace the capitalist political economy through democratic means, social democracy as a more reformist project captured by Keating and McCrone (2015) and others. British Labour is also often linked with ‘labourism’—a specific project to further the material conditions of the working class, with an institutional link between unions and their political parties. New Labour is also associated with a ‘third way’ politics (sometimes the ‘new’ social democracy) where it embraced a more globalised political economy and shifted away from traditional policy instruments (e.g. nationalisation) (Giddens 1998; Powell 2004). There is, of course, some overlap with these definitions.

  2. Despite its widespread use, there is a vigorous and contested debate about the MARPOR dataset on both theoretical and methodological grounds (e.g. Budge et al 2001; Laver et al 2001; Gemenis 2013). It is beyond the scope of this article to rehearse these debates, but to clarify the merit and ways in which the MARPOR dataset is used. For our purposes, we use the coding of Labour’s manifesto for descriptive purposes to highlight the extent to which specific policy issues (e.g. support for nationalisation) have salience over time. We do not use this data to claim that the 2017 manifesto is more or less ‘left wing’ over time, or compared to, say, the 1983 manifesto. Instead, we make descriptive, contingent judgments about the 2017 manifesto using the MARPOR for comparative purposes. In particular, the use of the RILE (left/right) index is contested (Gemenis 2013; Dinas and Gemenis 2010). Here, we employ the RILE index only in so far that it gives a generalised salience view of the changes in Labour’s manifestos. We note that the terms ‘left wing’ and ‘social democratic’ have various definitions, and indeed meanings that change over time. Our purposes are expressly not to categorise Labour’s manifestos in spatial terms, but rather focuss on policy salience for descriptive purposes. At best, the MARPOR data are the most comprehensive dataset that codes the content on manifestos.

References

  • Allan, N., and J. Bara. 2017. ‘Public Foreplay’ or Programmes for Government? The Content of the 2015 Party Manifestos. Parliamentary Affairs 70 (1): 1–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anwar, M. 2010. Race and Politics: Ethnic Minorities and the British Political System. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bale, T. 2016. The Loser Takes It All. Labour and Jeremy Corbyn: A Response to Steve Richards. The Political Quarterly 87 (1): 18–19.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bara, J. 2005. A Question of Trust: Implementing Party Manifestos. Parliamentary Affairs 58 (3): 585–599.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benoit, K., and M. Laver. 2007. Estimating Party Policy Positions: Comparing Expert Surveys and hand-Coded Content Analysis. Electoral Studies 26 (1): 90–107.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beresford, R. 2015. New Labour and Enterprise Policy: Continuity or Change? Evidence from General Election Manifestos. British Politics 10 (3): 335–355.

    Google Scholar 

  • Budge, I. 1987. The Internal Analysis of Election Programmes. In Ideology, Strategy and Party Change: Spatial Analyses of Post-War Election Programmes in 19 Democracies, ed. I. Budge, D. Robertson, and D. Hearl, 15–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Budge, I. 2001. Validating Party Policy Placements. British Journal of Political Science 31 (1): 210–223.

    Google Scholar 

  • Budge, I., H.-D. Klingemann, A. Volkens, J. Bara, and E. Tanenbaum. 2001. Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Consterdine, E. 2017. Why Jeremy Corbyn Can’t Seem to Solve Labour’s Immigration Conundrum, The Conversation, 12 January. https://theconversation.com/why-jeremy-corbyn-cant-seem-to-solve-labours-immigration-conundrum-71137. Accessed 2 Oct 2017.

  • Consterdine, E. 2018. Labour’s Immigration Policy: The Making of the Migration State. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, P., and D. Kavanagh. 2018. The British General Election of 2017. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crines, A.S., D. Jeffery, and T. Heppell. 2017. The British Labour Party and Leadership Election Mandate(s) of Jeremy Corbyn: Patterns of Opinion and Opposition Within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 28: 361–379.

    Google Scholar 

  • Daily Mail. 2017. Labour’s manifesto creates a great opportunity (and dilemma) for Theresa May, 17 May.

  • Däubler, T. 2015. What the UK General Elections of 2005/10 Tell Us About the Demand for Manifestos (and the Other Way Round). Parliamentary Affairs 68 (2): 401–422.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dinas, E., and K. Gemenis. 2010. Measuring Parties’ Ideological Positions with Manifesto Data: A Critical Evaluation of the Competing Methods. Party politics 16 (4): 427–450.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dolezal, M., L. Ennser-Jedenastik, W.C. Müller, K. Praprotnik, and A.K. Winkler. 2016. Beyond Salience and Position Taking: How Political Parties Communicate Through Their Manifestos. Party Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068816678893.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dorey, P. 2017. Jeremy Corbyn Confounds his Critics: Explaining the Labour Party’s Remarkable Resurgence in the 2017 Election. British Politics 12: 308–334.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doyle, P. 2015. New Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Impact on British Foreign and Defence Policy. London: Aljazeera Center for Studies.

    Google Scholar 

  • Financial Times. 2017. Labour Lays out £49bn Tax Rise in Radical Election Manifesto. 17 May. https://www.ft.com/content/0d71d118-3a51-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23.

  • Freeden, M. 1994. Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology. Journal of Political Philosophy 2 (2): 140–164.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gemenis, K. 2013. What to Do (and not to do) with the Comparative Manifesto Project Data. Political Studies 61 (S1): 3–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giddens, A. 1998. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gower, M. 2016. A New ‘Controlling Migration Fund’ for the UK? House of Commons Briefing Paper, No. 7673. Accessed 1 August.

  • Guardian. 2017. The Guardian’s View on Labour’s Manifesto: Widening the Bounds of the Thinkable. Accessed 16 May.

  • Hall, S. 1981. The “Little Caesars’ of Social Democracy. Marxism Today. April: 11–15.

  • Hannah, S. 2018. A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left. London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hawkes, S. and H. Cole. 2017. From Crusher with love: Jeremy Corbyn’s hard left manifesto for Labour has a £30billion financial black hole and will land everyone with a £4,000 bill. The Sun, 12 May. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3541218/jeremy-corbyns-hard-left-manifesto-for-labour-has-a-30billion-financial-black-hole-and-will-land-everyone-with-a-4000-bill-after-day-of-chaos/.

  • Hickson, K., and J. Miles. 2018. Social Democratic Euroscepticism: Labour’s Neglected Tradition. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20 (4): 864–879.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hindmoor, A. 2018. What’s Left Now? The History and Future of Social Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Independent. 2017. A fine manifesto—if Labour were still fighting the last election. 16 May.

  • Jackson, B. 2017. The Politics of the Labour Manifesto. Political Quarterly 88 (3): 343.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, H., and M. Kandiah (eds.). 1996. The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–1964. Houndmills: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kavanagh, D. 1981. The Politics of Manifestos. Parliamentary Affairs. 34 (1): 7–27.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kavanagh, D. 2000. Labour Party Manifestos 1900–1997. In Labour Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997, ed. I. Dale, 1–8. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keating, M., and D. McCrone. 2015. The Crisis of Social Democracy in Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Labour Party. 1974. Let Us Work Together: Labour Way’s Out of the Crisis. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab74feb.htm. Accessed 16 Sept 2017.

  • Labour Party. 1983. The New Hope for Britain: Labour’s Manifesto 1983. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab83.htm. Accessed 16 Sept 2017.

  • Labour Party. 1987. Britain Will Win with Labour: 1987 Labour Party Manifesto http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab87.htm. Accessed 16 Sept 2017.

  • Labour Party. 1992. It’s Time to Get Britain Working Again: Labour Party Manifesto 1992 http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab92.htm. Accessed 16 Sept 2017.

  • Labour Party 1997. New Labour Because Britain Deserves Better. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab97.htm, Accessed 16 Sept 2017.

  • Labour Party. 2015. Britain Can Be Better: The Labour Party Manifesto 2015. London: Labour Party.

    Google Scholar 

  • Labour Party. 2017. For the Many, Not the Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017. London: Labour Party.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laver, I. (ed.). 2001. Estimating the Policy Positions of Political Actors. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leahy, P. 2017. The Few, Not the Many: Labour’s Ideas for the NHS. Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 99 (9): 304.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lehmann, P., T. Matthieß, N. Merz, S. Regel, and A. Werner. 2015. Manifesto Corpus. Berlin: WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

    Google Scholar 

  • Littler, J. 2017. More for the Many, Less for the Few. In The Corbyn Effect, ed. M. Perryman, 202–213. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maguire, K. (2017) Leaked Labour Manifesto is a Full-Blooded Socialist Offer to Britain. The Daily Mirror, 11 May.

  • Manwaring, R., and M. Beech. 2018. The British Labour Party: Back to the Wilderness. In Why the Left Loses: The Decline of the Centre-Left in Comparative Perspective, ed. R. Manwaring and P. Kennedy, 25–38. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCann, K. 2017. Labour’s Left-Wing Manifesto Leaked. The Telegraph, 11 May.

  • Moran, M. 2017. The End of British Politics?. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pearce, M. 2014. Key Function Words in a Corpus of UK Election Manifestos. Linguistik Online 65 (3): 23–44.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perryman, M. (ed.). 2017. The Corbyn Effect. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pettitt, R. 2018. The ‘How’ of Election Manifestos in the British Labour Party: A Source of Ongoing Controversy. Party Politics 24 (3): 289–295.

    Google Scholar 

  • Piper, E., K. MacLellan. 2017. Labour launches ‘radical, responsible’ election manifesto. Reuters, 16 May.

  • Pimlott, H. 2017. Stuart Hall’s Legacy: Thatcherism, Cultural Studies and ‘The Battle for Socialist Ideas’ During the 1980s. Socialist Studies 12 (1): 117.

    Google Scholar 

  • Powell, M. 2004. Social Democracy in Europe: Renewal or Retreat? In Social Democratic Party Policies in Contemporary Europe, ed. G. Bonoli and M. Powell. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prince, R. 2016. Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup: How Jeremy Corbyn Stormed to the Labour Leadership. London: Biteback.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richards, S. 2016. Leadership, Loyalty and the Rise of Jeremy Corbyn. The Political Quarterly 87 (1): 12–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robertson, D. 1976. A Theory of Party Competition. London: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robinson, E., et al. 2017. Telling Stories About Post-War Britain: Popular Individualism and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1970s. Twentieth Century British History. 28 (2): 268–304.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, M. 2016. Corbyn as an Organisational Phenomenon: A Response to Steve Richards. The Political Quarterly 87 (1): 20–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rustin, M. 2016. Are Real Changes Now Possible: Where Next for Corbyn and Labour? Soundings 66: 7–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seymour, R. 2016. Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sloman, P., and K. Kowol. 2014. The Politics of Foresight: British Election Manifestos and Social Change, 1945–2010. London: Nesta pamphlet. https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/the_politics_of_foresight.pdf. Accessed 16 Oct 2018.

  • Soldatic, K., and H. Morgan. 2017. ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’: Shame and the Neoliberal Governance of Disability Welfare Subjectivities in Australia and the UK. In Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities, ed. J. Louth and M. Potter, 106–133. Chester: University of Chester Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, E. 2010. ‘Managing’ Migration: Discourses on Immigration and ‘Race relations’ from Thatcherism to New Labour. In Domestic Policy Discourse in the ‘New World Order’, ed. L. Maguire, 251–288. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stafford, J. 2016. The Corbyn Experiment. Dissent 63 (1): 69–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, P. 2016. Hard Left, Soft Left: Corbynism and Beyond. Renewal 24 (2): 45–50.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomson, S. 2010. The Social Democratic Dilemma. Basingstoke: MacMillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Toye, R. 2013. From ‘Consensus’ to ‘Common Ground’: The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and its Collapse. Journal of Contemporary History 48 (1): 3–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Werner, A., O. Lacewell, and A. Volkens. 2015. Manifesto Coding Instructions, 5th ed., Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB).

  • Wray, H. 2006. An Ideal Husband? Marriages of Convenience, Moral Gate-Keeping and Immigration to the UK. European Journal of Migration and Law 8 (3–4): 303–320.

    Google Scholar 

  • Volkens, A., P. Lehmann, T. Matthieß, N. Merz, S. Regel, and B. Weßels. 2018. The Manifesto Project Dataset—Codebook. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Version 2018a. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business, Law and Government, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

    Rob Manwaring & Evan Smith

Authors
  1. Rob Manwaring
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Evan Smith
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rob Manwaring.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Manwaring, R., Smith, E. Corbyn, British labour and policy change. Br Polit 15, 25–47 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-019-00112-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-019-00112-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation