FTI Consulting UK Public Affairs Snapshot- The Drive to Survive: Rishi Sunak launches the 2024 Conservative Party manifesto

Today at Silverstone, the Conservatives launched their 2024 manifesto, Clear Plan – Bold Action – Secure Future.

Though the choice of location offers unhelpful headline material – you can choose between going round in circles, and being stuck in the pits – the Conservatives are hoping to use this as a reset moment following the difficulties of the past week.

Weighing in at 76 pages – more than Boris Johnson’s, though fewer than Theresa May’s – the document promised to deliver “big, bold interventions” focused on the areas where the Conservatives feel they offer the most compelling contrast to Labour.

Many of the policies – national service, a migrant cap, the quadruple lock on pensions, protecting single-sex spaces, and punchy words on the ECHR over Rwanda flights – have already been trailed in recent weeks, and will come as little surprise.

But there was more – notably, the scrapping of the self-employed National Insurance main rate, designed to boost entrepreneurism, and a further 2p cut to employee National Insurance. First-time buyers have been promised the abolition of stamp duty entirely on properties up to the value of £425,000, alongside a new Help to Buy scheme; on the supply side, 1.6 million new homes are proposed.

There are crowd-pleasers on law and order, defence, education and health – with 8,000 new police offers, defence spending as a proportion of GDP to rise to 2.5% by 2030, bans on mobile phones in schools, and £3.4bn for new technology for the NHS. Families, too should welcome the move to a household from an individual basis for Child Benefit.

In terms of what isn’t in the manifesto, there is likely to be disappointment that neither income tax nor inheritance tax features in the programme for tax cuts. There will also be broader questions about whether anything announced today is particularly big or bold.

Those questions speak to the great difficulty about putting out a manifesto when you’ve been in power for fourteen years: whether to emphasise change or continuity. Too much continuity, and it’s just more of the same; too much change, and it begs the question of why these announcements are being made now rather than at any previous point.

Conservative leader Rishi Sunak is seeking to respond to this dilemma by making two points. The first is that much of the Conservatives’ time in power has been spent firefighting – whether Covid, Ukraine, or inflation. Within that time, things have “not always been easy, and we have not got everything right”. But, the economy has “turned a corner” and a better macroeconomic picture means that some policies can now be brought to the table.

The second point is that the Conservatives are offering considerable clarity and detail about what the next few years would feel like under them – something Conservative strategists argue Labour has not provided so far in this campaign. It allows Sunak to continue saying that a vote for Labour would be a vote for the unknown – and, hopefully, persuade some swing voters in the process.

Perhaps a greater difficulty for the Conservatives is around costings. After fourteen years in power, promises of savings from further clampdowns on tax avoidance and evasions, further tightening of the welfare system and further improvements to civil service productivity do start to ring hollow. Those promises can also backfire in one of two ways: voters either don’t find them credible, or – as with the promise of £12bn cuts to the disability benefits bill – they consider them unnecessarily tough.

Paul Johnson, of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, is in the former camp for now, judging that on welfare reform, “the policies that have been spelt out are not up to the challenge”, and, more broadly, that “the manifesto did not tell us was where the £10 to £20 billion of cuts to spending on unprotected public services, as implied by the March Budget, might come from”.

Labour leader Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has been quick to dismiss the manifesto as “Jeremy Corbyn-style”: “anything you want can go in it and none of it is costed, it’s a recipe for more of the same”.

That shows some daring, given that he had backed both of Corbyn’s manifestos. A much safer option would have been to mention Liz Truss. But it also shows the extent of Labour’s confidence: one senses they are beginning to have fun. Given where the polls are, and the safety-first nature of this manifesto, perhaps they feel they can afford to.