The Observer view: manifestos reveal the gulf between the main parties

Labour’s leader Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner after the launch of the party’s manifesto in Manchester on 13 June. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The Britain that the next government will inherit on 5 July has been profoundly misgoverned for 14 years. Productivity, the heart of prosperity, has stagnated, as has business investment; the already weak trends were ruptured in 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum, and have stubbornly refused to budge since. Low growth and frozen living standards are thus guaranteed until those trends are reversed. Even though taxation has climbed, there cannot be one citizen unaware of the intolerable stress on underfunded public services set to intensify in the years ahead on current spending plans.

Meanwhile, life expectancy in disadvantaged parts of England is falling for the first time in more than a century; infant mortality is rising; poverty so blights 4.3 million children that we have among the shortest five-year-olds in Europe; one in six adults are illiterate or innumerate. People commonly live with their parents until their mid 30s because housing, whether rented or mortgaged, is prohibitively expensive. Having children is deferred; the birthrate is falling.

Abroad, Britain has largely cut its ties with its European neighbours. Britain is not trusted to keep its word or honour treaties guaranteeing fundamental human rights. Little has been done to address the gaps that allowed ethical standards to reach new lows in the last parliament. As the climate changes before our eyes, Britain has watered down its planned responses. Truly, the past 14 years have been squandered.

So how do the manifestos of the three main parties measure up?

The Tories’ manifesto has been unable to escape from the brute reality that they have been in charge since 2010. Several individual measures – plans to further protect pensioner income, promises to cut national insurance contributions for the self-employed, and more attacks on the welfare system and immigration – feel like stale hangovers from a policy framework that has failed. Fresh thinking has been limited to proposals such as introducing a form of national service whose practicality is doubted. On the big issues – productivity, investment, the quality of public services, the condition of the people, our relations with the EU, ethics in government – the manifesto is either mute or repeating tired mantras. The focus is on a commitment to future tax cuts as though that is the magic bullet. There is no new inspiring story of what Britain could be after another five years of Tory government.

The Lib Dem manifesto reveals a party that has begun to regain its confidence after being savaged for its coalition with the Conservatives. Unlike the other major parties, it breaks the collective silence on Brexit, recognises its damage and wishes to rejoin the single market as a stepping stone to eventual full EU membership. It will launch a free national care service and will find the revenue to raise spending on public services, largely through reforming capital gains tax, cracking down on tax avoidance and extending the freeze on income tax allowances. It will scrap the noxious two-child limit on access to benefits, triple the pupil premium and bring forward the target date for the achievement of net zero to 2045. It hopes that all of this will lift investment and productivity, abjuring, except for a light industrial strategy, the more detailed proposals advanced by Labour. Overall, the tone is one of qualified optimism. A fairer deal is possible.

Labour is weighed down by the need to reassure after the Corbyn years

Labour is weighed down by the need to reassure after the Corbyn years and what it knows will be aggressive attacks on any proclivity to tax and spend. The promise is to focus on “wealth generation” to create the growth that will in turn fund its “missions” on health, education, opportunity, safer streets and the drive to net zero. It thus gives considerable space to setting out how the state can reset investment and productivity. There will be a rise in public investment congruent with a need to lower public debt in the very long term, with a marked emphasis on green and environmental projects. This, together with reform of the pension fund system so that it invests more in British enterprise, startups and scale-ups, will trigger rising private investment and a wave of new companies – further boosted by a major infrastructure programme and long-term increased spending on research and development.

A national wealth fund and green prosperity plan are proposed to supplement the pension fund and financial system reforms, along with new mechanisms for partnering with business to capture the benefits of focused cooperation. A new deal for working people will boost job security, training and union representation, and, as growth accelerates, initial steps to boost teacher, doctor and police numbers will be followed up by more. On the EU, only baby steps are proposed to ease trade tensions. Like both the Tories and Lib Dems, the party recognises that more funds will have to be directed to defence. Criticised simultaneously for hidden extravagance and excessive caution, if the party could pull off its missions, the impact would be radical and transformative, ranking alongside, if in a different context, the achievements of the Attlee government.

There are many criticisms fairly levelled at British politics, but the manifestos answer one. These are not indistinguishable programmes for government. They are very different, reflecting very different philosophies – the Tories their distrust in government, Labour their faith in the necessity of government to improve the economy and society, and the Lib Dems a more limited faith in government, but essential as a means to individual enfranchisement. Yes, there are gaps, but it matters that you recognise the bigger stories – and which way you cast your vote.