Bedtime reading, anyone?

Manifesto or Mills and Boon... the choice is yours

Ever wondered who actually reads manifestos?

Great tomes of teasing promises and rose-tinted good intentions - all instantly breakable on election - are they too Mills and Boon for the average Brit’s literary tastes?

Who looks forward excitedly to launch day? Who grabs a copy and takes it to bed for a chapter by chapter study before the light goes out?

Labour’s - launched bizarrely against a backdrop of badly photographed wheat fields - promised future fairness (as opposed to past unfairness?) and all kinds of stuff that should have been done over the past 13 years.

The Conservatives’ pledged change and people power, with all of us involved in the progress of our country. Funny, I thought we always had been. Didn’t that used to be the point of democracy?

In his launch, David Cameron assured us, paternally, that his government would “trust” us.
Nice of him to say so but surely even he must realise the trust boot is currently worn on the other foot.
Will we find the courage to trust our government again?

Manifestos aren’t known for being worth much more than the paper - and fancy bindings - they’re published on.
In fact there’s much to be said for an assumption that they’re more to do with a nostalgia for old electoral traditions than promised, hard and fast policy.

Manifesto promises of referenda didn’t get us too far, did they? And I can’t remember any Labour manifesto promising to raid my pension savings and plunge me into penury in old age. That one came from blind side.

Since both Labour and Tories have studiously avoided the elephants at their launches, tiptoeing instead around their edges, both rom-com manifestos soon acquired the whiff of irrelevance.

Public sector cuts? Hello! Everybody knows they’ll have to come. Anybody fancy talking about them like adults?
More specifically, cuts to public sector protected final salary pensions - for which we all pay through the nose, while edging towards the private sector’s old age in poverty. Are they even mentioned in manifesto small print?

But what do I know? Both major parties are on record as aiming their hopes, dreams, tax breaks, perks and manifesto policies at “Decent, hard working families.”

I’m single and childless, so I guess - like all similar folks - I don’t matter.

I could clutch at straws, I suppose. I do work too hard to have the time or energy to be indecent. Does that count for anything?
I’m not holding any breath.