Occasionally I write about politics on here. My main interest is in culture, and I don’t like partisanship for several reasons but most importantly because it is boring. Therefore, my approach to politics is that the ‘takes’ I present on here must be beyond party bounds and relate to something more deep about freedoms or the organisation of society and the functioning of places.
We have a General Election inbound in the United Kingdom (this week). It may not be the most consequential in the world by a long shot, but it’s the one I have a vote in.
My personal pledge for all General Elections is to read the manifestoes. To me, this ought to be seen as part and parcel of the whole civic duty of voting. That’s not to say that it should be legally required. Rather, I mean one should only take oneself seriously if one has at least glanced at what the political parties say for themselves about what they intend.
Why do I think this is important? Because the only other source of knowledge for our political choices is journalism. And journalism is intrinsically flawed. Journalists summarise and conflate things all of the time. Indeed, they have to. Journalists make mistakes, misquote, misremember. Perhaps most problematic of all, journalists ignore what they don’t like and deliberately give certain people the cold shoulder.
Journalists obviously dislike their political opponents, depending on what side of the political divide they are on. But journalists also dislike those that confuse dramatic and memorable narratives. Centrists who straddle various issues are an important target here. Why do the Liberal Democrats insist on a ruthless campaign of practical dad jokes? Because they know they must trick journalists into covering them through the lure of a good pun and a bizarre image. It has worked well.
Finally, journalists are sheep-like. They have far too much to write about in far too little time. The result is the repetition of headlines, simple ideas and simple analysis. Everything must submit to the white hot relevance of The Topic and everything else gets forgotten. The tragedy of this process is obvious: it’s only what’s forgotten that’s worth writing about in the first place.
The only way to escape this is to read party political manifestoes yourself. See how you feel when a party presents its own ideas in its own words. You might be surprised. Once you’ve done it a few years in a row you will realise that every party will have at least one idea you agree with and don’t find objectionable, including fringe parties. This doesn’t mean you should or shouldn’t vote for them, or that you should doubt whether you have principles. Rather, it should make you think about why you feel the way you do about certain topics, whether you can imagine feeling differently, and what it would take to make you feel differently.
The obvious way to read political manifestoes is like shopping. We’re looking to tick off the things on our list which we think are good, and avoid the bad. That is a sensible approach. However, there are other ways of reading a political manifesto. Here is a novel one.
Political Manifesto Readthrough: The Medium is the Message
The idea here is to ignore the actual content of political manifestoes and instead look at their presentational style. This is inspired by learning about the concept of User Experience (UX) from Neil Scott, and part of my relentless quest to turn everything into a visual-cultural-historical exercise. You’re welcome. (Presented in alphabetical order, four main parties in England, where I have a vote. Please note, my value judgements in this niche context do not correlate with my actual political views, which I have tried to screen out for the sake of this exercise!)
Conservative Party
Their manifesto is a big old PDF. The first thing that comes up from the Google search is a long PDF, I guess through a mixture of SEO bloopers (?) and people’s preference for the full document. Notably, the party has produced a more navigable website version, which they presumably want more people to read, but instead you get the public.conservatives.com URL and another URL for a PDF at the top. For this reason, I’m judging the PDF versions here. This is messy, and rather looks like a bootleg to my eye.
The PDF document is an obviously overwhelming format. The Conservative Party’s one runs to a total of 80 pages. This is indulgent, allowing the party to theoretically explain everything they want to in as much detail as they want. However, the downside is that none of that will come across if the reader simply gets bored and stops reading.
The PDF has a lead section with a kind of semi-detailed summary of all of their ideas. The categories are rather bloated, with many many items assigned to each one. The result is that topics get rather confusing. Does an NHS spending policy really have much to do with scrapping ULEZ? Arguably it will, but not for the reason the party wants you to believe.
There is also an A-level textbook vibe to the PDF. They have little blown-up sections with an orange background to give further information, a bit like a “stretch and challenge” set of extra questions you might find in a chemistry tome for seventeen year olds.
On that theme, the conservative manifesto has a lot of numbers embedded in the text. I’m not sure they do much. They are generally quoted without any context. £4.7 billion here; £8.3 billion there. When confronted with numbers this specific all thrown together, one wonders how these two-significant-figure stats have been dreamed up. The Labour manifesto is guilty of the same sin, though. The difference is that it’s much easier to scan the Tory manifesto and see its rhetorical tactics quickly.
3/10 Medium is the Message marks.
Green Party
The Green Party’s user friendly online manifesto comes first in Google, before a page with the neat headline ‘2024 manifesto: downloads.’ Very nice! A good outcome that looks deliberate.
However, the start of the online manifesto consists of a wall of plain text which will fill most people’s phone screens. Not so good. The first words of this text is “Millions of people […]” which strikes me as a bizarre choice; it sounds both abstract and exaggerated at the same time.
Then, the manifesto presents us with a series of photograph background buttons with text, usually incorporating the words “fairer” and/or “greener”. The repetition looks a little silly. I note that the Liberal Democrats use the same “fairness” word throughout, which is interesting and points to a similar political desire to point towards economic justice without sounding like a commie.
The text works from headlines and bulletpoints, in a similar way to the Tory manifesto but which is slightly more readable owing to less text on display.
An innovation of the green manifesto is the addition of a box at the footer of most pages. This box gives a specific example of green policy in action, usually done at a local council level owing to their paucity of MPs. This is shrewd.
Most voters will be sceptical about the Greens because of their low visibility and indeed many may not realise they have actually done anything at all. The boxes of ‘past portfolio’ are concrete, specific, and give much needed credibility for this party.
7/10 Medium is the Message marks.
Labour Party Manifesto
The Labour manifesto again presents good SEO skills in that their readable version comes first. This is a damn good thing, for their full PDF manifesto comes to a ludicrous 142 pages, almost double the Conservatives’.
The Labour manifesto has a similar idea to the Greens’, in that it starts with a bit of text and then leads us into a series of topics. However, the party has been far more disciplined on this bit of graphic design. The flavour text at the beginning is a mere 22 words excluding titles, meaning we can scan it instantly. This gives an impression of confidence and clarity.
The topics have neat little icons next to them, which assists speedy scanning. The titles for each topic have clearly been written to avoid repetition, and for this reason they are far more convincing and engaging than the Greens’ manifesto.
Once you get into the topics, there are few bullet points here. The Labour manifesto is the simplest thus far, with very few bits of visual apparatus being used. The pages start with big text headlines, followed by a box with one cluster of bullet points. There’s a big image to start with, often of Sir Beer Korma, hard hats and the likes, and that’s about it. The texts have headlines, but that’s about all. The font size is big. It works well.
My negatives? Not including the concrete examples of good practice in the past is a missed opportunity compared to the Green offering. And there is an epic fail in the costed section in that it has numbered asterisks on each table which point out “may not sum due to rounding”. Not the right place to make that caveat!
8/10 Medium is the Message marks.
Liberal Democrats
The Lib Dem campaign has turned out to be the comedy event of the election, with various planned stunts as alluded to above. Their manifesto, however, is perhaps the stealth event of the season.
I say this because their election manifesto online version buries anything of substance beneath a vibey headline. You click on that headline and you get a somewhat still summarised version. No, you have to click on ‘more detail’ to reach anything meaningful. You have to do a fair bit of digging to find, for example, the party approach to cannabis or taxation.
There is also a major technological blooper in the Lib Dem manifesto page. The lengthy “more detail” sections are automatically scrolled to the bottom when you open them up. Weird.
It gets worse when you consider the overall design of these pages. Not only have we a huge number of indented bullets, but they also appear in narrow dialogue boxes in front of the website text. Awful.
1/10 Medium is the Message Marks.
Reform
When it comes to graphic design, how do the new kids on the block, Reform, perform?
On my SEO point, they have done a pretty bad job. Their own sponsored version has a snippet (the text extracted from the website to give a sense of what it’s about, but which is manually overridden by professionals) that doesn’t make much sense (breaking off mid sentence). The organic search engine result that comes up below this has a snippet which is their address and registration information. Whoops!
The manifesto page has a lot of text (not as much as the Greens) and it ends with Farage’s signature, amusingly just as the Greens’ equivalent section does. It’s hard to find the actual manifesto though, which one has to scroll down to (snappily called ‘Our Policy Documents’). Oh, wait. Users then have to click through again, on a button called ‘Our Contract with You’. Then, you’re led to where the file is hosted: assets.nationbuilder.com
Seriously!? It’s almost as if the web designer nerds employed by the two right wing parties are sabotaging their clients’ campaigns. The file loads so slowly that my browser gives up the ghost half way through.
OK, so what about their actual manifesto? It’s another big old PDF, with far too much text in the introduction. The main pages are reasonable in terms of text, with massive landscape format pictures of Richard Tice clapping (among other things) to spruce things up.
The main takeaway for me is the summary section (the most important one). Where other parties (apart from Labour and Conservative) seem to repeat adjectives in this part, Reform uses a verb. “Imagine” so, each line goes like this “imagine smart immigration, not mass immigration”. The problem here is twofold. Firstly, it makes the text scan weirdly. Secondly, readers cannot resist reading the words to the tune of “Imagine” by John Lennon. You remember that classic tune: 🎵Imagine no small boats in the channel🎵 (🎶and no NHS waiting lists above us🎶).
The user experience here is by far the worst in terms of actually getting to the manifesto, but the manifesto isn’t quite as poorly designed as the Lib Dems… So:
2/10 Medium is the Message marks
Well, what was the outcome of this little exercise? The main thing is that it’s clearly very difficult for political parties of any stripe to design a really great looking manifesto which is easy to get access to. Odd, given how much money is in politics, but this reflects the sad fact that manifestoes are seldom read.
Thanks for reading, and please do go out and vote. And try to read the manifestoes first.