http://www.labour.org.uk/uploads/3099f339-a055-dd64-c113-7c620424cdc1.pdf
So, I realise that most people don't actually read manifestos, but presumably they're written with the intent that at least some people might glance at them. Why doesn't Ed just put "Single? No children? We don't want your vote" on the front page and save them the effort?
Families up and down the country are paying the price for the global financial crisis and the Tory-led Government’s economic failure. Families are feeling the squeeze, but this out of touch Government is making tough times even tougher with policies which are hurting but not working. Bills are going up for families while petrol prices are at a record high, but David Cameron is doing nothing to help.
It's all just gravy for the singles, of course, and anyway, they don't matter electorally. After all, it's not as though 29% of households in the UK are single adults living alone. Oh, wait, it _is_ 29% of households. Fortunately, Labour are doing so well in the polls that they can wave two fingers to 30% of the electorate and it doesn't matter.
A bit of textual and visual analysis gives some fun, too. Aside from the linguistic poverty (tough appears 53 times, which implies that a thesaurus isn't amongst Ed's recent purchases, touch 13 times, mostly in the 7 out of touches) and the obsession with particular groups in society (48 family/families), you can see how ashamed they are of their leadership: Miliband is mentioned once. Meanwhile, Cameron gets 18 times. Apart from Harman on the back page, no other Labour politician is mentioned, although on page fourteen you can see half of Andy Burnham.
Diversity is obviously last year's concern, because every single face in the document is white; still, Labour doesn't need to worry about other communities, as they're mostly safe seats like Bradford West. Page 8 has a photograph which the most Kinder, Küche, Kirche elements in the Tory Party would discard as being too cheesy. On the same page they write about "stand[ing] up for the squeezed middle, even when there is less money around" which were I poor I'd read as meaning they're going to cut my benefits to give smiling families in sunlit houses more money to spend at Boden.
And the omissions are interesting. 4 mentions of school, but all in the context of a free school meals scheme in Southwark. No mention of education, which given it's one of the major functions of local authorities is a little odd. No mention of borrowing, deficit, etc even though it's promising radical tax cuts (including lowering VAT to 17.5%).
It really is a shambles. Aside from the rebarbative prose, endless repetition, brutal sentence structure and slip-shod editing (let's not worry about the prosody of inspiring writing, because there isn't any and it isn't) it seems to be a desperate case of "vote for us, because we'll tax a few slackers, give you a handout and keep foreigners out". Dreadful.
ian