J.L. Carr’s classic novel How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975) contains a character named Arthur Fangfoss. Mr Fangfoss is a rural tyrant who, when standing for the local council, limits his election address to a pithy eight words: ‘If elected, I will keep down the rates.’ No such brevity, alas, attends the 2017 manifestos of the UK’s three main political parties. The shortest of them — the Lib Dems’ Your Chance to Change Britain’s Future — weighs in at over 80 pages, while Labour’s For the Many, Not the Few extends to a well-nigh novella-length 23,000 words.
The Conservatives’ Forward, Together is not that much shorter and took several minutes to download (for some reason it seems impossible actually to buy a party manifesto these days. No bookshop in my home city of Norwich was stocking any, and the local Labour councillor from whom I requested a copy of For the Many, Not the Few seemed puzzled that anyone should want one).
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