As we get closer to the actual day of voting this somewhat dispiriting General Election campaign across all the parties has produced very little new thinking or genuine plans to improve Britain’s prospects which are frankly dismal. In my last blog before the General Election I want to cover some of the issues raised in the manifestos of the two major parties. I don't plan to cover the other parties as I think they're largely irrelevant though I suppose it is possible there could be a hung parliament in which case some negotiations might be needed between more than one of the parties, but I think it unlikely. Present polling indicates that Labour is going to win a very large majority. It would seem that most people in the country think along the lines that after 14 years of Conservative rule which has not really dealt successfully with many of the challenges that we face it is time for a change. But they do not really understand what that change means as it is actually quite difficult to distinguish very much between the two major parties in their manifestos. The Conservatives have undoubtedly moved more towards the centre ground and that is why the Reform party has emerged and Labour at least on the face of it would seem to also be moving more towards the centre ground. However, once they are in power with a very large majority, I think it likely that will change. Keir Starmer as a young man was very much on the left wing and indeed published articles in a magazine that he edited in his twenties which suggested things like the abolition of the police force as in his mind their only purpose was to protect the property of the rich. He produced many other extreme ideas as did other leading figures in the current shadow cabinet some of whom are Marxist in their real views.

Let us examine the Labour manifesto in a little bit more detail. It seems to want to position itself as the party of wealth creation with the aim of improving living standards for working people. Noone in the Labour leadership knows anything at all about wealth creation and none of them have any experience of it whatsoever. Kier Starmer has never run a business or had anything else to do with wealth creation and indeed as a barrister and then as a public prosecutor probably did more to oppose business than anything else. At least the current Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt was a highly successful businessman who set up his own business which he later sold for an 8-figure sum. The current Prime Minister is another one who has huge experience of wealth creation. It is not just that he married the daughter of a billionaire, but he made his own fortune in business, and it also means that unlike the Tony Blairs and David Camerons he is not in it for the money. There are several other leading figures in the Conservative party who have similar experience so it's not that they don't know how to create personal wealth but they don't know and nor do the  Labour Party how to genuinely encourage more investment and so lead to an improvement in productivity where the UK lags behind most of its international peers. Both the manifestos of the Labour Party and the Conservative party are full of good intentions but with very few serious actual policies that will encourage business spending. Kier Starmer says that he will create growth, but he has not got a clue how to do that.

The Labour Party wants to deliver all sorts of improvements in public services but without the money to pay for this it is impossible to see how this will happen. All the serious independent commentators make this point. Some of the tax changes that Labour have promised will almost certainly lead to reductions in tax income rather than any increase. If you tax the wealthy the wealthy leave. That is what happened in France under Mitterrand and later under a Labour government in Norway changes in taxation applied to wealthy people meant that the wealthiest people left those countries and went to friendlier regimes like Switzerland and even the UK. Labour is talking about a windfall tax on big energy companies and as a result more than one energy company has already pulled its plans to invest further in the UK. Labour plans to apply VAT to private schools. This is entirely driven by their left-wing views that there should not be such schools. No doubt the rich who send their sons to schools like Eton will be able to meet these demands, but many private schools are not like Eton at all. They provide important education to children who cannot get their special needs in the state sector. Already two of these schools have announced that they will close even though the tax has not yet been introduced. Many parents are considering what they will do and almost certainly a great many will take their children out of such schools and thus put even more pressure on the state sector which will be unable to respond. Very little tax will be raised in this way because it will have to be spent on improving systems in schools where are already many big challenges.

Labour is promising to create an extra 40,000 NHS appointments and operations a year by introducing weekend services as well as turning to the private sector. It says the money will come from cracking down on tax avoidance but as I have already explained that will not produce anything like the money they think as many non-doms will simply leave the country. The problem in the NHS is not a lack of investment but a lack of organisation. I recently had a personal experience where I had to go into hospital for emergency treatment and over the course of two days I had to explain my situation to 16 different people. The old idea of case management seems to have disappeared and it was completely chaotic. I eventually asked if I could move to a private ward. This would normally cost £750 per night but as I was coming from the NHS, they just simply charged me £150. The difference in service and care was colossal. I had nothing like the interruptions through the night that I had had in the public ward but instead I had a peaceful comfortable night and was able to leave fully recovered the following day. This was actually in the same building.

The Labour manifesto also sets out the principles of how it wants to change the crisis-ridden care system in England but does not mention any detail as to how it will do this.

There are also plans to deal with the backlog of rape cases where more than 68,000 trials were waiting to be heard in April. Some of the worst delays are endured by victims of serious sexual violence. Labour says it will dedicate space for rape cases in crown courts to start cutting these backlogs, but this is not new spending, but simply a rearrangement of existing resources. The big problem is there is a shortage of experienced barristers to prosecute and defend cases which in turn affects how many become judges available to oversee such trials. A survey of criminal barristers by their professional body indicates more of them are likely to walk away from sexual offence work in the coming year because of the pay, hours, and stress. This is an enormous problem that will need a huge injection of cash and there is no sign of that coming from either of the parties.

Labour promises to build 1,500,000 new homes in England during the next five years which would require a level of housebuilding not seen for 60 years. It is completely unrealistic of Labour to have this plan when they have no way of achieving it. Over the last decade on average about half that number of homes have been completed and there is simply not the capacity in the industry to meet this target.

Labour says it will restore plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 which would overturn a government decision made last year to extend the deadline to 2035. This is a totally unrealistic target. In fact, both of these targets are unrealistic. The carbon footprint of an electric car is actually greater than the carbon footprint of a petrol car for many reasons. First of all, you have to make the car and you make it out of steel, one of the worst materials in terms of carbon emissions. Secondly you need to use rare metals all of which are mined in countries that have no carbon neutral mining techniques if there are any. Thirdly the battery is significantly heavier and so is the car. Fourthly if you have an electric vehicle you have to charge it from the grid half of which is not yet renewable and is unlikely to be during the time frame we're talking about, In fact to charge all vehicles in this country from the electric grid would require the building of four new power stations and no new power stations have been built in decades. You also would lose all the stock of petrol and diesel that is held by the oil companies, the petrol stations and indeed is in the tank of the average vehicle. Because electric vehicles are heavier than petrol driven vehicles, they will do more damage to the roads that are already badly damaged with a huge backlog in repairing potholes etc. That will simply increase and again that process is not carbon neutral. Finally, since the UK does not have the capacity to make all these electric vehicles most will be imported from China where the manufacturing process is far from carbon neutral.

Labour has some vague ideas of introducing a new border and security command for the UK and would scrap the Rwanda scheme. I personally think that scrapping the Rwanda scheme would be a good move as that to me is simply political cover for the total failure to deal with illegal immigration, but the problem is not really the small boats. About 50,000 people each year come here illegally on small boats, but the net immigration figure is over 700,000 people a year and there doesn't seem to be any attempt to deal with that.
Labour has made its biggest spending commitment in green measures during the next parliament with a target of £23.7 billion which is more than the additional spend on health or education but again people really need to understand that while a wind farm may produce renewable energy it has an extremely high carbon footprint. In the first place the windmills are made from concrete and steel which are the two worst materials there are in terms of their carbon footprint. The wind may be free of carbon but the product that captures the wind is not.

Turning to the Conservative manifesto it does have quite a number of more specific policies than the somewhat vague Labour manifesto. However, it is still largely a series of targets and intentions rather than genuinely creative and original policies that have been properly costed. All the political parties say that their plans are fully costed but they are simply not fully costed. They are targets with very little thought as to how they can be achieved. At the beginning of my professional career, I was trained in the Peter Drucker method of how you set objectives. First of all, you establish the base where you are. Secondly you establish the objective that you want to achieve. Thirdly you establish the method by which you will achieve your objective and fourthly you establish the method by which you will measure the fact that you have achieved your objective and having achieved your objective you will have established a new base from which you can start the process over again. I see very little sign that any of the political parties understand these basic principles which apply equally to political management as they do to business management.

If the Labour Party wins the General Election with as big a majority as has been forecast by some of the polling companies, then I fear we are in for a very rough time. Probably for the next decade or more the country will move even further back behind its major competitors in the world and people will not achieve the higher standard of living they're looking for, but I could probably say the same about any of the parties. I don't think it healthy in the British political system for one party to have a dominant and overwhelming majority. That is not good for political stability or for the country as a whole.