Did you read any of the party manifestos in 2010? The chances are you didn’t, if the experiences of most people are anything to go by. To give you some idea, I have in fact voted Labour continuously since 1992.

And yet it’s thought that the party manifestos potentially have a massive impact in influencing people’s opinions indirectly through political commentators. Commentators apparently wade through the documents and advise you on what it all means. If that is true, what happened last time? The NHS has just been through such a major change that Sir David Nicholson, retiring head of NHS England, said that the reorganisation could be seen from ‘outer space’. As many wellwishers come to London for socialist Tony Benn’s funeral, many also sympathise with how mute and supine the Labour Party have become. They are not a socialist party, just a front for a ragbag of incoherent corporate memes. The planks of free movement of capital and free movement of persons, despite the promises of ‘the living wage’ yet to be legislated for officially, are firmly running policy like letters in a stick of DNA. Under this ideology, you can easily expect socialist outlook for the NHS to be consigned to history in the movement of multinational companies making primary care more ‘efficient’ and ‘technologically with it’. Not all change is progress, and Labour’s reaction to the Budget last week demonstrated that it is happiest when doing limp and supine. It’s happiest when it’s doing nothing at all, but agreeing. It’s happiest when it’s taking it up the backside so hard it hurts.

It is happy to sign up to McKinsey £20 bn efficiency savings though apparently objects to billions to be returned to the Treasury without having gone into frontline care? It objects to social care cuts, and yet is offering no big money to implement whole person care or integrated care. It says that it wishes to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), making the ‘current structures do different things’. This is perfectly laudable as it doesn’t want the NHS  to undergo another random re-dis-organisation, but it means a number of tranches of policy get away unscathed. The loathed private finance initiative, which sets fair for NHS Trusts to go bust over loan repayments allowing top CEOs to pay off their mortgage by implementing ‘efficiency savings’, carries on regardless. This is the same policy which sees junior nurses fight on the frontline like infantry in the Somme. And when push comes to shove, the regulators are only there for the officials not the infantry, as evidenced as a trance-like hypnotic following of compassion, and a lack of sanctions by the General Medical Council even over ‘thousands of needless deaths’ as alleged numerous times.

So if whole person care is revolutionary why is Labour keeping key details under cover? Does it or does not include unified shared budgets. Labour has already set the mood music about the need for personal choice, and it may be more of a Big Bang in a Webb Pension-esque manner than we first anticipate. But unified shared budgets with one part of the service claiming to be free at the point of need and universal being in a forced marriage with an altogether different social-care service could mean it’s unclear what you end up paying for. Like pensions, it could be a case of ‘shop til you drop‘, but it doesn’t want to produce another ‘longest suicide note in history‘. That party manifesto for 1983, under the auspices of the socialist academic Michael Foot, is fairly widely accepted to have been a disaster, and ironically Steve Hilton and pals narrowly avoided the Conservative Party manifesto being longer in 2010. For Labour, “going bland” is the only way they’ll hope to come to power?

There’s a growing sense that Labour will not say anything provocative or radical in its need to ‘save the NHS’ for the general election in May 7th 2015. Take for example its solution for hospital closures. One can only assume that Labour approves of hospital closure in some form, as it would be impossible to reconfigure secondary care for the whole of the NHS in England otherwise. And currently Labour is facing a dilemma over how far to back George Osborne’s plans to let people take large lump sums out of their pensions, with Dame Anne Begg, the chairman of the Commons work and pensions committee, joining senior figures warning of unforeseen dangers in the proposals. But Labour has already decided to lie down and become supine on the need for austerity, offering some weird version of ‘austerity lite’, inflaming the Unions but keeping hardworking hedgies. And disabled citizens are left wondering why Labour took so long to harpoon ATOS and wonder why Labour would much rather talk of scroungers on benefits than sticking up for disabled citizens, some of whom have allegedly committed suicide in reaction to this Government’s outsourced implementing of benefit assessments.

Rachel Reeves, shadow work and pensions secretary, has confirmed her party “supports” the principle of the reforms announced by Osborne that would give people more control over their money. As far as being an uninspiring wonkish technocrat, Reeves is on excellent form. She said the party would “trust people to make sensible decisions” as long as the government offers reassurance that the reforms are fair, cost effective and give people access to the right advice. For “sensible decisions”, read “bland”, and you might as well vote for the Conservative Party while the Labour Party offers virtually the same package of dogwhistle politics inspired by their corproate masters. The pension reforms appear to have given the Tories a boost in the polls, but Steve Webb, a Lib Dem pensions minister, admitted “a lot of detail” in the chancellor’s plans still needs to be worked out. But it was this electoral viagra, but over the inheritance tax, which meant Gordon Brown woosing out and delaying the election that never was – and the rest is history as they say.

What is definitely now history is “The longest suicide note in history”, his party’s 1983 election manifesto, which was more left-wing than usual. “The New Hope for Britain” called for unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community, abolition of the House of Lords, and the re-nationalisation of recently de-nationalised industries like British Telecom, British Aerospace, and the British Shipbuilding Corporation. The epithet referred not only to the orientation of the policies, but also to their marketing. Labour leader Michael Foot decided as a statement on internal democracy that the manifesto would consist of all resolutions arrived at its party conference. Roll on 30 years, and John Mills, who has given over £1.5 million of his shares in 2013 to the Labour party, and has emphatically disclosed his opinion that party head Ed Miliband is highly ‘boxed in’ with his economic stance on different policies. Mills has called for the party to adopt a more radical approach towards their future economic policy, orelse they risked offering very little to the public than the Conservative party in the upcoming general election.

Ed has defended his party’s current policies, arguing that they have been ‘standing up’ for a multitude of different work groups and classes, rather than the middle class and wealthy orientated policies of the coalition. But while wonky technocrats come in with their garbage on ‘coproduction’ and ‘accountability’, while demonstrating absolutely no knowledge or interest in the problems of the NHS or social care, let alone specific issues such as the ‘funding gap’, Labour still deserves one fate – to be consigned to history.

Socialist Tony Benn may have had a long wait before he sees his party ever coming to power again. Labour can only be a productive government over a few terms if it has a strong mandate to deliver distinctive policies it believes in. Social democrat Miliband still has a lot to prove, or the party will have to remind him that they, and the public, are more important than him.