This week the major UK parties will release their general election manifestos and today the governing Labour Party went first. I've made a word cloud taken from the section, 'Meeting the challenges of a new global age: A global future'. Each word appears in size relative to it's use.
A few things struck me. You'd expect global and international to be large (it's a section about those things). You'd also expect political buzz words to feature - so new, challenge and change are all there.
Also prominent are support, security and Afghanistan. The UK is fighting there so fair enough. But these are much larger than development and aid, both of which are the same size as defence. Not a good sign that international development policy will be based around the needs of the poorest people. Can you read a lot into this? I hope not as Millennium Development Goals or MDGs don't even make the cloud.....
What do you think this shows, if anything?
Climate Change, Justice, Indigenous, CSR seem to be missing….
No surprise really. A government that can’t run or look after it’s own country - what do you expect?
Sustainable development is missing too….
No sign of recognition of the substantial and unique impacts of poverty on women. The words ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are both missing.
is anyone actually surprised by this?
Not surprised at all that development aid doesn’t figure prominently - it’s hardly an issue that will win an election and it’s hardly one that will be disputed by any of the parties. What should matter more is whether it features in the Budget announcement, and I don’t remember it doing so.
Then again, with the British economic climate as it is the priority would be to sort ourselves out first so in a better position to help others out later.
If you plan to do this for the Conservatives tomorrow and the Liberal Democrats on Wednesday I shouldn’t expect any different - although ‘tax’ will be used more by the Tories and expect more ‘International’ and ‘Europe’ from the Lib Dems.
Hi guys
thanks for the comments!
@caroline - it’s true that gender doesn’t feature, which is really quite scary!
@lara - I’m not that surprised by it but am interested in the relative weighting.
@andrew - the government are commited to 0.7% for ODA and you raise a fair point about it not winning an election. But this is taken only from the global section so it doesn’t matter that the election is being fought on domestic priorities on the whole.
Let’s see what the Tories and Lib Dems throw up - might not bother with UKIP, think we know what might come out of that!
This is a facinating way of viewing what I imagine is a pretty staid document. Food for thought.
I agree with Tom, this is an excellent way of approaching the priorities of the manifesto, although perhaps not in isolation. It is peculiar that gender has been omitted, particularly when it has clearly been a focus of the Department for International Development. I suppose it may have been in the name of brevity, but that doesn’t seem to stack up.
Re: climate change - I know that SERA’s stance is that the best green policies should make so much sense that they don’t appear to be green, and I think this may (intentionally or otherwise) be a reaction to that thinking. But it is a priority, both in the Labour grassroots and at the top - and there is a section of the manifesto dedicated to the green recovery, as well a promise to provide over the 0.7% in international aid to help poorer countries to deal with the effects of climate change (after 2013). I don’t think you can look at the actions of Ed Miliband and say that climate change isn’t a priority for the Labour Party. Not that I think we go far enough, but I intend to press for that from within, and we should press them for it from without, because none of the other promises will matter if we don’t take climate change seriously!
@claire - the gender thing is very weird and I agree, DFID has rightly put a lot of effort into this area.
I restricted myself to the section 10 of the manifesto and like you say ‘gree’ issues did get it’s own section, so I purposefully left that out for the purpose of this blog. And whether or not we think Labour should go further I think that they and Ed Milliband have shown strong international leadership in this area - although there are some contradictions they need to sort out.