Just Words? A Discourse Analysis of Labour’s 2024 Manifesto and the Implications for British Social Policy

Political manifestos are often framed as contracts between parties and voters. They also function as strategic texts that communicate party identity, define problems, set priorities, and articulate visions of a better future. This article examines the UK Labour Party’s 2024 election manifesto in this light, investigating what it reveals about its ideological direction and its social policy agenda. It places the 2024 manifesto in historical context, utilising content analysis and computer-aided large language model techniques and triangulating Manifesto Project coding with automated classification and manual adjudication to assess continuity and change in Labour’s policy positioning. It finds that, across multiple measures, including left–right indices, party coding proximities, and principal component analysis, Labour’s 2024 manifesto clusters closely with New Labour programmes and, on some measures, aligns more closely with Conservative platforms than with Labour policy traditions. These findings suggest that 2024 marks an ideological recalibration for the Labour Party that brings with it significant implications for the direction of the welfare state.