JEREMY CORBYN served up Labour’s manifesto on November 21st with a dollop of populism. Billionaires were bashed. Journalists were booed (until Mr Corbyn demanded the assembled crowd of Labour activists stop). The party’s leader took aim at a rich, powerful elite who do not want “real change”. “Why would they?” asked Mr Corbyn at the launch in Birmingham. “The system is working just fine for them. It’s rigged in their favour.”

Beneath the populist rhetoric of the many against a greedy few, the clear outlines of a Corbyn-led government emerged in the manifesto. Under Labour, Britain would have a larger, deeper state, with a return to universalism at its core. Its frontiers would expand to cover everything from water supply to broadband to how much a landlord may charge a tenant. Where the state already rules, such as in education or health, the government would go deeper, with the introduction of free child-care for pre-schoolers and a “National Care Service” for the elderly.

At the last election, in 2017, Labour surprised its opponents and voters with the most left-wing manifesto since the 1980s, promising sweeping nationalisations, higher taxes and more spending. The 2019 version goes further. Two years ago Mr Corbyn promised £48bn ($62bn, or 2.3% of GDP) of extra day-to-day spending. This time the number is £83bn, as Labour refuses to be outgunned in a fiscal arms race between Britain’s three main political parties.

Its manifesto mixes the party’s greatest hits with some new tunes. The government would spend £75bn on building 100,000 council homes per year, paid for from a £150bn “transformation fund”, a pot of money for capital spending on public services. Rent increases would be capped at inflation. The most eye-catching proposal, a plan to nationalise BT’s broadband operations and then offer the service free of charge, was announced the previous week. Surviving policies from 2017 include a plan to nationalise utilities, alongside Royal Mail and the rail network, and a range of new rights for workers, from a higher minimum wage to restored collective-bargaining rights. All told, government spending would hit 45.1% of GDP, the highest ratio in the post-war era outside of a recession and more than in Germany, according to Resolution Foundation, a think-tank.

To pay for it all, very rich people and businesses would be clobbered. Corporation tax would rise to 26% (from 19% now), which Labour believes, somewhat optimistically, would raise another £24bn by 2024. Oil and gas companies face a windfall tax. But Labour ducked the chance to pay for its spending by increasing taxes on middling earners. The party kept its pledge to raise taxes only on those who earn more than £80,000 a year. Universal services apparently do not require universal tax increases. Others have their doubts. Labour’s tax plans are “simply not credible”, says Paul Johnson, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, another think-tank.

Three main problems lurk in Labour’s proposals. First, the party has promised continental levels of spending without corresponding levels of taxation for the bulk of Britons. That is not sustainable. The second issue is capacity. Labour’s manifesto contained five sections. Some of them alone—such as promising to spend £250bn on green measures—would be enough to keep a government busy for a five-year term. Implementing them all at once, while simultaneously trying to resolve Brexit, looks unmanageable—particularly for a minority or coalition government, the most realistic scenario. The third is the party’s effect on business. Taken on their own, plans to raise the minimum wage, give employees full rights from day one or increase corporation tax might be digestible for British firms. Taken together, they would be hard to swallow.

Without a big change in Labour’s fortunes, Mr Corbyn will not enter Downing Street next month. But politics has changed during his tenure as Labour leader. During this election, the Liberal Democrats have cast themselves as the heirs to the fiscal caution of the coalition government of 2010-15, in which they were the Tories’ junior partners. Yet they still managed to announce £64bn in new spending in their manifesto launch on November 20th. The Conservative manifesto, expected in a few days, will include pledges of extra spending. For the first time in a decade, whoever wins the next election the state will get substantially bigger. Perhaps Mr Corbyn had this in mind when, at the end of his speech, he quoted Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet: “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”

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