Labour's clocks in at 78 pages and sports a creepy Communist-style cover, with a nuclear family staring off at the sun in the distance. The Lib Dems manage to find enough material to cover 57 pages in their manifesto. The Conservative manifesto has been likened to a hymnal with its austere, deep blue cover. Yet, amazingly given that it deals with smaller government, it somehow manages to extend to a forest-wasting 131 pages.

So that's almost 270 pages of material in the space of three days. It would probably be an unkind moment to reflect on Brown's statement, in the wake of his massive broken promise over a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, that manifesto pledges are not subject to legitimate expectation.

So why do manifestos go into such excruciating detail? It's necessary to provide a certain amount of explanation, so that voters can see that plans are credible, but it's unnecessary to provide quite so much. Some examples:

We will reach the long-term vision of superfast broadband for all through a public-private partnership in three stages: first, giving virtually every household in the country a broadband service of at least two megabits per second by 2012.

(Labour, p.1:7)

We will... double the maximum fine for under-age alcohol sales to £20,000;

(Conservative, p.55)

[We will launch] an ‘Eco Cash-Back’ scheme, for one year only, which will give you £400 if you install double glazing, replace an old boiler, or install micro-generation. If you choose micro-generation, you will be able to sell the energy back to the National Grid at a profit, with a more attractive feed-in tariff than under current government plans.

(Liberal Democrats, p.23)

Tonight Jeremy Paxman grilled Vince Cable on Newsnight about the Liberal Democrats' manifesto, and highlighted more nonsense, such as the proposals to force night buses to stop in-between bus stops (p.73) and to give compensation to any traveller bumped onto a rail-replacement bus (p.78).

With manifesto pledges down in the weeds like this, it's extremely likely that parties will have to break at least one of them by the end of their term. Yet, suppose you're a voter who is swayed by one of these detailed pledges. You're going to be pretty disappointed to be told that your pet pledge is the one that's being dropped.

In an ideal world, they would write short manifestos that set out their strategy for addressing the country's problems and building on its strengths. To the extent that further explanation is needed, provide it, but don't go beyond that.

But we need to bear some responsibility too. We don't trust politicians; in order to gain our trust they seek to line up a vast array of little pledges which they then deliver. Could we accept larger, more sweeping pledges, which are then delivered less precisely? Would we believe Vince Cable and Nick Clegg if they were to promise to improve public transport, using their manifesto pledges as illustrations, but leaving the detail out of the main document? Are we ready to go there, together?

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Filed under: Politics with tags conservatives, gordon brown, jeremy paxman, labour, liberal democrats, manifestos, mind-numbing detail, newsnight, nick clegg, vince cable