Toby Blume's look at the Labour Party Manifesto.

Labour's election manifesto, perhaps unsurprisingly for a Party that has been in power for thirteen years, holds relatively few surprises in its 75 pages. Its key themes include democratic renewal, economic recovery, tackling climate change and protecting frontline services.

Labour's proposals would see citizens and communities being given wide-reaching powers to hold the public sector to account, to influence policy making and to take over the management and ownership of services. The list of services that communities and not-for-profit groups will be able to ‘take over' seems pretty comprehensive, from failing schools and hospitals, pubs and Children's Centres; to renewable energy production, shops and football clubs. Citizens will be given the right to take over and run them all as cooperatives or not-for-profit organisations.

And if running a public service or utility company is not your thing, then you can just have more of a say and hold them to account. The police, health services, local authorities, English Heritage, and the BBC are all going to have to be more accountable to citizens and involve the public more in how they are run.

And there will be lots more meetings too, as public agencies will be required to be more accountable to citizens. There will be monthly neighbourhood police meetings and (in relation to tackling anti social behaviour), ‘all relevant agencies' will hold monthly public meetings to hear people's concerns. Also, the extension of Participatory Budgeting will give people more of a say over how public sector money is spent. That lot should give us all something to do on a quiet Tuesday evening then!

Political reform features prominently and there are plans for electoral reform, including an elected House of Lords and fixed-term Parliaments. MPs who misbehave face being recalled by their constituents and banished to wherever banished MPs go to (possibly the House of Lords, or prison, I'm not sure which). 16 year olds will be allowed to vote in elections, so long as they are sufficiently well educated in citizenship at school. It's not clear whether they will also get education on military combat, before being able to join the armed forces at 16 too.

Regeneration looks to be in for a pretty bumpy ride, and the sub-text of ‘we will make savings' can surely mean only one thing; stringent cuts. What money there is will be targeted at tackling worklessness. This is despite limited evidence of the Working Neighbourhoods Fund having had a major impact. A new framework for managing land will be introduced that reconciles economic, social and environmental demands. That sounds perfect, but the sentence rolls off the tongue somewhat more easily than implementing it will be.

However, there is some welcome support for local economies and community assets, and the successful asset transfer programme will continue as will the support for new Community Land Trusts. £235million will go towards providing play spaces and adventure playgrounds and there will be support for community organisations to run food-growing initiatives like allotments and community farms. Then there will be a Supermarket Ombudsman, although I suspect they will need to be a Superman Ombudsman to resist the lobbying effort of the big supermarkets. And pubs are given a boost, in the face of fairly rapid decline in recognition of the important role they play in community life (presumably in areas which don't have large Muslim or Methodist populations).

Supporters of the Better Banking Campaign should be fairly pleased about the inclusion of unambiguous commitments to reform banks and tackle financial exclusion. However, the pledge to get banks to increase support for community lenders through regulation and taxes is far too open to be confident it will lead to the change Better Banking is seeking. Nonetheless, recognition of the damage caused by predatory doorstep and payday lenders on our communities is a positive development and proposals for the Post Office to deliver financial services has significant potential. With the Financial Services Authority (FSA) being given responsibility for all consumer finance, the success of much of this will depend on the FSA considerably upping its game. Can we rely on them to safeguard our interests? Their track record is (at best) ‘patchy'. Perhaps, given the love of mutualisation and accountability to citizens, the FSA might be democratised too?

Oh, and in case you were worried about it, fear not . . . primary schools will be getting more teachers of Mandarin.