virtualeconomics

I fought. I lost. A review of Labour's election messaging by a candidate working in comms

 

Every season of The Apprentice, at least one team fluffs the pitching episode by getting caught up in developing a product without working out how they'll pitch it at the end. Being part of a major party's general election campaign that made fundamentally the same mistake as 15 years of baby entrepreneurs was…eye-opening.

 

A product is not a pitch

It was my honour to stand as a first-time Labour candidate in the recent general election (in Sevenoaks, an unwinnable, ultra-safe Tory seat).  I’m also a communications professional with twenty years’ experience (I used to run 100+ journalists at a division of Northcliffe, have hired and trained pretty much every sort of marketing team there is, was at one time an award-winning journalism and media economics commentator quoted in most major newspapers, currently run PR and messaging for a mid-cap travel company and election campaigns for my local CLP). There have been plenty of articles raking over the reasons Labour lost the election. I have instead some thoughts on, specifically, the messaging behind our losing campaign. These are, needless to say, my personal reflections on my experience.

TL;DR? Labour’s messaging didn’t work.

To be clear, the press team who liaised personally with us as candidates were great - responsive, well-informed, tireless. They did what they could.

But. I flatter myself I’m a reasonably smart guy with a lot of comms experience. I spent every spare waking second in the weeks since the election was called trying to understand the message I was being asked to promote and condense it down into simple, consistent soundbites I could use at hustings, on the doorstep, in newsletters and other comms.

It was impossible.

Keep racism low status

One of the great cultural and political achievements of the late C20th was to keep racism low status.

By the end of the C20th racism wasn’t just unacceptable, largely illegal and a virtual guarantor of ostracism from civilised company. It had been made a low-status belief. This didn’t quite kill it off, but more than banning it or shunning it, this drove public expressions of racism rare.

On the launch of the "Tory Momentum"

It’s fun to watch the Tories try to launch their own Momentum. “Activate”.

From the point of view of professional social media, it's a hack job. Amateurish. Almost absurdly so. By way of example let’s have a look at their first attempt at a meme - a stock photo of Jeremy (I'm assuming they paid the stock image rights rather than just copying it off the web), followed for some reason by Admiral Akbar’s catchphrase “it’s a trap”.

First, let’s remember that Twitter is mostly read on mobile devices. Recent estimates put mobile use of Twitter at 85% of traffic. So you’d think the Tory attempt to copy Momentum - a grass-roots campaign typified by its deep understanding of social media - would at least check how their first meme looked on mobile

On mobile, you can see the top half of the meme - Jeremy, two thumbs up, and the Labour slogan “for the many not the few”. You can’t see the alleged punchline though, unless you click through, because it’s lost below the fold. See my photo, above.

On mobile, and therefore for 85% of visitors to this new Tory movement, their first meme is just a (weirdly blue) advertisement for the Labour party, complete with a reiteration of Labour's campaign slogan "for the many, not the few". If you’re going to make memes for Twitter, it’s best to get someone who knows how Twitter works and knows what "mobile first" means to help with the design. (Protip - make your Twitter memes the right size for Twitter. Canva offers a number of free templates which will do it for you.)

The man elected eight times who we're supposed to believe is unelectable

Is Jeremy Corbyn electable? Trivially so. His constituents keep electing him. They do so in ever-greater numbers. They've done it eight times. "Unelectable" is not a useful charge to levy against a man who keeps getting elected. As well say that the sea is dry or that fish fly south for the winter. 

Ah, but. Islington North is not Britain, the argument goes. Islington North is an unrepresentative bubble of weird, rich, London left-wingers. The country as a whole will never elect a left-wing politician. 

Which would be debatable (not true, but at least debatable), if Scotland hadn't just elected 56 of them. Check out the manifesto that a handful of months ago wiped all of the other (indistinguishable, centre-right, neoliberal) parties off the Scottish political map. End austerity and raise taxes. Fund the welfare state and the NHS. Scrap Trident. It's not a strikingly dissimilar policy agenda to this one. The argument that people won't vote for this left-wing lunacy also falls down at the existence proof stage. They just did it. This manifesto just swept an entire country.

Daylight

One of the basic tests of whether what you do is good or bad is whether you can imagine, having done it, going home and saying to your parent(s), partner(s), kids or friends "hey guys, guess what I did today?" Or as Louis Brandies most elegantly put it, "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Things are done furtively in the dark that no-one would be willing to own up to in the light of day.

On Friday Laurie Penny kicked off a debate about misogyny online when she pointed out that for airing her opinions she is regularly subject to threats, abuse and all sorts of hate from anonymous - presumably male - commentators. Many other women have since commented that they have been subject to similar abuse. The fact that women say things apparently drives some men into a violent fury, and many websites give them the option of venting that fury through anonymous trolling.

Rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail

With thanks to @timhardford and @stevesilberman, just recording some of the work of the rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail for posterity before they notice and take it down.

The full gallery is (was) here, and using a celeb gallery to raise awareness of Occupy Wall Street is funny. Hats off to the guy, who is presumably now looking for a new job.

Communication breakdown

When Haringey Council voted to close four elderly people's drop-in centres, the users of the centres contacted the council to point out that they could save the centres if they simply stopped wasting public money on publishing the cat-basket liner "Haringey People".

Dropping through the door six times a year, this self-congratulatory pamphlet serves the same two slightly sinister purposes as all such local government "newspapers" - to present the council's squandering of public money in a positive light, and to crowd out such independent local journalism as might actually subject the council to proper scrutiny.

Amusingly, when put to the vote the coucil overwhelmingly supported the continued publication of their magazine and council leader Claire Kober told the Haringey Independent newspaper that "cutting Haringey People would seriously diminish our ability to communicate effectively with residents". Any communication problem would, of course, be better solved simply by paying a modicum of attention to what those residents want - which unsurpisingly appears to be an unambiguous call for services instead of propaganda. 

(The details of the story originally appeared in the print edition of Haringey Independent - I cannot find the same story on the website, presumably a failing on my part which I will remedy as soon as a link becomes available.)

Keeping the lizards out (reprise)

As the opportunity to vote for something rolls around once again, I only ask that you consider the following questions.

If you're going to vote for the LibDems, is it because you actually want them to govern, or merely want them to govern more than you want the Tories or the other alternatives? If you you're going to vote for AV, is it because you'd really like to be ruled by people who will be elected under that system, or because you hate that idea slightly less than being ruled by the people likely to be elected under FPTP? Are you, in any sense, being presented with an option that you positively want and endorse?

Every time you turn up and tick one of their boxes, you are legitimating the government. You are preserving the illusion that the goverment governs by the consent of the governed because it has a popular mandate expressed through the ballot box.

It is not a waste of your vote to withhold that legitimacy, if it is not something you wish to confer. It is not a waste of your vote to withhold that consent, if all you can think to do with it is submit to the lesser of several evils. The BNP will not really end up running the country, whatever you do or do not do. And if everyone did it; if no-one turned up to the polls; if the mandate and the legitimacy were withdrawn; then there would the opportunity for actual, meaningful political change.

I leave you, as always, with the definitive words on the subject by Douglas Adams from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.

A decision so trivial we can be trusted to make it ourselves

As we gallop towards voting on May 5th the thing that most strikes me about the AV campaigns is not just the feebleness of both campaigns but that if these were ads for anything except how to run the country they would be illegal.

The "No" campaign is feeble in crass and obvious ways. Fronted on TV by a fictitious politician from the last century (not David Cameron, boom boom), its core arguments appear to revolve around the expense (there is none), the complexity (which depends on explaining AV disingenuously badly to a classroom of obligingly dim-witted straw men) and the unfairness of second or third choice candidates coming first. I gather this really is, very occasionally, mathematically possible under AV, and would if we adopted it occur on average about once per century. It is not significant.

Harvesting soft power, squandering soft power

Since Joseph Nye coined the phrase more than twenty years ago the US has gone to great lengths to defend and expand the ambit of its soft power - the message of Hollywood, the American music industry and the whole apparatus of monocultural hegemony that every day is whispered into nearly seven billion ears "America is best. America is right. Everyone would be American if they could".

It isn't, after all, merely the persuasive talents of the music and film industry lobbyists that lead the American congress, senate, president and judiciary to work so tirelessly in the interest of those industries. It's the perfectly sincere self-interest of a great power at work. So when copyright law is endlessly revised at both the statutory and case level to better serve the demands of the MPAA and RIAA; when the diplomatic efforts of the state are turned to expanding that American copyright law to the corners of the earth; when "Homeland Security" means not the fight against post-9/11 terrorism but the seizure of alleged copyright infringing domains; when the rights of American people and technology innovators alike are routinely trampled so that funding continues uninterrupted for the American message; that's America defending its soft power. That's diplomacy, statecraft; what Rochau and Bismarck called realpolitik. 

The odd thing, then, is not that the US will go to such lengths to safeguard its soft power. The odd thing is that the UK baulks at spending less than £250m to safeguard its own.