Labour must find the words to sum up its purpose, former No 10 adviser says

Labour under Andy Burnham has a clear sense of purpose but has yet to find the language to sum it up, former No 10 director of political operations John McTernan has said.

“On the right, they have very straightforward three-word slogans: stop the boats, take back control,” he said. “It’s not so easy to summarise the current Government’s programme in three words.”

McTernan, now a senior adviser at Burson Global, was speaking on Monday at a LabourList event held in partnership with the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) at Labour Party Conference. Chaired by Professor Tony Travers of the LSE School of Public Policy, the panel asked how political parties can cut through when trust is low and the way people consume media is changing.

The Prime Minister came into office “knowing the things that he wants to do”, McTernan argued, from devolution and reindustrialisation to social care. Turning those priorities into a message still requires hard thinking, he said, because that thinking has yet to be pulled together into a coherent whole. As he put it: “Without a purpose, communications doesn’t have a spine.”

The LSE’s Dr Nick Anstead, associate professor in the Department of Media and Communications, likened the present moment to the 1930s or 1970s, when a “major structural crisis” was under way without an obvious resolution. He echoed McTernan, saying: “You don’t start with the technology. You don’t even necessarily start with the message. You have to start with what’s the ideological project, what’s the political project, and then the other things develop from that.”

He pointed to Tony Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” as a soundbite built on decades of thinking, comparing it to Burnham’s recent line at Prime Minister’s Questions that social security should never be sacrificed for national security. Both, he said, invited voters to see a debate as something other than a zero-sum choice.

Other panellists warned that messaging alone may not be enough to restore trust. Glasgow South MP Gordon McKee described how false rumours of an asylum hotel in his constituency drew around 100 people to a community meeting. Even after he told them the government had confirmed there were no such plans, roughly a third of the crowd refused to believe him. He said: “The only way trust is garnered is by setting an expectation and then delivering that expectation.”

Merlin Strategy CEO Scarlett Maguire expanded on this, saying voters now doubt even genuine video and ask whether it has been generated by AI, and place far greater trust in “ordinary people like them”. She also warned that parties risk underestimating Facebook. Charlotte Beeden, who led Labour’s North West digital team in the 2024 General Election and is now Creators Lead at 411, said local content had cut through in the same way. She said videos of local potholes being filled during the general election outperformed anything else the campaign produced, because national policies “felt so far away”.

Closing the discussion, Anstead offered a more hopeful reading. Crises, he said, are “moments of great chaos, but also moments of great opportunity”, when institutions are reshaped for a generation. The answer for Labour, he suggested, might be “the idea of a generational project, the idea of something that’s much bigger than the news cycle or even the electoral cycle”.