SPONSORED: ‘Communicating in an age of political crisis’

SPONSORED

Developing an effective political communication strategy is core to any attempt to renew the fortunes of the Labour government in office. But for that strategy to work, we must understand the nature of the challenge it entails. Too frequently, politicians see communication as the core of the problem they face – the “if we could just explain our very well-intentioned position better, people would be convinced” school of thought. This, though, simultaneously overstates and underestimates communication’s role in building a successful political project. A communication strategy alone cannot resuscitate a government’s fortunes. Instead, the most effective communication strategies must be the culmination of much wider ideological and policy projects.

The scale of the task facing Labour in constructing this sort of larger project is huge. The untimely demise of Keir Starmer’s premiership tells us something important about contemporary British politics: leadership instability is not just a disease of the right. Prior to Starmer’s removal, it was possible to believe that the rapid exit of the previous five occupants of Downing Street was the result of a crazed Conservative Party addicted to regicide. This explanation now seems much less convincing. Nor is this just about personalities and fitness for office. While Boris Johnson and Liz Truss proved themselves completely unsuitable as Prime Ministers, Theresa May, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer – whatever one thinks of their personal politics – seemed in many ways cut out to be perfectly competent PMs. But that wasn’t enough to keep them in charge.

We therefore need to go beyond both parties and personalities to find a convincing reason for the decade-long period of extreme political instability we have lived through. Indeed, at a time when it is common to talk about the age of crisis or the perma-crisis, it makes more sense to think of the rapid turnover of leaders as a symptom of a wider set of complex challenges.

A better explanation comes from examining the UK’s political economy and the four distinct shocks it has faced over the past two decades: the 2007/08 financial crisis; the decision to leave the European Union in 2016; the COVID pandemic and associated disruptions and costs; and Europe’s longstanding weakness in accessing affordable, secure, and stable energy supplies, highlighted by the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Iran. In these circumstances, the UK’s growth model has been severely compromised, leading to the longest period of stagnant living standards in modern British history. As Resolution Foundation research published this spring argued, wages have never returned to their pre-2008 growth rates. In this environment, it is hardly surprising that politics has become febrile and unpredictable.

We are living through what social scientists call a critical juncture. These are times when previously effective ways of governing, as well as the ideologies and political coalitions that legitimated them, come under great pressure and may even break down completely. Short of reasserting order after a violent revolution, governing during a critical juncture is the most difficult form of politics. However, it also offers a rare opportunity to recast a new and lasting political settlement. It is no coincidence that the aftermath of earlier critical junctures in the 1930s and the 1970s marks the point when new political ideas and settlements emerged.

This is where political communication becomes important again. Critical junctures are inherently communicative moments – they require an effective articulation of a problem definition and arguing for solutions in response. Therefore, the correct starting point for any political project on the European left at this moment – which has rarely been explicitly reckoned with – is to ask what social democratic politics actually looks like in an era of low growth, what it is trying to achieve, and how it will construct viable political coalitions to accomplish these goals. 

It is no coincidence that the greatest, most memorable slogans in political history are linked to clear ideological projects. When Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no alternative, or Ronald Reagan made pithy jokes about the nine worst words in the English language being “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help“, they were synthesising and presenting a much larger argument about what they were trying to achieve in office.

Labour’s challenge, then, is not to find better lines but to do the much harder work of building a governing philosophy adequate to the moment, and only then find the language for it. Another politician who famously governed at a critical juncture was Franklin Roosevelt. His New Deal policies shaped American politics for the next five decades, and that substance gave weight to his famous inaugural-address line, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That seems a good prescription for today. These are undoubtedly unstable, disconcerting times, but Labour’s task now must be to do the harder work of definition – boldly constructing a vision of the good society fit for our political era – and trust that if it can do this, the words will follow. 

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