The dying art of political oratory

Max Atkinson has written an interesting analysis of the decline of political oratory:

...a major change in the past 25 years has been the replacement of political speeches by broadcast interviews as the main form of political communication in Britain – even though interviews hardly ever result in anything other than bad news about the politicians themselves. As a result, effective political speech-making has become a dying art, in which there appears to be a curious collaboration between the media and politicians to continue relegating the coverage of speeches in favour of the broadcast interview.

At the same time, the politicians are also doing their bit to eliminate much of the passion and liveliness that were once a normal part of political rallies – by speaking in rather strange venues to audiences with little or no interest in politics, and certainly no motivation to applaud or boo anything they might hear.

That is the irony of the communication strategy of leading politicians and their advisers. In their desperation to ‘connect’ with the electorate, they succeed in doing the precise opposite.

I made this point in my criticism (here and here) of the Liberal Democrats’ ‘message script’. That contrived approach to communication sucks the life out of politics. But your average political adviser seems incapable of understanding this point, and so cannot understand why the likes of Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson have more popular appeal than the conformist, over-managed ‘on message’ clones.

Wonks who don’t get out much

Coalition government is likely to become the norm in Britain because of the long-term decline in the combined vote of the Conservative and Labour parties (it peaked at 97% in 1951 and slowly fell to a postwar low of 65% in 2010).

But coalitions, now routine in local government, are still regarded as a novelty in national government. John Kampfner argues today on the Guardian’s Comment is free blog that, because coalition government is more likely, we need to learn to do coalitions better. He also suggests, paradoxically, that coalition could enable the parties to abandon “the Blairite straitjacket of triangulation that so stifles choice and debate”.

Kampfner acknowledges that the mistakes of the present coalition are partly due to the rushed procedure for coming to an agreement. But there is something else:

...there is a far bigger lesson, and it goes to the heart of the disconnect between the Westminster village and the rest of the country. The demographics of British politics are bad enough, but what happens when all the parties cleave towards similar policies and a small voting pool? On immigration, the three leaders find themselves dancing to Ukip’s tune. On criminal justice, drugs policy, Europe and elsewhere the recipes on offer, for all the rhetorical positioning that goes on, sometimes vary only at the margins.

Even on the burning issues of the moment – welfare, NHS reform and economic cuts – when it comes to the general election, how different will they sound when they are probed on the specifics of their commitments, and what these would commitments?

None of this should come as a surprise. Our rarefied political class is uniformly obsessed with the legacy of Tony Blair. The former prime minister bequeathed the art of triangulation – find out where your opponents are on any issue, and plonk yourself right in the middle. This is usually called “being on the side of the hard-working family”. It should be called the politics of caution. The hard worker/non-shirker/squeezed middle is a construct of wonks who don’t get out much. Voters have more variety, and are best served when given a choice.

Coalitions, far from limiting that choice, could – if done properly next time around – increase the options available. Parties could be required to set out before the election, as during any negotiations that take place afterwards, what they would be prepared to trade and what they would stick to: their “red lines”.

The risk-averse politics of triangulation does not offend voters but nor does it galvanise their support. It is why the Liberal Democrats remain stuck at 10% in the polls. Kampfner continues:

The Lib Dems, the beneficiary of coalitions, should rediscover some of their old radicalism, both for their own prospects and to reintroduce greater political choice. Clegg is correct when he juxtaposes the responsibilities of office against what he calls the empty wish lists of opposition.

Like any party, Clegg’s cannot and should not get all it wants. But the triangulation of the Blair era was little more than managerialism and safety first. It was the politics of a small minority of floating voters, and it was based in closing down areas of controversy. Paradoxically it was the Lib Dems who offered something different. Within Labour, the signals are mixed. Does the party think electoral success resides in an electorally self-selecting straitjacket, or does it have the courage to present something more galvanising?

Now, tragically, the only party that is refusing to play the game of cautious consensus is Ukip. Meanwhile, regarding the biggest issues of the moment – such as the failings of the financial system that led to the crash, the global shifts to the east and the rise of a new authoritarian model – mainstream politics is largely silent.

The reason Clegg repeatedly offends his party on issues such as secret courts and immigration is that he is being repeatedly advised to triangulate. To get out of this rut, he needs to set about his advisers and sack the “wonks who don’t get out much” – the merchants of triangulation, the believers in the “hard worker/non-shirker/squeezed middle”, the risk-averse advocates of converging on a mythical ‘centre ground’, the calculating cynics who believe you should construct policy on the basis of this week’s focus group data. If he doesn’t get rid of them but continues to triangulate, eventually the party will get rid of him.

How not to win an EU referendum

Under the headline “Ken Clarke and Peter Mandelson join forces to fight Eurosceptics”, today’s Observer reports that “Tory and Labour grandees” are to join forces “to turn back the rising tide of Euroscepticism”.

This is precisely what the pro-EU cause doesn’t need. A major reason for euroscepticism is the popular perception that the EU is as an elite project. Putting political grandees (especially exhausted volcanoes like Clarke and Mandelson) at the head of the campaign serves only to reinforce that perception. The support of such politicians is not unwelcome but the campaign has to create the right overall impression.

An effective pro-EU campaign must counter the perception that it is elitist. A previous post suggested how this could be done. In any event, if the campaign is to succeed, it must learn from the experience of community politics – it should empower and enable, and mobilise the interests and voices of ‘people like us’. If the campaign consists of ‘grandees’ telling people what is good for them, it will fail.

What have we ever done for the Romans?

The prospect of a referendum on British membership of the European Union, in itself, does not fill me with trepidation. With the right campaign, the case for staying in can be won.

The fear is that the same sort of people who ballsed-up the AV referendum will be put in charge of the campaign.

EurActiv reports that both sides are already limbering up for a campaign and that both plan “to woo the country’s biggest swing demographic: those aged between 18 and 44” (although EurActiv’s description of such campaigns as “youth-focused” is rather generous to thirty- and forty-somethings).

This seems a bizarre strategy for UKIP and the ‘out’ campaign. A referendum will have a turnout no higher than about 30% (unless it is held on the same day as a general election, which is unlikely), so the result will hinge on differential turnout. The ‘out’ campaign has a built-in advantage because support for UKIP – and for euroscepticism in general – comes mainly from older voters, who turn out more reliably than younger voters.

If the ‘in’ campaign’s strategy is to woo younger voters, there is always a risk of the ‘dad at the disco’ syndrome. The idea that Sir Richard Branson would make the campaign look ‘hip’ is a case in point.

There has not been an effective pro-EU campaign in Britain since the 1975 referendum. Pro-European opinion has tended to rest on its laurels. When Europhiles do get off their backsides, they usually present their case in abstract or dry constitutional terms. Most people outside the political elite cannot relate to such arguments.

Even when the discussion turns to concrete benefits, the arguments are mainly of the ‘what the EU does for you’ variety. Well, yes, the EU does promote jobs and trade. But to achieve a more effective campaign, why not turn this argument on its head and ask what you can do for the EU?

To understand what this would mean, begin by asking yourself what you most admire about other EU countries. What sort of things make cultural and commercial exchanges so enriching? The chances are that these are things of quality, which are also a unique expression of those countries’ cultures. Belgium? Chocolate. Denmark? The Killing and Borgen. Spain? Rioja. Germany? Mercedes. Poland? Reliable plumbers.

Now think about similar British things that other Europeans might admire and want (and which have nothing to do with stereotypical images of bowler hats and red double-decker buses).

Fortunately, a recent trend has provided many such things for Britain to offer its European neighbours. Over the past decade, there has been a renewal of pride in local identity, and a revival of interest in local heritage and craftsmanship. The shame in Britishness and especially Englishness that was fashionable in the right-on era of the 1980s has been ditched. Last year’s Olympic opening ceremony marked the point when the British finally kicked the habit of national self-flagellation. Instead, they are celebrating their local cultures – in particular, there has been a boom throughout the country in locally-produced food and drink.

A pro-European referendum campaign that presented the EU as a bigger stage on which British people can promote themselves and their local cultures would be much more effective than dreary talk of treaties and constitutions. For example, British supermarkets sell French cheese, Italian ham, German sausages and Spanish wine. Imagine a campaign that aimed to stock supermarkets elsewhere in the EU with English ales and ciders, Bury black puddings, Lincolnshire sausages, Cornish clotted cream, Welsh lamb and Scottish beef. Imagine a campaign that aimed to force shops in France and Spain to declare how much of their fresh seafood actually comes from Cornwall or the Hebrides. Imagine a campaign that aimed to make a fish and chip shop as common a sight in Italy as a takeaway pizza joint is in Britain.

It’s not just about food and drink. Imagine a campaign that aimed to help young British people pursue careers elsewhere in the EU. Imagine a campaign that aimed to sell more effectively our tourist attractions to other Europeans. Imagine a campaign that aimed to make BBC TV and radio programmes more easily available throughout the EU.

A ‘what you can do in Europe’ campaign would be more ‘real’ for most people than a traditional campaign. It would also involve more people because it is about enabling anyone with pride in something, and because so many local interests have something they want to brag about.

And the real beauty of such a campaign is the way it would put Euroscepticism on the back foot. Euroscepticism starts from the assumption that local identities and the EU are incompatible and therefore antagonistic. This campaign would redefine that relationship as symbiotic. Conversely, Euroscepticism would be redefined as a force that limits the scope of local identities and prevents them taking wing.

But if we seriously want to win this referendum, before we do anything else, we must first make sure that no one puts the usual tossers in charge of the campaign.

Why Ed Balls is a complete arse

The previous post mentioned the Labour Party’s problem with messaging and unthinking mantras. It also quoted the Power Inquiry’s criticism of the political strategy of ‘triangulation’, “a mathematical equation that secures power but in the end drives down people’s desire to be politically engaged.”

Right on cue, Ed Balls has launched a race to the bottom with the Conservatives to see who can be the most ‘tough’ with long-term unemployed people.

A genuinely radical party of the left would be articulating a real alternative to the failed economic orthodoxy that has caused high unemployment. Labour is not that party. Instead, it is competing with the Conservatives and Nick Clegg for an illusory ‘centre ground’, or what Balls calls “a one nation approach,” as if this empty slogan somehow distinguishes Labour from the coalition parties.

Anyone who thought ‘New Labour’ had died with Tony Blair is sadly mistaken. Ed Balls remains a true disciple. His politics is politics reduced to public relations. Millions of innocent people will suffer because of day-to-day tactical considerations about how to respond to the opinion polls and how to impress the right-wing tabloids.

Well it might win a temporary boost in the polls, but do you want this sort of cynic running the country? I don’t.

Why politicians seem abnormal

Last Friday’s post that leaked the Liberal Democrats’ ‘message script’ caused a bit of a stir. There were a few attempts to defend the script (in the comments both on that post and elsewhere). These responses had one thing in common; an inability to imagine any other course of action. The need for everyone to stay ‘on message’ seemed to go without saying; if you don’t like the messages, what alternative ones would you prefer? The possibility never occurred that this sort of prescriptive messaging might actually be part of the problem.

It is a problem not unique to the Liberal Democrats. My thanks to Nick Barlow, who recommends a recent blog post by Jon Worth titled “Behaving in politics as if we were normal people”, and to Jon Worth in turn for recommending a post by Mary Kaldor on the ‘subterranean politics’ of various new grassroots movements throughout Europe.

Jon Worth considers why we don’t behave in politics like we do in real life. He gives the example of the Labour Party adopting the ‘one nation’ message last year and how it rapidly became an unthinking mantra:

I have no idea how the mantra came into being. But now everyone follows it, shadow cabinet members and think tank wonks repeat it, and it has become party line. That process is not normal, it is not healthy. It is not practicing the kind of politics the participants imagine. Try changing the mission statement of a large corporation so abruptly and there would be harsh counter-reactions among the employees. In Labour there is slavish, flaccid loyalty among the devotees (at least in public), and a shrug from the 99.5% of the UK population that are not party members.

The problem is that being in a party for a decade squeezes the life, the straightforward honesty, the originality out of people. It is not that party people become dishonest per se, but more that the spontaneity, the vitality is drained from them. They will Google themselves compulsively to check how they are being perceived, rather than using the net to really make political change happen. They will use social networks to repeat the leadership’s line and show how diligent they are on #LabourDoorstep, rather than building networks beyond the party.

Mary Kaldor, meanwhile, points out how participants in the current wave of street protests throughout Europe “cite concern with the failures of democracy as the reason for engagement and protest rather than austerity per se”. Behind these protests is a widespread frustration with political elites and the lack of participation.

What is turning people off conventional politics? In 2006, the Rowntree-funded Power Inquiry (full report here and executive summary here) investigated popular disengagement from formal democratic politics in Britain. Two of the most important reasons for disengagement are that “citizens do not feel that the processes of formal democracy offer them enough influence over political decisions – this includes party members who feel they have no say in policy-making and are increasingly disaffected”; and that “the main political parties are widely perceived to be too similar and lacking in principle”.

Underlying these factors is the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, which has created “a large section of British society which is now better educated, more affluent, expects greater control and choice over many aspects of life, feels no deference towards those in positions of authority, and is not as bound by the traditional bonds of place, class and institution that developed during the industrial era.”

The Power Inquiry concluded that political parties have failed to adapt to this profound social change:

The response of the political system to post-industrialism and to political disengagement has been either technocratic or self-interested in the sense that the parties have adapted their policies and campaigning simply to win elections. The political strategy of “triangulation”, for example, is democracy by numbers. It is a mathematical equation that secures power but in the end drives down people’s desire to be politically engaged. It hollows out democracy because it inevitably means by-passing party members who want debate and neglects the democratic channels of engagement which might get in the way of the strategy.

The people responsible for the Liberal Democrats’ ‘message script’ appear to have ignored these lessons entirely. The problem with their script is not merely the empty rhetoric of the messages themselves but also the underlying premise that voters will be impressed by a Leninist-style party line. The insistence on party mantras is intended to convey a sense of coherence but it is counter-productive because it serves only to confirm the sceptical views of people who feel alienated by the whole political process. Even if some of the messages had any merit, it would be immaterial; the whole tone puts people off because it sounds insincere and makes politicians who talk in this contrived manner seem abnormal.

As the Power Inquiry pointed out, increasing numbers of people feel no deference towards those in positions of authority. But the repetition of mantras makes this worse. It makes politicians sound slavishly loyal, calculating and synthetic, and creates the impression that political parties do not tolerate debate or dissent.

As Power also pointed out, “the main political parties are widely perceived to be too similar and lacking in principle”. Yet mantras fail to differentiate the parties but make them sound the same. Just as most modern cars look the same because rival manufacturers’ wind tunnels produce the same results, so the mainstream parties produce similar messages because they get similar results from their opinion research.

The political system looks dysfunctional to most people because the political elites don’t seem like normal people. Speaking in robotic slogans can only make that worse.

Gosh! You mean grassroots campaigning actually works?

In the Boston Globe, Michael Kranish analyses the story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in this year’s presidential election campaign.

Amid a catalogue of errors, one mistake will stand out for most British Liberal Democrats:

Rich Beeson [one of Romney’s political directors] ...said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match.

One-to-one contact with voters? No kidding.

Admittedly, the Obama campaign’s grassroots techniques were somewhat more sophisticated than your average British local by-election operation:

Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget” voters and a sophis­ticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.

Nevertheless, the basic case for grassroots campaigning remains the same. A shame it was not understood by the Liberal Democrat leadership in the 2010 general election.

Nick Clegg elbowed Chris Rennard aside and installed a group of advertising and PR people to run the party’s campaign. These people had no serious experience of political campaigning but believed this did not matter. They were convinced that a ‘ground war’ (i.e. grassroots campaigning) was more or less redundant and that the Liberal Democrat campaign could rely on an ‘air war’ (i.e. a nationwide marketing campaign). The success of the first televised leaders’ debate and the ensuing ‘Cleggmania’ served only to reinforce their prejudices. When on polling day, support collapsed like a soufflé, they had no idea why.

Of course, general election campaigns (or any other nationwide campaign) cannot be conducted solely via a ‘ground war’ but require a judicious mix of ground and air tactics. But as voters become more individualised in their outlook, more consumer-savvy and more sceptical about politics, they will need and expect more human contact, not less.

Do online political campaigns work?

The answer to this question is: it depends.

In a recent speech, Jeremy Heimans, co-founder of online petitions pioneer Avaaz, warned that online campaigners must build for the long term and that they should not confuse online tactics with a clear strategy:

Don’t fixate on technology. Movements are not internet memes, and one viral YouTube video does not make a movement. What we are trying to do in all these movements is build and consolidate power around important issues.

Heimans noted that recent responses to the subject of online campaigning have tended to polarise into two types, hyperventilation or sighing. The hyperventilators tend to make bold claims such “Twitter is changing the world, it made the Arab Spring happen”, while the sceptics dismiss online tools as less effective than real world, offline activism:

The funny thing about both of these extremes is neither of them tend to know very much about tools on offer.

This bears out what I learnt from master campaigner Des Wilson many years ago. Any activity deserving of the name ‘campaign’ should be (in Des’s words) “A planned, organised and sustained drive to persuade someone to do or give you what you want.” The internet and social media haven’t changed this; they can be highly effective campaign tools but they are still just tools in the box.

Issue cocoons

Robert Reich has produced a pithy cartoon summary (in slide show form) of his book Beyond Outrage, an analysis of what has gone wrong with America’s economy since the end of the 1970s.

His argument focuses on how the richest 1% has gained at the expense of the middle classes. But the most interesting slides are #7 and #9, which show how the 1% has got away with it: divide and rule. Opposition has been dissipated into ‘issue cocoons’.

The lesson for anyone seeking to challenge the forces that have got us into the present economic mess is this: to develop a coherent analysis and prescription, you must raise your sights beyond special interests or selfish identity issues, and learn to think holistically.

The tragicomic battle between the Liberal Democrats’ gender balance and ethnic minority lobbies over candidate quotas is a good illustration of how attention can be distracted and energy wasted when people lose sight of the big picture.