Issues about Single Issues on the Climate March

I attended the Climate Change March on Saturday, mostly to seek absolution for my lack of domestic recycling, but also to support the Cleggmeister in his attempts to sway hippies with powerful rhetoric.

Previous readers of this blog will know I love protesting. There’s always a little bit of theatre that makes me believe it’s all going to somehow work out right, whether it be the hippies with the painted faces pushing a cart labelled ‘Climate Change Bandwagon’ or the entrepreneurs selling whistles to the communists, protests are always reassuring.

And so it was again. Despite the fact that a protest consisting mostly of socialists marched on a route that took in the Rolls Royce & Bentley showrooms, the Ritz, innumerable Starbucks, and the US embassy no-one threw any bricks at all. We arrived in Parliament Square in good spirits and settled down to listen to some hippy band’s deep and meaningful song about how capitalism was bullshit, man.

Then the voices of the young Liberals and middle-aged environmental Liberals around me rose in cheering as the Clegg came on stage to give his speech. And it was very good. He’d clearly worked out that his audience weren’t going to be particularly market friendly, and so his speech was full of exhortations to environmental action.

“No to a third runway at Heathrow!”

Hippies cheer!

“No to Kingsnorth!”

Hippies cheer!

“And no to spending twelve and a half billion quid of our money to give us a short-term VAT cut – which we’ll all have to pay for in the future – when every penny of that money should be spent on public transport, on green energy, on sustainable housing for the future.”

Hippies look confused!

That last part was a typically Lib Dem complicating of the issue, I admit. But it did make me observe the reactions of the rest of the protest during the remainder of the speech. It brought something interesting to light.

During the, “…the scandalous situation that the big energy companies are charging a pensioner – scrimping and saving, living on her own, to perhaps heat one room in her home (or his!) – is charging her or him more than a multimillionaire who’s heating their five-storey mansion from top to toe…” section, the only ones cheering such an ostensibly worthwhile statement were us. Even the socialists didn’t want to know about little old ladies. Everyone just looked grumpy.

Why would that be? Theoretically, the majority of the crowd were the self-defined ‘ethical’ sort, who doubtless do their recycling, owned a wormery, biked everywhere and generally are very nice to the planet. But they don’t appear to care about little old ladies.

I’d like to make a distinction here, based not on science but on public perception. It’s about single issues. They fall into one of two camps: the ’sexy’ single issues, and the ‘unsexy’ single issues. Climate change, human rights and the developing world fall under the former, the plight of the elderly, the mentally ill and arguably trade unionism fall under the latter. The test is whether you’d find someone more attractive depending on which field they worked in. “I work with the elderly” isn’t as attractive (to me at least, putting subjectivity aside here) as “I work for Friends of the Earth”.

And this is the danger. People who think they’re saving the world don’t want to be reminded about the people who are too poor and too old to join in. As evidence, I give you the crowd’s reaction on Saturday. While single issue campaigning has been spoken about as a reflection of society’s new individualism, with people focusing on the issues they care about, I see it more as intellectual cowardice. If you don’t consider that your new bill that’ll cut carbon emissions by whatever percent by levelling a higher duty on fuel will leave the elderly to freeze to death in the winter because they can no longer afford to heat their homes, then you’re a monster. Reducing the sphere of the ethical to an individual’s relationship with the planet ignores the rest of society. Single issue campaigning will ultimately lead to bad policy – if it hasn’t already.

So the next time you’re confronted by an environmental activist who’s demanding that you recycle more, ask them if they’re sharing their wormery with the little old lady living by herself in the flat upstairs. Picking and choosing when you’re going to be ethical is despicable. Luckily, I chose not to be ethical. I work in politics instead.

ConfBlog#1: The Phantom Menace

“It’s a shit ‘ole”, said the taxi driver. “What?” I replied. “It’s a shit ‘ole, that hotel you’re going to,” he replied. ”You’ve been conned, mate.”

This was not an auscipicious start to the Lib Dem Conference season. The taxi driver had complained about Lib Dems being tight-fisted bastards all the way from the train station, so I confirmed his prejudices by refusing to tip him. I had been dropped outside a hotel that resembled every seaside guesthouse since life first crawled from the oceans. It had awnings, and strange mannequins of fishermen in the windows. I approached the front desk, where the owners, who appeared to be husband and wife, were having a blazing row.  

“Err, hello?” I politely enquired. They stopped rowing for long enough to confirm my booking and take my card details. My card was declined, which I was rather expecting seeing as I didn’t have any money. I had been building up to my most sheepish smile just for the occasion. “Is there any way I could pay at the end?” I enquired of the wife. “This is the only card I have on me. No idea why it’s not working.” “No,” she replied. “We always take payment upfront.”

The husband then said, “It’s alright, pay at the end if you like.” “THAT’S RIGHT, JUST OVERRULE ME WHY DON’T YOU!” came the response from the wife. While the row erupted I took the key from the rack and snuck upstairs. The room was clean and didn’t appear to have anything else living in it, which is all I really want out of places to sleep. I headed off to the conference centre.

Bournmouth International Conference Centre may be a bit excessively named, unless the world has more reknown floating around than I have until now realised. It was hosting the first training sessions of Conference, and I was due to attend a session on messaging. Messaging in a campaign context is now a little behind the times; it’s all about the narrative you communicate to voters now. Indeed, the ossification of the Campaigns Department in this regard has been noticed by the Bones Commission, the internal body that recently produced a report on party reform. It recommended reducing the powers of the Chief Executive, Chris Rennard, who is at present responsible for much of our campaigning, and instead handing them over to a body much more easily controllable by the leader. This was, it said, to move the party away from merely being a leaflet delivery cult.

The Campaigns Department’s reaction to this threat to its previously unchallenged authority has been to rebrand itself. It’s got a pretty new half-bird logo, uses lots of single words as slogans (and doesn’t capitalise them, just to be modern), and still pumps out the same material into its training sessions.

But different parts of the reforms coming out of the Bones Commission and the Leader’s Office are going different ways. The Make It Happen initiative, which involves lowering the overall tax burden, has proven particularly unpopular. Indeed, during a long liquid lunch one of my contacts from another part of the party told me that there was going to be an effort at rebellion against it during conference. However, these being Lib Dems, this revolt is likely to take the form of leaflet distribution. After all, to do otherwise would be to violate the founding principles of the Cult of the Focus.

The Ghost in the By-election Machine

The Liberal Democrat campaign in Henley was textbook. It included some of the best literature I’ve ever seen, including an exemplary magazine crushing the Tory’s claims to be a defender of the greenbelt. We had a large army of volunteers out canvassing and delivering throughout the weeks preceding polling day. Our election day operation itself was so well-manned we were able to knock up people who we had no canvass data for, but appeared likely to be our supporters. But, in the end, we were only able to achieve a swing of 1.84% – a swing that, arguably, was more likely to be caused by Labour voters switching to us than necessarily a product of our campaign.

And this has been noticed. So what happened? Out of the five by-elections since 1997 that have resulted in a change of control, the Lib Dems have won four – and the only one we didn’t win was Crewe & Nantwich, less than a month ago. Indeed, the swings we have managed to achieve in more recent by-elections have been down from the heady highs of 2003 and 2004. The last time we managed a swing of over 10% was at the Bromley & Chistlehurst by-election in 2006.

So what happened? While, naturally, the Tory revival played a part here, it’s not the full story – the Tories only raised their share of the vote by 3.4% compared to 16.9% in Crewe, while Labour’s share fell by over 10% in both cases. Previously, we would have expected a lot of that vote to go to us, but it seems to have been divided between us, the Tories, and the BNP. While the issue of Labour voters going towards the BNP is for another day, it’s worthwhile asking what was so different about this election in terms of our capture of the Labour vote. Why didn’t we get more?

To anyone on the ground familiar with our campaigning tactics, the answer would be obvious. The Tories stole everything we’ve been doing in by-elections since 1997, and with their greater money and resources, did it better. They had a magazine, Good Mornings, polling cards, localised newsletters, the works. Their literature had clearly had more spent on its production, and while ours was designed more effectively, theirs had a tendency to look more professional. I suspect that this professionalism played a big part in increasing the efficacy of their literature relative to ours; a leaflet with higher production values indicates a more serious party in the minds of the voters, and not appearing serious is something we can ill afford.

This isn’t just true in Henley – across the country, Labour and the Tories are copying our tactics, sneaky buggers that they are. They’ve started producing imitations of the Focus local newsletter, started campaigning more on local issues, and actually begun to work harder for their votes. They’re doing this because they realise that otherwise that these are votes we’ll be able to take. It’s a good reflection upon our efforts that the public are now more likely to get a better service from their elected representatives, even if the larger parties had to be terrorised into doing it. However, it leaves us with a campaigning quandary: if the Tories and Labour are stealing our thunder on local campaigning, one of our most important selling points is gone. We have a reputation for being effective local campaigners, and this is partly why our share of the votes for Council elections is consistently higher than that of national elections – usually at least 3-4%. If we lose that, where do we go from here?

There are multiple approaches currently being put forward. One of the most popular is to shift the strategy for our campaigning away from ‘messenging’ towards ‘narrative’, as advocated by Neil Stockley. This would involve ensuring our candidate at by-elections has a good story to tell, giving the voters an emotional involvement with his or her campaign. It’s analogous to Obama’s primary campaign: presenting oneself as an outsider bringing hope and change to an ossified political system is very emotive, regardless of its truth. While this will doubtless be effective, every party will contain sufficient Obama-watchers to make it likely that all of a sudden everyone will be bringing hope and change in 2010.

Another approach is to rethink our literature radically, and start taking more tips from the world of advertising. This would involve amplifying a brand – whether it be the party or a candidate – with extremely emotive phraseology and photography. An example is for the front page of a leaflet to consist of a big picture of a happy family with the tagline, ‘Because your family is priceless’, with more information inside about how only the Lib Dems can guarantee your family’s continued prosperity.

I suspect that this would certainly gain us votes, but would require significant volunteer management to ensure that all of our people went along with this – patronising and manipulative advertising techniques are not what our membership in general signed up for, regardless of how effective they are.

The approach I would like to suggest is the following. During the debate about detention without trial for 42 days, several polls were published that found that while the public was in favour of liberty as a principle, in particular cases they were more likely to be in favour of surrendering it for increased security. Other research has emphasised that the public are frequently in favour of our economic policies and the principles behind them – they simply don’t vote for us because they don’t think we can win. What this demonstrates is that where we’ve managed to overcome the credibility gap, or indeed during a by-election where it’s less relevant, targeting literature about relevant principles to relevant demographics could be extremely effective. Our candidate will have the value over and above the opposition of not only being a strong local campaigner, but a strong local campaigner who believes what you believe.

This will naturally only be successful if we can weave into the campaign’s overall narrative, potentially using the advertising techniques mentioned above. Talking about a candidate’s background and how he or she has come to their principles could be devastating – it’s the sort of thing that would work very well in a magazine. It gives us an inbuilt advantage over the Tories and Labour in the current climate, as it’s not clear at all what either party stands for.

Naturally, its success is dependant on its effective implementation, and it is possible to object that we talk about our principles already. But the point is that we rarely do it in any kind of prominent way – while the principles inform the electoral machine, they’re rarely produced by it. We can’t afford this any more. If the Tories and Labour have caught up to us, we need to be one step ahead.

Showdown at the P.O. Corral

WE WON! We won! Not the election of course, but rather the fight to save Essex Road Post Office from the ravages of a Labour Government bent on ruining anything of benefit to the poor & vulnerable. A concerted effort involving the local community, our PPC Bridget Fox and the Lib-Dem run Council had produced an agreement with Royal Mail Ltd. to allow a franchisee to take it over.

This was a tremendous victory for Bridget. She’d campaigned for over a year to keep it open, and had gathered thousands of petition signatories and organised hundreds of people into protests. I’d taken pictures of lots of them and put them into exciting leaflets. And so we marched down Essex Road early on Wednesday morning to proclaim our victory before the media.

Unfortunately, Labour had had the same idea. The local MP and champion pie-eater Emily Thornberry had been given a roasting in the press over the hypocrisy inherent in voting in favour of post office closures in Parliament while simultaneously campaigning to keep an Islington branch open. A few minutes after we arrived a rather aggressive man in a red t-shirt appeared and started shoving a piece of paper with ‘Emily saved the PO’ scrawled on it in marker pen into the faces of passers by. We took advantage of this by introducing Lib Dem Councillor Emily Fieran-Reed to the same passers by. He then scrawled on the reverse ‘Local MP saves Post Office’, and given that an awful lot of Islington residents think that Bridget is already the MP thanks to our campaigning and Thornberry had chickened out of turning up, was again quite amusing.

More Labour activists showed up, and after an initial period of studiously ignoring each others’ existence we started to exchange accusations of lying. I nearly got into a fight with the aggressive red t-shirt, although to be fair he did become distinctly more aggressive after I tickled him to get him to lower the sign. It all got rather ugly. The lady from the Gazette took pictures of each set of politicos, then one of the avowedly ‘neutral’ people, which was quickly swarmed by Thornberry’s lackeys. So I pushed into the middle. Unsurprisingly, the neutral photo was used.

Politics shouldn’t have to be like this. Instead of coming together to celebrate a victory for the community, we spat at each other like children fighting over a toy. This is especially a shame, as one of the Labour activists was quite pretty. But it leads to an interesting question: would the Post Office have been less likely to be saved if two separate groups of people hadn’t been quite so determined to beat the other in terms of campaigning? Demonstrating that your party is better equipped to represent local people is a big spur to activism, and I am not convinced that either party would have put in quite so much effort if everyone had agreed to share the PR spoils equally. But then, that’s why socialism doesn’t work, isn’t it?

Post-Election Thoughts

Selling pre-packaged opinions is part of my trade. You know when you’re at a dinner party and the political discussion is at the level of assertion – when people are merely repeating sentences at each other without any form of engagement? Well, that’s what I do. I sell those sentences, those forms of proto-opinion that are far too common around the dining tables of Britain. How does it work? It depends on three factors: the relationship between an opinion and a person’s own interests, the form in which the opinion is received and the number of times it’s repeated.

Of these factors, repetition is by far the most important – people can be persuaded to act against their own interests if they hear the same opinion frequently enough without anything to counter it. Just look at my aunt – a former left-winger in the grand Grant clan tradition now, after ten years of repeated exposure to the Daily Mail, believes immigrants are taking over the country and there’s a Muslim waiting in every shadow.

I find the process of opinion-forming fascinating, and this election has provided many wonderful examples of the art. By far the best-conducted campaign has been by the Evening Standard – the form and content of their opinion-forming has been simply superb.

For example, the Standard ran an analysis of Paddick’s policies about a week before the election. On his plan to switch the management of the Tube to a concession model, the paper wrote: “This would only add another level of bureaucracy. The unions would have a fit.”

In the mind’s ear, you can hear people repeating those sentences back to you across the dining table. It doesn’t matter that they don’t have anything to do with the policy, it only matters that they’ve been associated with it. This is the end goal of politicians’ soundbites, the focus of the messaging of our literature – to lend the listener or reader an easily embedded opinion. It’s about identifying whose interests will be best satisfied by which opinion, then using an appropriate form to transmit it repeatedly. But this is a game played at every level – every single person has their own interests and their own need to communicate them with others. Unlike what some Marxists would have you believe, the populace are not generally docile and receptive to the opinions of the intellectual elite. They’re players too.

Now that I’ve given a explanation of what I’m talking about to those of you who don’t spend all their time trying to mindfuck the voters, what went wrong with the Lib Dem campaign in London?

The slightly glib answer is that we were heavily squeezed between Boris and Ken. But why did this have to be the case? Are there things which could have been carried out differently which may have changed the final result? I don’t believe we ever could have won – but we could have and should have polled higher than we did. What went wrong?

Put simply, I think we failed to take into account the role of particular interest groups in this election, and the way in which our opponents were able to portray them as being uniquely under threat unless they cast their ballot for Boris or Ken. ‘Opponents’ doesn’t just refer to our political opposition – there were multiple political actors who had influence over this result. Let me give a couple of examples.

A large part of our vote comes from slightly better off public sector employees – people like teachers, junior managers and their ilk – the sorts of people who don’t fully agree with Labour’s policies, but aren’t vicious enough to vote Tory. During this campaign, the workers in the many and varied quasi-public sector organisations nominally under the control of the Mayor – like Transport for London and the London Development Agency – were told by UNISON, PCS, and the other unions that if they didn’t vote for Ken Boris would embark upon a purge as soon as he entered power. We had a significant number of people who may have otherwise voted for us with a strong economic incentive to vote for Ken. How did we attempt to counter this? We did nothing – indeed, we allowed our opponents (see above) to portray our policies as almost as damaging as those of the Tory party.

The rise of the BNP during this campaign also cost us votes – but it did so invisibly. This is because of a separate under-the-radar campaign ran by various interest groups and sponsored by the Daily Mirror. In Hackney, two tabloids paid for by the Mirror were delivered to nearly every address. While ostensibly politically neutral, this tabloid was full of scare stories about the implications of the BNP coming into power. Since not being ethnically cleansed is a pretty fucking good incentive to vote, the combination of this campaign with the newspaper stories about the BNP backing Johnson meant that all of a sudden an awful lot more black people had a big reason to vote than last time. This came out in the results – Jeanette Arnold’s vote doubled since last time. What did we do to try to take some of these additional voters for ourselves? We talked about the importance of the police not excessively focusing on young black men – which, while important, rather missed the issue.

We were thus abandoned by a lot of our traditional support, and failed to capitalise on the increased voter turnout. This is because our campaign was insufficiently sophisticated to take this into account. Focusing on crime was important to overcome what has traditionally been perceived as a weak issue for us, and indeed we started getting the signals that this was working (people calling us up to tell us to stop just talking about crime). The problem was, we started getting these signals two weeks before election and didn’t start diversifying our message to take this into account.

I would argue that what we can take away from this is twofold. Firstly, we must resist the temptation to retreat to our comfort zone and focus exclusively on the local interest groups in council wards that we can already deal with. We will never win big if we do that. Secondly, one of the roles of the London campaigns department must be to identify these London-wide interest groups and develop a strategy and materials for targeting them. In essence, we need to find ways of doing street letters on a far bigger scale – partly through media work but also through ground war operations co-ordinated across multiple boroughs.

There are, of course, lots of other reasons why we didn’t win – two prominent personality politicians turned the contest into something more presidential, which Brian as a newcomer had a difficult job to break into. But the lessons we can learn from this contest will help us do better next time.