The day after... Let's be practical. What tactics delivered this result? And how do voters respond sustainably and well?
For a whole swathe of Northern and Midlands working-class voters to lend their votes to a Conservative party that promised to “Get Brexit Done”… who also voted against a party that showered upon them houses, voices on boards, student fees cancelled, jobs in a Green Industrial Revolution—but fronted by what seems like an alienating character…
To say the least, this 2019 General Election needs some explanation. And we won’t jump to any hot takes - we’d prefer to see read the social-scientific surveys of voter opinion when they come in.
But we would like to echo the result with two of our abiding concerns - firstly, to keep trying to answer the everyday empowerment question that thrums through contemporary politics on these islands (only brought to a head with Brexit’s “Take Back Control”).
And secondly, to dwell on the crisis of political practice. What are the techniques and processes which are managing to get at citizens at the moment? How can their affective and emotional triggering be countered by other, emotionally-attuned appeals, that go under the radar of the old polarities?
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On the second point, watch the video below. This is a presentation from the NZ/Australian political consultant Ben Guerin, hired by the Conservative Party to conduct their comms and social media campaign (the video should begin at the right point - if not, go to 32.10).
Here Guerin is talking about their success in electing the Liberals (meaning ideologically conservative) in Australia a few weeks before. Some of the tools of the contemporary political message campaign are laid bare here:
From these articles by ABC Australia and the New Statesman, we hear that:
When the average Facebook user spends just 1.7 seconds on each post, the challenge is to get them to "stop long enough on our content, to process it, to react with it, to interact with it and then share it with their friends…This is the single most important point: the best social media strategy is water dripping on a stone. You've got to be pushing the same consistent message day-in, day-out," he said. See the comparison between the “dripping stone” messages in the UK and Oz general elections:
The premise is simple. Clogging people’s social media feeds with “boomer memes” – hastily executed and comically dubious pairings of image and text pitched to older voters – is considered more effective than publishing considered analyses of policy.
“You can have a quote from an economist. Or you can have a picture of a dog next to it saying ‘tax is bad’. Guess which one had more engagement,” said Guerin, reflecting on the successes of the Australian campaign. Whether it is changing the Tory press office Twitter handle to “factcheckUK” during Johnson’s head-to- head debate with Jeremy Corbyn, or releasing badly edited memes of the Labour leader as a chicken, the Tory social media strategy bears similar fingerprints.
Topham Guerin believes in quantity, not quality – and in speed, not scrupulousness. In November this year, it broadcast a video of Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, which was edited to make him look dumbfounded when asked about his own party’s policy. It garnered 5 million views on Twitter. Another, which Facebook has since banned, made BBC newsreaders look as if they were endorsing Johnson.
Guerin says that after capturing attention, the next task is to encourage engagement, which means getting the reader to like, comment or share the post. The way the Facebook algorithm works, the more engagement you get on a piece of content, the greater the chance that it spreads further.
In the video, Guerin defines engagement as a response of emotion. "Like, we're not going to interact with something if we don't care about it. But the particular emotions that we need to unlock are arousal emotions, we're talking anger, excitement, pride, fear," he said. “Your content should be relating to one of these emotions for anyone to give a damn about it."
We’re aware of the danger of overstating the power of these operators - and imagining that political success now is about the largest warchest, spending money on the most emotionally cynical media and communications techniques, and let the best operators win. But here we are, again…
We note one of the post-election aphorisms that the Scottish autonomist site Bella Caledonia minted:
The political opiod of right-wing populism isn’t going away anytime soon. The idea that complex difficult problems can be solved with three or four word slogans: “Take Back Control” – “Get Brexit Done” – “Make America Great Again” – is electorally successful, even if it is socially useless. They’re called Glittering Generalities. But the solution doesn’t rely on replicating these forms but by addressing the fact that individuals are exhausted, stressed, vulnerable, and badly informed.
At A/UK, we would indeed argue that politics needs to lift people’s faces from their screens, portable or static, and engage each other body and soul to body and soul. But that implies a level of investment in methods and practices of conviviality and sociality, and over a longer period than a general-election rush to the polls. Which brings us to…
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… George Monbiot. As you’ll see from the link, an inspiration to us over the last few years. And both reliably and powerfully, he came out with a blog straight after Thursday which made some points about a response to the result recognisable to any A/UK reader. We’ll lay them out below:
Solidarity is going to be crucial over the coming months. We should seek, wherever possible, to put loyalty to party and faction aside, and work on common resolutions to a crisis afflicting everyone who wants a kinder, fairer, greener nation.
All the progressive manifestos I’ve read – Labour, Green, SNP, Liberal Democrat, Plaid Cymru – contain some excellent proposals. Let’s extract the best of them, and ideas from many other sources, and build an alliance around them. There will be differences, of course. But there will also be positions that almost everyone who believes in justice can accept.
I believe we need to knit these proposals into the crucial missing element in modern progressive politics: a restoration story. A powerful new narrative is the vehicle for all political transformations. While all the progressive parties in the UK have proposed good policies, none of them have told a story that exactly fits the successful narrative template. Let’s work together to craft the story of change.
We should use the new story, and the proposals this narrative vehicle carries, to build mass resistance movements, taking inspiration from – and building on – highly effective mobilisations such as the youth climate strikes. We will draw strength from the movements in other nations, and support them in turn.
…A major part of this resistance, I believe, must be the reclamation of a culture of public learning. Acquiring useful knowledge requires determined study. Yet we have lost the habit of rigorous learning in adulthood, once seen as crucial to social justice. This makes us vulnerable to every charlatan who stands for election, and every lie they amplify through the billionaire press and social media.
Those who govern us would love to keep us in ignorance. When they deride “elites”, they don’t mean people like themselves – the rich and powerful. They mean teachers and intellectuals. They are creating an anti-intellectual culture, to make people easier to manipulate.
Let’s reinvigorate the workers’ education movements. Let’s restore a rich public culture of intellectual self-improvement, open to everyone. Knowledge is the most powerful tool in politics.
…I recognise that charity is no substitute for justice, and we can never fully compensate for the failures of the state. Even so, we must enhance the support and giving networks for the people this government will neglect or attack. No one should have to face the coming onslaught alone.
We will create, to the greatest extent possible, a resistance economy. This means local cooperative networks of mutual support, which circulate social and material wealth within the community. The astonishing work of Participatory City, with Barking and Dagenham council in London, shows us one way of doing this.
We will find each other and ourselves through volunteering, which provides the most powerful known defence against loneliness and alienation, helps support the people this government will abandon, and can defend and rebuild the living world.