Comms-Alt-Delete

The Lenin question?

Lord Maurice Glasman has this after-dinner party line about needing both the Marvin Gaye question and the Lenin question. The Marvin Gaye question is ‘what’s going on?’; the Lenin question is ‘what is to be done?’

I absolutely think we need to understand what’s going on. But just understanding things is not sufficient. What we need is a prescription: a policy agenda for how to deal with the problem.

One of the things the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear said is that therapy teaches us you can just dwell on your problems. You can intricately understand all of your problems–why you’re doing something, why you’re addicted to something, why you have this bad behaviour–but still not do anything about it.

I think something like that happens on a more macro level too. We can say a thing is bad and that we ought to be doing something about it, but that doesn’t really change anything. Yes, it matters that we understand the problem, but what are we actually going to do to fix it?

As for an example…

I’m working on a paper on the politics of property tax reform for the Fairness Foundation. There’s a huge amount of elite consensus across the political spectrum that we need to update valuations and we need the system to be much more proportional. It’s outrageous that houses in Kensington are paying less than somewhere up north. But why hasn’t it happened? 

There’s been loads of policy on this. We don’t need more policy. What we need is to understand how we can actually get it done, and that means understanding how British political economy has developed and how reliant it is on housing speculation and home ownership. In order to get this policy through, we need to confront and navigate those problems and the trade offs and obstacles involved with doing something about.

What we do not need is another paper saying ‘we need property tax reform.’

Better stories aren’t going to help anyone

If another person tells me the left needs better stories or we need better narratives I’m going to shoot myself. What we do not need are better stories. You develop a story by actually doing things. You develop a story by demonstrating you can do things.

Comms-Alt-Delete

There are way too many comms people and PR people within Westminster. Stephanie Mudge’s book Leftism Reinvented is an anthropological history of who has occupied leadership positions in social democratic parties. In the 19th century it was trade unionists, then economists in the mid-20th century, and then more recently PR consultants and the spin doctor. This has been catastrophic for left politics. 

We need good comms people. We absolutely need to be able to sell what we’re doing. But we need something to sell. 

Herd mentality > factionalism

Westminster is dominated by this ‘who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out.’ It’s a way for Westminster to avoid talking about anything more complicated. And for journalists and others whose job it is to understand Westminster to justify what they do. All of this though is almost entirely detached from the condition of the country. That can be very frustrating.  

Factions exist, but they’re much less important than people think. Sure, there are differences of perspective across the Parliamentary Labour Party, but the bulk have fairly nuanced views. What is a problem is that because Westminster is dominated by insider gossip and intrigue, there's a lot of herd mentality. On something like immigration reform, you’ll have people from across the party tell you privately that we need to do something, and that [UK Home Secretary] Shabana Mahmood is doing a good job. But publicly they’ll come out and call her a fascist. It's ridiculous. 

The left’s problem with talent recognition

Lefties are committed to the idea of egalitarianism, and they don’t like to think that some people are just better than other people at doing jobs. Right-wing people are much more comfortable talking about talent, getting talented people in, and being very deliberate about that. The left needs to discriminate: to say this person’s good and this person’s not.

Trad comms people are on the way out

Political comms is increasingly dominated by the internet. The trad comms people–the people who go on Sky News or GB News, the people who write for legacy publications–are going to be less and less relevant. We all need to recalibrate how we communicate ideas and our understanding of how ideas travel.

Contrary to what we’re told, there is little evidence that the internet has locked people into inescapable echo chambers. People, particularly young people, aren’t listening to hours and hours of podcasts to reaffirm their existing beliefs. They’re listening to them for ways of understanding what’s going on, for deeper explanations and interpretations than what they find elsewhere. 

We’re now in a political world where political education–how people come to politics, how they understand political issues, how they understand political processes–takes place on and through online platforms. 

Someone who’s really interesting on this is Josh Citarella, who does a podcast called Doomscroll. He has spent years in obscure message boards and forums trying to understand how today’s media streams work. His argument is that there is no mainstream anymore, only a chaotic information environment in which outsiders have become insiders, and insiders outsiders, and where alt media such as YouTube and Substack is now quantitatively larger than traditional media.

Message boards as the new think tank

Over the last decade you’ve seen message boards turn into think tanks, and anonymous posters become political actors. The ‘posting to policy’ pipeline is remarkable. Look at how the term ‘Boriswave’–a term coined by the online right to describe the significant rise in immigration after Brexit–is now used by front bench politicians. 

Meanwhile, instead of thinking seriously about how to use the internet, left politics has retreated and siloed itself into the NGO sector and academia. Most of these places are stuck in a previous era—they can’t compete.

Thank you to the 132 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

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