🔥 Politicise everything.

Politicise everything.

Leasehold reform is a car crash on the motorway. People look at it, think ‘thank God I’m not in that car’, wipe the sweat off their brow and drive on. If you’re not a leaseholder, or in a family connected to one, you’re instinctively not going to be interested. So how do you make an issue that affects up to 10 million people get political and media cut-through? 

Our approach is to politicise everything. That means being inescapable, being provocative, and gleaning as much media coverage as you can, all of the time.

When salience goes up, business power goes down

A good friend said to me some years ago when I was setting up this campaign: ‘When salience goes up, business power goes down.’ That has really been key for us. 

The vested interests in this area are hugely powerful. It’s a multi-billion pound industry. We will never get anywhere near to outspending them. But we can politicise the issue. They don’t want it politicised because it means they start to lose control over the politicians and the civil servants, over the policymaking. 

In the worst case for them, certain areas of the policy agenda get escalated to Number 10, and Number 10 may even have to overrule a resistant Treasury because it’s become such a political hot potato.

Westminster should not be your primary audience

The best thing to do as a political campaigner is not have Westminster as your audience. Find a constituency out in the country. They are more powerful than any MP, any minister, any special adviser, or any civil servant. Find them and mobilise them.

You need to build a connection with that cohort of people affected by your issue, and then MPs and civil servants will be running to speak to you.

Where campaigns fail is when they think it’s all about being in the room, getting face time with politicians, knowing the special adviser. But that minister could be gone tomorrow or is not keen on your agenda and just stringing you along. You want your campaign to be strong enough to weather whoever is in today and gone tomorrow. 

Is the system controlling you?

Do not be a stakeholder. As soon as you do, you’re going to be played, or you’re going to be co-opted or bought, and your campaign will be all the poorer for it. 

I find a lot of groups become stakeholders, and that kills the campaign because it means you lose touch with your own supporters; you’re fixated on playing the insider game. You’re trying to second-guess what policymakers are going to think of you if you say one thing or do another. As soon as you do that, you’ve lost and the system is winning—it’s controlling your campaign.

Meetings that don’t matter

You asked, ‘doesn’t the confrontational approach mean you’re excluded from some meetings?’ Those are meetings we don’t want to be part of, because that’s not where the power is. The power is outside those meetings. The power is with the voters.

The Ratatouille Imperative

It’s that scene from Ratatouille where he brings in the cheese and the strawberry to create an unexpected explosion of flavour. It’s a blending of emotion, and being rational and policy-detailed. That’s the killer, and I don’t see enough campaigns doing it. 

There are brilliant campaigns that do a lot on emotion and are incredible at getting attention, but then they’re weaker on the policy side, or not open about their policy asks—which lets politicians, advisers, civil servants and lobbyists stitch up the policy against the interests of those campaigns’ supporters.

And there are others that just do policy and think making the agenda salient is beneath them. By not making a scene around your issue, you are aiding the other side and allowing reforms not to make it into a King’s Speech. Endless meetings with civil servants and all-party groups won’t get reforms done.

Use existing linguistic memes

I’m a magpie. The words and phrases we use often come from reading books or watching films and thinking ‘I like the sound of that.’ 

It’s about echoing language that’s already been used—‘cartels’, ‘will of the people’, a ‘Brexit rerun’, ‘take back control’, ‘property mafia’, ‘milking parlours’, ‘woke feudalism’—because that’s what resonates. You don’t want to create whole new vocabulary to push your issue. You want to lean into things people have already heard before and will find amusing. 

Ministerial action in a week

We learned how to blow up an issue with viral video. There’s no secret sauce, no magic recipe; the key thing is you’ve got to be authentic. It won’t work if you’re not. You also have to keep finding fresh ways to tell the same story to maintain interest and momentum, especially when Westminster and Whitehall don’t want to talk about your issue.

A year ago we did a video outside the Royal Courts of Justice attacking the government’s woeful defence against a judicial review, where freeholders claimed their human rights would be breached by reforms Labour supported. 

Lewis Goodall saw it on X and expressed interest. We did an interview with him off the back of it, and within a week the housing minister was on the same programme announcing they were speeding up a key Right-to-Manage reform—months ahead of schedule—that would help millions of leaseholders take back control of their service charges.

And a book recommendation…

I’d urge everyone to read A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain. It’s over ten years old, a bit dated in places, but really important, because if you’re a campaigner you need to understand how business lobbying works in Britain—that’s what you’re up against. It’s not just cutting through with voters; it’s knowing the dirty tricks these business interests are playing that you’ve not got a Scooby about.

Thank you to the 118 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.