🗣️What would Aristotle say about politics today?

For some time after Labour’s election victory, pundits argued that Keir Starmer should produce a Substack. Then the Prime Minister started, and now the message is ‘Yes, but not that way’. The reasons people cite:

1. It is inauthentic: it neither feels written by him, nor does it fit the norms of the platform.

2. It lacks coherence: what’s the objective?

3. The audience is uncertain: is this intended for political insiders who understand the different bits of policy being talked about, or the wider public, who probably don’t?

Take the last Substack. It starts by referring to the war in the Middle East and then awkwardly pivots to the spring statement. What’s the betting someone really important said just before this went out: ‘We must acknowledge the war’, ‘…but this isn’t about the war’, ‘I know but we’ll look out of touch if we don’t talk about it, just acknowledge it’, ‘but it will be weird’, ‘acknowledge it.’

The comms person was right—it’s weird.

It uses epistrophe (the repetition of a word or clause for effect) with the line “Nigel Farage and Reform want to scrap it.” We’ve seen politicians struggle with this rhetorical device in the past; it’s not always easy to get it right. Regardless of the device itself, the way it is used positions Labour as weak to Reform. Nietzsche would call this slave morality; Labour are defining themselves by their opposition to Reform, not by the strength of their own vision.

Lastly, the piece falls into several of the usual policy communications traps. It over-indexes on political statements and policy outputs, not real-world outcomes. It uses unimaginative language and cliched metaphors, like ‘turning point’ and ‘a clear destination in mind.’ And the piece has more chameleons than London Zoo; words and phrases that change their meaning depending on who is watching. What is a Labour value? What does the PM mean when he says ‘working people’?

The discipline that sits underneath all of this is political rhetoric, and today’s guest, Professor Alan Finlayson, is a specialist. If you are interested in digital communications and how to think about social media in 2026, I’d strongly recommend his recent interview in Renewal on whether the left understands the internet.

As to his Policy Unstuck interview below, I had a career highlight being able to ask someone in all seriousness: ‘what would Aristotle think?’

I still have Alan’s shriek of laughter in my ears.

Tom

✍️ Do you ever wonder whether your writing is any good?

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Welcome to the post-common culture era

Communication doesn’t just share information, but organises people and their relationships with one another. A national newspaper read by everyone on the same day brought people together, thinking about the same things, at the same time. 

Digital media and social platforms are fundamentally different. They completely dissolve all the ways people were previously organised and connected to political parties and policy decisions. That change has been so rapid that the mainstream political system has not caught up at all; traditional parties are blindsided by how movements like Reform and the Greens organise through these new means.

It’s not just politics–outside of sports, very few things are watched by millions simultaneously. The effect is that we now live in a post-common culture era.

The specialisation of the political and policy elite

Politicians are disconnected for simple, well-known reasons. The long story of post-war politics in Britain is partly a massive decline in party membership. There were over two and a half million Conservative members in the 50s. The Labour Party, via trade unions, used to have around six million. That’s all declined. Party membership dropped markedly during the New Labour years, spiked briefly with Corbyn, and is now about 300,000.

This disembedding of parties from wider life—their connections to communities, trade unions, churches, and charities—means politics is now much more of a distinct niche hobby interest, rather than part of a larger life. 

Furthermore, the increased complexity of political management means it has become a specialised, graduate-entry career rather than something that becomes an extension of work elsewhere. That’s not unique to politics: there’s an intensification of specialisation across all kinds of areas.

Politics (and communications) is a mix of science and art

Problems arise when you have people who are great at arguing policy with other wonks but lack an understanding of politics beyond that. Politics is not just a policy science, it is also a performance art. How do you represent and perform what you’re doing? How do you mobilise people?

The simple point of rhetoric, from ancient Greece to now, is adapting what you’re saying to the audience you’re talking to. You cannot know that simply from your focus group data or opinion poll data: you need a thick sense of how they live.

MPs used to get that by spending time in the Labour club or the Conservative association, and by coming from the same world as those they represented. My sense is they don't do that so much now. Expertise is important, but knowing what you're doing in politics means understanding the sociology and culture of the nation. If you just know the formalities of a policy, you don’t know how to get there.

Politics is downstream of culture

The politicians who argue against the idea that politics is downstream of culture are completely wrong. It is. 

The Breitbart claim is not original. It was understood by Ancient philosophers—Plato was worried about how theatre shaped politics, for example—by figures such as Gramsci in the 1930s, and picked up by French right-wing intellectuals in the 70s as 'metapolitics.' The Labour and Conservative parties used to know this intuitively through their vast social memberships.

Breitbart’s implication is that you win by first engaging in a battle over culture - identities, myths, world-views - and over representation in mass culture. The liberal left used to know this too. They championed the representation of gay people in soap operas to help legitimate equality policies. If you haven't first won the battle of ideas, culturally and intellectually, you don’t have a movement to sustain your policy.

If you want a current example, look at how the vocabulary around migration has shifted in media and online. That’s the outcome of a strategy implemented by the right and it is paving the way for Reform’s policy demands. 

The right effectively uses inductive reasoning in its rhetoric

The rhetorical device of inductive reasoning is a characteristic of reactionary discourse, because it argues that everything is going to hell, and it proves that proposition by listing visceral instances of victimisation: ‘This person got arrested for a tweet. This asylum seeker committed a crime.’

It builds a larger claim from tangible, local examples that people can easily understand and respond to emotionally. It powerfully instantiates their claim that the system is broken.

The left’s tendency to moralise is a fatal political weakness

The liberal tendency goes the other way around: starting with a general moral rule, looking for examples where the rule is broken, and telling people off for it. If your politics is just pointing out people’s moral failings, you aren’t giving people a meaningful orientation or involving them in a process.

Liberals ought to recognise that there are competing moral orders in play. Political life is about building a coalition out of people with different forms of moral reasoning to achieve a common cause. You disable action if you just point out moral failings.

The old cliché is true here: the left looks for enemies, while the right looks for allies.

What would Aristotle say about British politics today?

I think he would find Labour’s communications to be… inartistic. 

Classical rhetoric is about combining three appeals: character (ethos), emotion (pathos), and logical propositions (logos). Powerful rhetoric unifies these into a meaningful proposition. Labour doesn’t have a unified conception of that. They flit between trying to affirm ethos by putting up flags, but it isn't connected to a coherent policy proposition or a meaningful emotional understanding of the situation.

Ultimately, it doesn’t persuade anybody because it doesn’t offer an analysis of our current situation. Labour is just saying, ‘The Tories made everything bad, we will make tough decisions.’ It doesn't give us a sense of where we belong or what we can do.

Successful policy requires persuading and involving the implementers

Lots of people think policy is writing a briefing document with instructions for a bureaucracy. But ultimately, policy is about getting lots of people to do something differently. Health service policy is about changing the behaviours of a million NHS staff and 65 million patients. Education policy is about changing how people act in classrooms. You can do that by instruction and incentive, or you can involve them in the process and persuade them to be part of it.

What’s gone wrong is that governments try to make policy without involving the people who will actually implement it. They order them to do it, which breeds resentment, or they use financial incentives, which leads to perverse outcomes.

Policy needs to engage and activate people. When governments have been most successful—like the 1945 welfare state reforms or early Blairism—it’s because they galvanised key parts of the professional communities they were trying to change, and gave people a vocabulary they could use to think and act for themselves.

Thank you to the 103 readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.