👥 When politicians aren't the best messenger (and who is)

In today’s interview, Jess covers…

1. The need to rack up lots of small policy wins to succeed in widespread cultural change

2. The importance of identifying the right messenger for the message—and why politicians aren’t always that person

3. How social media has changed how MPs behave in the House of Commons

A reminder that I’ll be running a webinar on the lessons from running Policy Unstuck and what it means for your organisation’s approach to its newsletter(s) on the 16th October. You can register here. And a massive thanks to the 66 of you that have referred this newsletter to a colleague—I really appreciate it.

Tom

The story Britain tells itself is crucial to its success

It is crucial to have a story about where we’re going with something if we’re going to bring people along with us, whether that’s the public or stakeholders. 

What is challenging about today is that when you look at the governments of yesteryear, there were periods of optimism which enabled really bold thinking. It definitely feels like we’re in a period of a lot of pessimism at the moment. 

People don’t feel super hopeful about their futures, and that’s a massive political challenge for the Government.

Unusual is the key word when it comes to coalitions

To get things through you need to build really unusual coalitions of people. You need to create a bit of a cultural change around what you’re trying to do. 

And, unfortunately, the timing also just has to be right. There has to be the right minister in the right place who wants to take up that issue, or there has to be something that has happened nationally that brings it into the public frame of mind.

You have to be able to be agile enough to respond to those windows of light that appear when you’re campaigning on something.

Be the tortoise, not the hare

A good friend of mine worked on the anti-smoking campaign from the very beginning. It started in the 80s, and the ultimate goal was a smoke-free generation. And that was crazy in the 80s. They said we were never going to get that. 

So what did we do? We went for advertising first. Then we went for the packaging. Then we went for outdoor spaces and public spaces. When I was a kid, you could still smoke in an aeroplane!

The fact that it’s changed so much in that time is quite remarkable, to get to the place where we had a prime minister stand up in the last parliament to say ‘we’re going to have a smoke-free generation.’

Who is the right messenger for this idea?

People feel disenfranchised from the political system. People are getting their information from increasingly polarised sources, and not necessarily sense checking or getting the other information they may have before. What then happens is these narratives get set in stone, on immigration or crime rates for example, and as we know, it’s really hard to cut through once that has happened.

So I’m quite obsessed with how you create trusted message carriers and how you start to shift a narrative, not with facts, but by tapping into that more emotive, feeling side of things.

You’ve got to think about people’s credibility in their own communities. Politicians are important community leaders, but they’re not always the leaders that people are going to immediately go to and think of as ’the trusted one.’ So who are the community leaders that are? 

It’s the lady that runs the community lunch at the community centre who knows everybody really well and will ring up John to check he’s ok if he hasn’t shown up that day. It’s the Traceys of the world who turn the grief of a personal tragedy into the strength to go out every day and talk to young people about the dangers of knives. It’s Mark, the youth mentor.

These are the people who have that credibility and can start to change these narratives.

You want to secure a politician’s interest, but do you know what they want?

As soon as I was elected, we got together and wrote a strategy document based on the priorities that we’d picked up over the course of the election. So we have 5 priorities that we work on and we’ve mostly split our time really trying to move the dial on. And I’ve always tried to organise my communications, my parliamentary engagement, my resident engagement around those issues.

It’s not easy to stay focused though–there is so much to do. We get something like 1,500 bits of casework come through every month. That doesn’t include bits of lobbying, or event invites. And then everything else… If you want to speak in a debate for example, that’s 5-6 hours that you can’t do anything else because you have to be in the chamber pretty much the whole time until you’re called.

The PPS role–what is it?

Being a PPS is essentially the link between the ministerial team and backbench MPs. Our job is to take the pulse of how backbenchers are feeling about any particular issue in a brief, and then feed questions and queries back into the ministerial team so that they’re prepared and can respond to it. 

Practically, some of the big things we do are help ministers prepare for oral questions, ministerial statements and urgent questions, and make sure there is enough political support in the house for them.

Social media is changing what politicians ask (and why)

I am ever so slightly concerned that–and we all do it–we use the chamber to clip our speeches and our questions and share those on social media and share them with our constituents. 

In many ways that’s really good because your constituents see that you’re raising the issues they’ve brought to you. But I don’t think it always lends itself to moving a debate on. 

There are times where I’ve sat for two hours in statements where the same question has been asked over, and over, and over again. There must be a better way of doing it.