BritainThinks’ recent swing voter project, led by my colleague Deborah Mattinson and reported in this month’s Progress magazine, set out the critical role of the ‘symbolic policy’ for Labour’s appeal to swing voters. Our report discussed how a few, well-chosen and well-communicated, policies can succeed in both speaking directly to voters’ own concerns, and to the wider attributes – vision, courage, in-touch-ness, and so on – that voters look for when deciding how to vote
Despite the project’s focus on policy, much of the ensuing debate particularly in the press, but also online, has centred on the fact that ‘Labour considerers’ in the workshops said they felt unclear on the party’s ‘vision’, and want to know ‘what does Labour stand for?’ before they commit to voting for it.
So far, this insight seems to have provided another excuse (like they needed one) for the various camps in and around the party to do what they love most: As soon as the Independent on Sunday released its coverage, which headlined with the vision finding, the corner of Twitter inhabited by the politically obsessed (of which I am a card carrying member) began to fill up with views about what the Labour vision should be.
The thing is that using this report as another opportunity to opine about Labour’s ‘big vision’ is to miss the central message of the BritainThinks’ article: For swing voters, a key route to understanding what a party stands for is via the small number of policies that actually cut through and stick in their memories. Swing voters use those policies as symbols, reading across to the party’s broader outlook, priorities, qualities and values. The implication is that Labour should be thinking much more carefully about selecting a few symbolic policies and figuring out how to communicate them to the voters we want to convince than about crafting the big vision language that goes around them.
This isn’t to say that parties don’t or shouldn’t have a bigger goal or set of goals that motivates and drives political activity. It’s just that when it comes to boiling that down to a message that might actually reach normal voters paying a normal (minimal) amount of attention to what Labour says, the outcome is usually a slogan of some description. These phrases tend to be full of the ‘values words’ that (as Deborah has discussed recently, elsewhere) voters simply dismiss as ‘politician speak’. Deborah and I have clear, abiding, and not altogether happy, memories of a life before 2010, testing endless variants of essentially the same ‘vision’ over and over again in places like Harlow, Watford, Slough, Edgbaston – ‘a new contract with Britain’? ‘A new compact with Britain?’ ‘A new covenant’? Or ‘I believe in fairness’? ‘Fair play’? ‘British fair play’? ‘A Britain, fair for all’? ‘A future fair (with hover-dodgems) for all’? Which has more vision? Which signals the greatest change? Which has most authenticity (ha!)?
In Redditch, we asked participants, ‘what do you mean when you talk about a party’s vision?’ Their responses were instructive: Leafing through a pile of policies that they had just identified as ‘strong’, a respondent pulled out one that said ‘we’ll pay teachers more who teach in the most difficult schools’. ‘This one’s a vision’, he said as others nodded along – ‘it tells me what matters to Labour, what they stand for. They think education isn’t what it should be, and they have a plan for it’.
For the voters we spoke to, when they talk about ‘vision’, they are looking for policies that convey:
1. A clear account of priorities – the main things that need changing in the country
2. A credible account of what could be done to tackle those priorities
In this definition, a vision isn’t a picture of the future you want to build, or the values you want to enshrine in our society. It’s a party’s diagnosis of the most pressing issues facing us, and a sensible account of what could improve things.
• The 1997 pledge card was a vision – a clear account of what needed doing
• ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was a vision – a simple, intuitive account of Labour’s approach to a top voter issue
• The Tory focus on the deficit and austerity ahead of the 2010 election was a vision: ‘They said what was wrong, and they said what they’d do to fix it, and they said it would hurt’
Swing voters will use your priorities – expressed through the symbolic policies you choose to communicate – to decide whether your broader values accord with theirs. They are looking to know what impact you’ll have on the specific things they care about, and they’re much more interested in what you’ll do when you get in than in what sort of world you want to ‘forge’ 20 years hence.
Of course ‘vision language’ has its place and role – particularly as I suspect that’s what the media and Westminster villagers are after when they question whether a party has a vision. For politicos, there’s a desire to fit policies, initiatives and announcements into a broader narrative – is this a break with the past? A return to traditional Labour values? A new direction? Indeed, part of the problem might be that simply relying on symbolic policies to convey this type of vision feels a bit dull and quotidian. When politicians (or at least their speechwriters) think of a vision, they probably imagine the type of oratory which redefines the way a population thinks of itself (in political philosophy terms, we all want to be Machiavelli’s great, timeless, founder of a republic, rather than his temporally bound succession of princes, scrapping around to gain and hold power). As Steve Van Riel notes, no one in the commentariat is calling for less boldness.
For swing voters though, it’s ‘show’, not ‘tell’. Those grand vision words are almost always taken as a signal that what’s being said is just more ‘politician speak’, and voters’ keenly honed filters screen it out alongside all the other white noise. Presented with those kinds of statements, participants in focus groups respond with indifference at best, and outright disbelief at worst, looking up from their mindbogglingly wordy ‘stimulus’ to say plaintively ‘I just don’t get it, this is all just words’.
Perhaps, voter distrust in general, and their allergy to big visions in particular, affords Labour an opportunity to heed Hopi Sen’s advice and ‘think small’ – avoiding the oversell of big claims in favour of a few, intuitive and clearly workable policies that say what the party’s all about. Labour’s recent focus on the failure of the economic recovery to impact on people’s cost of living has real potential (and, as James Morris has suggested, is territory where we have strength relative to the Tories). As BritainThinks’ article sets out, the energy bills freeze is a bit small, a bit short term, but as part of a suite of policies that speak directly to the cost of living it has the potential to communicate the type of political vision that voters can buy into. The challenge is, first, to keep the focus on the tangible cost of living, not on the more conceptual idea of ‘a good recovery’; and, second, to avoid straying into the fuzzy values-driven language that swing voters expect of politicians: ‘a recovery for all’ … ‘A recovery shared by all’ … ‘A recovery fair for all’ … ‘A British recovery, fair for all’ … A recovery based on the great British values of blah blah blah …
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Ben Shimshon is co-founder and director of BritainThinks. He tweets @BenShimshon