Stories are important. They’re what I do for my day job; when I’m not writing them, or script-editing them, I’m pulling them apart to see how they work. Stories are how people understand the world. They give people a sense of morality, the concept of romance, the idea that things always happen for a logical reason. They might not be true – real life is poorly plotted, full of clunky dialogue and implausible coincidences – but if a story is strong enough, and told well enough, it can be very powerful.
But if you use the word ‘story’ it sounds like you’re making stuff up, so let’s use different terminology. Let’s call it ‘forming the political narrative’. It’s precisely the same thing. It uses all the same tools and produces all the same effects. People aren’t won over by arguments or statistics, not really, but they will happily buy into a convincing story.
It’s important to realise this, because the Conservatives are very good at this. Sometimes it seems they’re more interested in the story than the reality. You only have to look at how they turned the narrative of ‘Oh God, what have the banks done?’ into ‘Labour maxed out the nation’s credit card’ to see how it works. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to have a quality known as ‘truthiness’.
This is what the United Kingdom Independence party and the Scottish National party are doing too. The thing about ‘truthiness’, though, is that it’s a narrative trick. It’s a way of covering up gaps in your logic. If your story doesn’t make complete sense – and good stories very rarely do – one way of disguising it is to have a character say ‘Of course!’ and then launch into an explanation of something else. It doesn’t have to link up to the bit that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t have to address the problem, it just has to fill a gap – an explanation is needed, so here’s an explanation! — and make it look like the person telling the story knows what they’re doing. If the person telling the story can give the impression that it all makes sense, the audience will go with it. They won’t worry about the plot hole. Politicians do it all the time – avoiding answering a difficult question by answering a much easier, one. Worried about the NHS? Of course! The answer is leaving the European Union. Worried about youth unemployment? Of course! The answer is Scottish independence! The fact that the answer doesn’t join up with the question – that there isn’t even a dotted line with an arrow between them – doesn’t seem to matter a great deal. You just need to say ‘Of course!’ at the beginning and offer ‘truthiness’.
The reason why it’s relevant now is that, right now, the Conservatives are trying to create the narrative for this government. Let’s take the current junior doctors’ dispute as an example. The government’s position seems bizarre, arbitrary and counterproductive – until you realise that it is all about the narrative. What the Conservatives want to do is to go into the next election saying, ‘We promised you a seven-day NHS – and we have delivered a seven-day NHS, despite resistance from the Labour party and militant leftwing doctors’ unions!’ They are banking on the fact that by 2020, nobody will really remember the ins and outs of the dispute and that the media won’t remind them. They will just remember that the doctors went on strike about a seven-day NHS. The fact that there is already a seven-day NHS is irrelevant; what is important is that the Conservatives give the impression that they have brought in a seven-day NHS in the face of overwhelming opposition. Truthiness.
And when you realise that, suddenly their behaviour makes sense. It doesn’t even matter whether or not they impose the new pay conditions or back down. There just needs to have been some show of resistance, something that will provide news footage of union members with placards so they can go, ‘Look, these are the nasty people who didn’t want you to have a seven-day NHS! Aren’t you glad we didn’t let them have their way?’
Telling stories works. They engage people. They stick in the mind and resonate and grow, whether they are true, half-true or complete lies. And it’s the fact that stories are so powerful that gives me hope for Labour.
You see, on the one hand, Labour doesn’t seem to be trying to create a narrative at all. It is, at best, shambling along from crisis to crisis like Unlucky Alf from The Fast Show and, at worst, trying to bury itself in its own coffin (you can never hammer the nails into the lid from the inside, though, I’ve tried). It’s largely passive, reacting to each event that pops out of the news cycle, letting the Conservatives control the agenda and get in the last word.
To win Labour needs to do two things. First, it needs to undermine the Conservatives’ story, and the way to do that is the way you ruin any story – by pointing out plot holes, pointing out gaps in the logic, by highlighting the cynically manipulative attempt to manufacture a narrative, and most of all, by giving away spoilers. Nothing destroys a story like somebody pointing out the storytelling mechanics and predicting what’s going to happen next. Labour has to be the guy sitting behind you at the cinema who says to watch the next bit closely because you’ll see that Bruce Willis is actually killed.
And second, it needs to offer a better story, it needs to create a compelling narrative of its own, and it needs a leader who is the hero of the narrative. Right now it’s not clear what Labour’s story for this parliament is. The Tories have already written what they hope to be its closing chapters – can Labour come up with something so compelling that voters switch over?
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Jonathan Morris writes for Doctor Who Magazine and is a candidate in the local elections. He tweets @jonnymorris1973
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