Homage to Caledonia
Last week I wrote that the Conservative victory meant the starting gun had been fired on a Labour leadership election campaign. Of course, it also signalled the beginning of another, much longer campaign: the one that will culminate in a referendum on Britain’s future in Europe. A Tory majority means that the referendum is now a certainty – at least by 2017, but recent reports suggest it could take place as soon as next year.
For those of us who passionately believe that the UK should remain in the EU, work on that campaign has to start straight away. The Eurosceptics who have been calling for a vote on our future in Europe have been preparing for this for most, if not all, of their political careers. The pro-Europe campaign cannot afford to be out of the debate for a moment.
With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about what we can learn from last year’s referendum in Scotland.
A few caveats first. One: no two votes are ever the same, and it can be pretty crude to say that just because one particular strategy worked (or didn’t work) in the past, then it will definitely work (or not) this time round. Two: what I’m about to write almost suggests that the No campaign in Scotland lost. I know that it didn’t, but for those of us who want the Union to continue, the result was uncomfortably close – and we should think about why that was, in order to aim for a much more decisive result in any EU referendum. Three: I am only talking about communication and messaging here, not content. The European Union is clearly in need of reform, and we need to have a serious and informed discussion about what that reform looks like – but that’s for another blog.
Having got all of those out of the way, I do think there are four fundamental elements of the Scottish referendum that can and should be applied to Europe, in principle at least.
First is the critical importance of running a positive campaign. If we want to build support for the UK’s place in Europe, then we have to do it by selling the benefits of staying in – not scaremongering about the perils of leaving. One of the most frustrating things about the ‘Better Together’ campaign was that too often its name was the only positive thing about it. A lot of the time, a more accurate brand would have been ‘Worse Apart’. Don’t get me wrong – there is a place in a referendum campaign for making sure people are aware of the risks of voting against your position, but that place is towards the end of the campaign, after you have cemented in people’s minds the positive, hopeful story that you have been telling for the last year or more. People need to be sold on the ‘why’ before you can effectively explain to them ‘why not’. If you start the other way around, you are basically telling people that their inclination to vote against you is ignorant or wilfully stupid, neither of which is a particularly endearing message.
Secondly, it is easier to run a positive campaign if you have been able to frame the question in your favour. One of the greatest feats Alex Salmond achieved long before the referendum ever took place was to secure ownership of the word ‘yes’. He ensured that the question was asked in such a way that his answers to it were always affirmative, positive, hopeful. Arguing against him was always going to be an uphill struggle from there. The pro-Europe campaign should do all that it can to make sure that the question on the ballot paper is “should we stay in Europe?” and not “should we leave?”
Thirdly, for a positive campaign to work it needs to be focused on people first and foremost. A lot of the arguments that are currently made in favour of staying in Europe are conducted at a structural, macro-economic level. The European Union is the largest trading bloc in the world. It gives businesses access to 500 million customers. Three million British jobs rely on us being in the EU. Those things are all true, and important – but they do not connect with people. I can’t picture what 500 million people look like, nor really envisage what it means to be part of a larger or smaller trading bloc. Three million jobs might well rely on our EU membership, but what most people will want to know is if that includes their job or not. So we should talk to people in human, personal terms. The car manufacturer that you work for chose to expand last year, and hire you, because they can sell their cars to French, Dutch and German families. You can make a last minute decision to go on holiday to Spain, armed with nothing more than a passport, because we are part of the European Union. Those are the kind of messages that will resonate with people.
Fourthly, as with all campaigns, we need to bring in different voices to help make the case. I live in Brussels, and work for a Member of the European Parliament. I’m probably pretty likely to say I think staying in the EU is a good idea, and my powers of persuasion are going to be limited by that. So we should be seeking out unusual voices, and people from other sectors whom you might not expect to be pro-European – from the financial sector, from industry, from civil society, from academia and beyond. In particular, this is where business comes in. Business came very late to the party in Scotland, but when organisations like the CBI did begin to argue in favour of the Union then it made an enormous difference. If British business leaders genuinely want us to remain in Europe, then they should begin saying that now, and saying it loud. They should shrug off a fear of being seen as overly political, and start making the case – to the media, to the general public, but crucially to their own staff – for continued membership of the EU.
None of these four things are easy to do – especially in the face of a well-established, articulate campaign fighting for us to leave – but I don’t see how it is possible to win without doing them. I think the hardest of all is translating our membership of a union of 28 countries and half a billion people into something meaningful and deeply personal to people in the UK, but it is also without a doubt the most important.
Finally, in the interests of balance, there is also one lesson that I think we should not learn from Scotland, and where we should instead do precisely the opposite. With the timing of the referendum still currently unknown, I would argue that it has to take place in spring, not autumn. Turnouts in UK elections are not much to boast about at the moment, and a low turnout referendum will serve the Eurosceptics much better than those who want to stay in (highly motivated ‘outs’ are more likely to go to the polls than people who are just broadly comfortable with the status quo). While the turnout in Scotland was very high last September, I find it hard to believe that the same would be true in a European referendum. However, if the question is on the ballot paper at the same time as next year’s elections for the Scottish and Welsh national assemblies, for the next London mayor and for councils across England, then people will be heading out to vote anyway. And – cynically – they will be voting in the two devolved nations and the capital city where pro-European sentiment is at its highest. It seems too good an opportunity to miss.
If I am right about that, and if someone with power over when these things happen agrees with me, then we’ve got less than a year to run and win the campaign. Time to get cracking.
Where do we go from here?
After the events of the last few days, I feel compelled to write my thoughts down. Not because I imagine for a moment that anyone will particularly want to read them, nor necessarily that they will add anything to what I imagine will be the millions and millions of words written over the next few days, weeks and months about the future of the Labour party. But because my mind is swimming with a number of confusing thoughts at the moment, and getting them down on paper seems like as good a way as any to try to make sense of them.
The starting gun has already been fired on the next leadership race; I suppose you could argue it was from the moment that shocking exit poll came in – or if not precisely at that point, then certainly a few hours later as it became obvious that the poll was right.
I don’t want to say now who I think would be best to lead the party, nor point the finger at whatever I perceive to be the mistakes of Ed Miliband, his team and the election campaign. Instead, I just want to get down a few thoughts on where we go from here, and how we should conduct ourselves.
Early on Friday morning, Rafael Behr had an article in the Guardian setting out one of the key challenges that Ed Miliband faced in his time in office, and that the next leader will face again, probably to an even more acute degree: whether the Labour party is not in power because it has lost sight of its core values and been outflanked to the left by the likes of the Scottish National Party, or whether the problem lies in having vacated the centre ground and seen it occupied instead by the Conservatives. Behr suggests that Miliband tried to split the difference between the two and ended up pleasing no one.
Behr is too good a journalist and too sophisticated a political analyst to suggest that the choice is really as crude as picking between a “retreat to the unelectable comfort ground of the left” and an “unprincipled rush to appease Middle England” as critics of either approach will typify them. But what worries me is that the choice will increasingly be painted in such terms as the leadership debate takes place over the coming weeks.
There will be a candidate of the left, unfairly criticised as being in the pockets of the unions. There will be a candidate of the right, lazily branded as ‘Blairite’ for wanting to win over those who voted Conservative this time around. Battle lines will be drawn; factions will be formed. Twitter will become the public arena in which this red-on-red warfare will be conducted. Tories will (rightly) rub their hands with glee and get on with implementing their first 100 days of a majority government safe in the knowledge that the opposition is barely looking.
The problem with us characterising leadership candidates as ‘left’ or ‘right’, and assessing them based on which particular demographic groups they would aim to attract, is that we are jumping straight past strategy and on to tactics. You shouldn’t be picking a target audience, much less a communications plan, until you have a clear understanding of two essential precursors: your values and your vision.
That’s what I will be looking for from anybody who wants my vote to lead the Labour party. What are their values? How do they articulate them, and how do they practise them? Stemming from those values, what is their vision for the country? What is their vision for the Labour party?
When I worked at Shelter, one of the most impressive things about the organisation was that you could ask anyone in the building – anyone, from the fundraising team to the finance team, from the solicitors providing frontline advice to the graphic designers producing leaflets and posters – and they could all tell you the charity’s stated vision. That is no mean feat, and it is the kind of thing that Labour should seek to emulate.
Because if we get that right, then the other debates – about which policies to pursue, and how to articulate them to a sceptical public – become easier to have. We will realise that both ‘left’ and ‘right’ are correct in certain things. ‘Winning an election’ cannot be an objective in its own right because it is meaningless (and ultimately unachievable) if you have no idea of what you would do after you’d won it. But any lofty set of political goals that don’t include the pretty central milestone ‘then win the election’ aren’t going to be much cop either.
In fact, I think that what we will find is that if someone in this leadership campaign sets out a vision for the future, and a set of values that they hold dear, then it will be possible to satisfy both the left and the right of the party. And mostly because we will realise that those labels are at best only partial and at worst meaningless.
People across the country are able to hold certain views that could be characterised as left and others that can be seen as right simultaneously. Someone who is concerned about the state dictating the minutiae of what their children learn at school can at the same time want to see government step in and nationalise the railways. They manage to believe both things at the same time without their heads exploding.
Why can’t the same be true of a party? There will be areas of policy in which the way to demonstrate our values and achieve our vision will be to propose something that instinctively appeals to the kind of voters who thought the SNP and Greens were a better bet this time around. There will be others where the best route to achieving the vision is by doing something that those who waver between voting Conservative (or UKIP) and Labour will be attracted by.
This might seem naïve, or at least overly optimistic. I don’t think it needs to be. But it will require all of us as Labour members to heed the advice that Ed Miliband gave in his resignation speech and conduct the leadership election with the same sense of dignity and unity that the election campaign was conducted.
And as well as Ed Miliband’s speech, we could also learn a lot from the incredibly moving final speech that Nick Clegg gave as Liberal Democrat leader. I don’t agree with everything that Clegg puts forward, but I can respect what was an intellectually coherent, ambitious and heartfelt attempt to define what it means to be a liberal in the early 21st century.
The candidate who can set out in the same way what it means to be a social democrat at this dark time will get my vote, irrespective of the background they come from or the supposed ‘faction’ they represent.
the unfinished article 
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