Let's Fix Britain

Why I think this should be Labour's slogan for the next General Election

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Policy is important. It will be what ultimately changes the country. Labour must have the right policies to govern and change the country for the better. Policy is what politics is for. But it is not really what politicians do. Most politicians don’t develop policy but advocate for it. Most policy is developed outside of MPs’ offices by experts - civil servants working out how to enact government wishes, think tanks taking thorny issues and coming up with solutions, campaigning and pressure groups working out how their agenda could be enacted and advanced through legislation.

Politics is about communicating policy priorities and arguing for your case over your opponents. It is about taking a core set of beliefs and enacting them in policy but also articulating them to ensure mass consent.

This too happens at different levels. Parties - because they are largely made up of people who care more about politics than the average citizen - will wrangle for ages over the wording in a manifesto. Pressure groups will spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to ensure parties commit promises to the electorate in these documents. Journalists pour over these to disect the nuance, differentiation, wiggle room and pitfalls.

The public though, don’t read them.

The public pick up on the general thrust of a campaign and add this to their prior impression. (One of the reasons that Labour has been so focused on sorting out its own house under Starmer, while letting the Tories visibly implode and tear themselves to pieces in the process, is to ensure that those priors are about stability and competence rather than the mess the party presented to the public previously.)

There may be some policies that break through. But if they do, it’s more often than not in a negative way. Think about ‘Labour’s tax bombshell’ in 1992 or May’s ‘Dementia tax’ in 2017. But overall, very few people are single issue voters and very few will be swayed by one policy. Few voters sit down with the manifestos of each party and conscientiously go through each of them deciding which policy platform they believe to be best and absolutely no human could ever do so without going into that process with a certain amount of preconception.

This is what we have always really known about politics. Whether we call it ‘heart vs head’ or ‘vibes’ or ‘framing’ we have long known that politics is a topline messaging business.

This is why three-word slogans are powerful. They aren’t everything. With nothing behind them, they are just words. But if they can truly encapsulate a moment, they can live long beyond that. They can be the start of a movement. Think ‘Yes We Can’ or "‘Take Back Control’. They hit the spot perfectly. They give you a real sense of what the campaign is about on a conceptual level. A level deeper and more visceral than the policy detail can.

I think that Labour should fight the next election with the slogan Let’s Fix Britain.

LET’S Fix Britain

Let’s is an inclusive word. It offers a vision of government and people working in harmony that is completely missing from anything we have seen from the Tories since they stopped pretending they cared particularly about the ‘big society’ rather than high society. It speaks to the notion I have come back to frequently of government as a convenor of society - a broker of partnerships that work between the state and private sectors. A state that underpins and enables our security and gives us the tools and confidence to achieve our ambitions.

Let’s is also an activating word. It is dynamic. It implies change and movement and impetus. It’s a word used in cheerleading (“Let’s Go Westerberg!”) or peroration (“Let’s pray”). Even in examples where it might be followed by a negative word (“Let’s surrender”) it is still a word of shared action and agency.

While Labour’s current slogan of a Fairer Greener Britain is a nice final destination, Labour needs to have slogan with more dynamism. Fixing Britiain comes with a sense of promised action that will lead to the desired outcome of a fairer and greener country.

Let’s FIX Britain

There is an all pervasive sense that nothing works at the moment. We have gone from a sense of being on the brink of this to this very quickly becoming the new normal. Nothing works as it should. We no longer expect it to. Day-to-day things that we wouldn’t have expected or accepted a few years ago are now a norm. This is most obvious and headline grabbing when it comes to public services, but it’s much more pervasive than that. We can’t find everyday items in supermarkets and we no longer find that weird. Normal things like butter cost a bloody fortune when we can get hold of them. We don’t really notice rail strikes all that much because we don’t expect a decent or reliable service on the railways.

A great deal of this is the fault of choices made by the Tories over the last 13 years. Some directly - the paring back of public services until they have collapsed under the strain. Some indirectly - junking of regulation that would hold the private sector to account and protect consumers so we have fewer rights and recourses for bad service from an increasingly fragmented corporate web.

Labour has to speak to this sense of despair that the Tories have left us in. But they must also make it clear that they offer an alternative. They must be seen to be ready with solutions - not simply pointing out the problems and rightly putting the blame where it belongs. Their attitude must be one of being ready to work; ready to take action that will stauch the multiple crises we find ourselves in from day one. This is what Starmer is symbolically displaying when he makes speeches with his shirt sleeves rolled up. That readiness for Labour to get in and start to clean up the mess.

Let’s Fix Britain

Britain is broken. But Labour must be wary of only being perceived as having permission to come in and clean up the Tories mess. Our systems are not fit for the 21st century. There will need to be fundamental changes to the way government work - by devolving power and responsibility while providing regulatory frameworks that offer national guarantees. In offering to fix Britain, Labour can speak to the moment of crisis while also offering much longer, deeper and more fundamental change. But do so positively and without scaring either those who rely on the state who need better but fear change or those who are simply small ‘c’ conservative in their approach to change (however much they might personally benefit or see those they love doing so).

As much as we expect this to be a change election, that doesn’t mean it is a revolutionary one. Change has to have widespread permission and to do so it has to be presented as unscary. I’ve written before about how I think Starmer is handing this particular tightrope well. Using the word fix can offer a sense of returning to some semblance of normalcy for those who desire it while also offering space for change.

LET’S FIX BRITAIN

‘Let’s Fix Britain’ goes beyond our immediate problems. It creates a permission structure for change as broad as ‘Take Back Control’ did for Brexiteers, as inclusive as ‘Yes We Can’ was for Democrats, as Tory definining and as ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. It is a positive slogan of hope that also implicitly pushes the understanding of just how bad things are now.

A slogan alone will not win the next election. But thinking from here to then about what we want the framing of everything Labour does and says in simple primary colours terms is an essential part of allowing us the space and permission to be the party of government able to do the more complex work.

As such, while I am offering Let’s Fix Britain as a slogan for the general election, I also believe it could and should also be the frame through which all party communications are seen.

Say a little thank you!

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I run a political and communications consultancy called Political Human. Please get in touch if you are looking for political or media consultancy advice, strategic communication and campaign planning, ghostwriting, copywriting, editing, training or coaching.

You can read some lovely things that some of my clients have said here.

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What I’ve been up to

I’ve been really enjoying rebooting House of Comments with the excellent Charlotte Henry. You can sign up by searching for us wherever you get your podcasts. The last edition, discussion anti-strike legislation and the disgraceful Andrew Bridgen is here.

I was also on GB News discussing (among other things) the anti-strike legislation

GB News @GBNEWS

'Minimum services? Absolutely! You first, Rishi Sunak.' @EmmaBurnell_ strikes back at the Prime Minister as the Government proposes new legislation on minimum service levels during strikes.

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Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that no longer hosts Donald Trump. I’m at emmaburnell@gmail.com or on Twitter (far too often) at @EmmaBurnell_