The Labour needs an effective story to start winning again

In the last four British elections whatever the Labour Party was selling, the UK wasn’t buying. Be it centrist Gordon Brown, soft-left Ed Miliband or radical left Jeremy Corbyn, the British electorate wasn’t interested.

Whatever Labour tries it doesn’t work. They have policies, media plans, electoral strategies, but it doesn’t all come together. There’s been something crucial lacking: a story. A story that Labour can tell that ties up all their ideas and policies into a vision for the future that the voters can get behind.

Both Miliband and Corbyn tried to tell stories about where the country had gone wrong under Tory rule, but these failed to capture the public’s imagination. Both had popular policies, but the story that united them into a vision was lacking. Now that Labour has a new leader, Keir Starmer, the party needs to think about the story it’s going to tell.

Where stories are needed

A good place to start looking for a new story is the two debates of the last few years where Labour’s lack of an effective story has had the most severe impact: Brexit in England and Independence in Scotland.

Brexit and Scottish Independence have been a pox on Labour’s house. They cut across Labour’s voting coalition and have divided the party. This is because the stories that are being told on either side of these great divides don’t mesh with the stories that Labour is telling. The stories of Brexit and Scottish Independence concern national identity, a subject that Labour is not comfortable telling stories about. Labour is much more comfortable telling stories about class or social justice than national identity.

Stories and national identity

National identity is the story of the nation itself. The story of the USA is that it was created in a revolution to give its citizens life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What actually happened in American history is something else, but that doesn’t stop the story of America being a great story. One that has made America, for better or worse, the world’s flagship democracy. This story is deeply embedded in American culture, seen in media as diverse as The West Wing and An American Tale.

Other countries have stories bound up in their nation’s identity. The story of Israel is that it’s the promised land of the Jewish people as laid out in the Tora and the Old Testament and that after the Holocaust, it’s the only place where Jews can be safe. Britain and Scotland have stories behind their national identity too, which I’ll come back to.

Stories of national identity and political campaigns

The story a political party or movement is telling to win over voters needs to work with the story of the nation. Brexit works well as a political story. It’s the story that says: the country is being stolen from the good, honest citizens by a nefarious elite for their own enrichment. Again, whether it’s true or not is immaterial. It’s a great story, which people believe, and it inspires them to vote a certain way.

The story that Scottish Independence is telling is that Scotland is held back, or ground down, by being a part of Great Britain. You can interpret this story in a number of ways. You can believe that Britain is too conservative, or that Britain wants to keep Scotland at heel out of spite, or any other reason why attaching Scotland to Britain (mainly England) is bad for Scotland. What’s important is that the story tells of how much better Scotland would be if it were an independent country.

You can argue about the evidence to back up this story, which is that the independence campaign was on one level. However, it is undeniably a compelling story about Scotland that motivates people to vote for independence.

Political campaigns and counter narratives

Political campaigns are stories. Remain and Leave are both stories about Britain. Yes or No to independence are stories about Scotland. For a story to win an election there are two things to avoid.

The first is the counter-narrative to your campaign’s story that can neutralise it. For the Scottish Independence, it was a story of how much better Scotland is off in the union. The story is about the money that comes to Scotland for being part of the world’s fifth largest economy. The Scottish Tories push this counter-narrative the most. Scottish Labour has struggled to tell this story as many Labour activists don’t want to be telling the same story as the Conservatives.

Contradictions to political stories

The second factor that can cause the narrative of a political campaign to become unstuck is anything that can contradict the story that you are telling. For Scottish Independence this was anything that showed that Scotland was not a viable nation outside Britain, such as disputes on whether an independent Scotland could use the Pound or could produce its own currency.

These contradictions can be more damaging than an effective counter-narrative as they lead voters to stop believing in your story. This is why the Scottish Independence referendum became an argument over the facts that support the independence story, because if they didn’t and instead contradicted the story, then the story loses its power.

Lessons from the Scottish Independence campaign

Labour got what it wanted out of the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum because of the interplay of these two factors. The story of Scottish Independence had too many contradictions. Boring stuff such as currency arrangements undermined the story the pro-Scottish Independence side was telling.

At the same time, Gordon Brown was able to lay out the counter-narrative. He was the only British politician who could tell this counter-narrative without adding to an element of the pro-independence narrative that all British political parties are the same in wanting to keep Scotland shackled to Britain.

These two factors coming together may not happen again. If Labour are committed to keeping Scotland in the Union, then they need to come up with their own counter-narrative to that of independence. The only alternative is to use the same counter-narrative as the Scottish Tories, which only fuels the independence narrative.

The left and stories of national identity

The counter-narrative to Scottish Independence that Labour need to develop (to either win seats in Scotland again or prevent Scotland leaving the Union) needs to factor in Scottish national identity. Labour also needs a story about British (or maybe English) national identity. Labour have no effective counter-narrative to Brexit and no way of contradicting the story of Brexit, which is why Brexit won the 2016 referendum and has divided Labour’s electoral coalition since.

Labour (or the left more broadly) need to tell a story about British national identity if we’re going to start winning again. Tony Blair, for all his faults, was able to tell a story about how Britain was casting off the shackles of the past 18 years. No longer will crusty old Tories be in charge. Britain was becoming a young, energetic, dynamic nation. It helped that Brit Pop and ‘Cool Britainnia’ was happening at the same time.

Critiques of stories about national identity

On the left, we have many critiques of the story of Britain. We’re good at pointing out how the British Empire was founded on imperialism, racism and exploitation. We’re also good at saying that nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist as we collectively remember it is holding us back from tackling the challenges of the 21st century.

Now don’t get me wrong. These critiques are important. They can be used to contradict political narratives or build counter-narratives. They are also important in recognising that reality is more complicated than a story, which mustn’t be lost sight of. However, the left needs to tell a story about national identity that is different to that of the populist right, or stories about national identity will be used as a weapon against us.

The left is uncomfortable about telling stories about national identity

The left feels uncomfortable about telling stories about national identity. We prefer stories about groups of people and not nations. Stories about groups of people (bound by class, region, culture, race, religion, sexuality identity, age or anything else) are important and should not be neglected. Again, they will inform the counter-narrative to the populist right that must be laid out.

Nations are made up of groups of people and we need to find a story that means all the people of Britain can live together. Most people in Britain identify with the nation and its story, not just the disaffected white old people who voted for Brexit, so the left needs to find a way to tell a story about national identity.

Labour needs to find its story

When faced with the narrative of Brexit, Labour wasn’t part of the counter-narrative - that Brexit is a bad idea and that it’s good to be in the EU - and Labour were unable to contradict the Brexit narrative. However, Labour were not telling the Brexit story and thus the Tories were able to use this story - that disconnected politicians were trying to thwart the will of the people - to convince over enough voters to win the 2019 general election.

The problem that faced Labour was that the stories of Brexit and Scottish Independence split the Labour coalition. Labour was unable to choose a side between the narrative and counter-narrative for either, and have been caught in the middle of it.

Labour doesn’t need to tell the Brexit story, but it does need to find a way to contradict it or lay out a counter-narrative to start winning again. The same is true for Scottish Independence. Contradicting a story about something as nebulous as the future of a nation is difficult, so Labour need a counter-narrative. This counter-narrative will have to involve a story about national identity.

Brexit has happened and a second Scottish Independence referendum looks unlikely during the coronavirus outbreak, but Labour still lacks a story they can tell to convince the voters to buy what Labour is selling. A story about national identity. Unless Keir Starmer can come up with an effective story that includes British and Scottish national identity then he too will lose elections as his three predecessors did.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.