Attention, Please!

The dramatic recall of Parliament was the right thing to do. It was also an example of good strategy in a political landscape where attention matters as much as message.

The first Saturday sitting of Parliament in decades felt dramatic. It was sudden and striking. It was an emergency. It was interesting.

The recall of Parliament in order to save the British steel industry was essential for our security and future prosperity. It was also a model for how we can communicate to combat populists and nationalists in an age where their performative politics drowns out those of us focussed on the serious and difficult work of policy change.

Throughout my time as a political strategist the job centred around the importance of message discipline. It was a sound approach. Afterall, the more a message is repeated the more likely it was to be heard by voters. Message consistency avoided stories about splits. It helped to control the debate and define the political choices offered to voters.

However, when that approach was developed the battle was for space in the linear broadcasts and print media where people already were in large numbers. Today, with such fragmented media consumption, the challenge is as much about being noticed at all. In the new Labour era we were competing with whatever was written or broadcast that day in Britain. As political communicators we’re now competing against every piece of content ever produced in the history of humankind. Our smartphone video feeds have news items from the last couple of days but also clips from movies, TV shows, podcasters content creators from any time in the past and any part of the world.

The “everything, everywhere, every time” approach we took at the General Election was successful in ensuring that we were communicating in volume wherever voters were in this distributed media landscape. In the wake of their defeat by Trump, the Democrats are debating a similar approach, for example asking why they weren’t on Joe Rogan’s podcast as Trump was.

However, the response to the more confused media environment can’t just be about quantity, the quality of our engagement as progressives also has to change too. Being a present in non-traditional spaces isn’t enough, we have to be truly compelling when we’re there. Cut-through now matters as much as consistency.

Good political communication now relies on the skill of what Ezra Kline calls being “attentionally rich.” If we’re going to overcome populism and secure a future of our liberal democracy, we won’t do it with a strategic understanding that was learned from a world that existed a quarter of a century ago but which is now long-gone.

I have been very much part of the problem here. For years I ran political campaigns. An issue would emerge that we knew voters were deeply concerned about and we’d have an internal conversation about what to say about it. We would want to mirror public anger but too often the language that would emerge from strategy meetings was insipid, bloodless and overly-cautious. The intent was to find language and interventions that connected, the outcome was to create further distance between politics and citizens. Why did this happen?

Our traditional instincts were that using authentic, emotionally honest language, was risky. Colourful language or bold statements would create controversy and invite ‘process stories’ where off-the-record sources would question the wisdom of what was said. A couple of ‘insider’ quotes later, and you’re officially in a row. Days later it’s the dreaded ‘dripping roast’. The thought of a difficult morning media round or a Sunday interview under pressure about internal divisions encouraged political communicators to be risk-adverse. And boring.

Today, if such ‘process stories’ are the cost of cutting through, they are absolutely a price worth paying for reaching voters who otherwise will be totally unaware of who we are, what we care about, or what action we are taking as a government.

When Parliament was recalled, like all MPs, my phone buzzed from journalists looking for grumpy quotes about having return from family time. A sprinkling of such stories appeared but they simply didn’t matter compared to the dramatic moment that dominated the national conversation. It was both important and interesting.

While we shouldn’t learn any policy lessons from populists, we must learn communications lessons from them. They are adept at dominating the conversation. They lack a coherent policy agenda but loose emotional threads are woven through through the moments of attention they create. Over time they create the connection that the safe and sober approach of progressives yearns for, but often misses.

It’s frustrating that populists don’t suffer from the day-to-day analysis of their inconsistencies in the media. They don’t pay a price for this because they value the currency of attention over the currency of credibility.

Trump never built that wall, he simply announced it over and over again, said awful things that were distasteful to the anti-racist establishment, and created conflict that dominated the national conversation. By the traditional rules of politics , he should have been toast, but when the dust settled on the constant rows there was left behind a feeling that he was fighting for a particular group of people and against outsiders. He was literally programming, generating moments that created viewer attention.

Progressives often complain that they we are judged by different rules from populists, but the truth is that we’re choosing to play a different game - and too often it is a losing one.

Here’s the hardest part for us to internalise. Even negative attention can be strategically useful if it denies the currency of attention from your opponents. Attention for the purposes of persuasion is preferable, of course, but persuasion without attention might actually be less useful than negative attention.

This is why our populist opponents troll us – they are setting an attention trap for us. This is why Musk doesn’t care that he’s lost billions of the dollar value of Twitter – he understands that attention is a more valuable currency. Populists place attention at the centre of their strategy. So must we. Our aim is obviously not the destructive controversy of Trump or Farage but strategic controversy that grabs attention.

In truth, I’m not sure what the practical response to all of this is. Indeed, I suspect there isn’t a perfect solution. Instead, we’ll have to honestly reassess the deeply embedded communications behaviours that are now outdated. We’ll have to experiment, take risks, pick fights, and surprise people. We’ll need to surprise ourselves.

A starter-for-ten from me would be to work around three principles:

1. Attention First.

The question of how to control the resource of attention should be the first question in any political strategy meeting. Being interesting as we say something is as important as what we say. Without attention it doesn’t matter what we say because without it we simply won’t be heard at all. Without attention others more adept at being interesting, the shameless opportunists, will fill the space. While other competitors focus on attention as their only priority, we risk being left chasing an ever-smaller group of voters with traditional media consumption habits because we don’t prioritise it enough.

The difference between us and the populists is that we care about more than just attention. We do need to dominate the market for attention though. Those of us who spent a decade entirely squeezed out of the attention marketplace in Scotland know how politically debilitating it is to be ignored. Being squeezed out of people’s attention is far worse than being unpopular.

Message consistency matters, but the larger story we tell about ourselves will only emerge from the plotlines of moments of attention. In policy and message terms, yesterday’s drama sat alongside raising the minimum wage, abolishing bad employment practices like zero hours contracts, or making sure that the super wealthy can’t use tax avoidance loopholes. However, do voters know we’ve done those things? Were they attached to sufficiently interesting moments of attention?

2. Conflict Cuts Through.

I’ve written at length about this before so I won’t labour the point. In summary: to persuade we need attention; to get attention we need to get through the algorithm; to get through the algorithm we need to be interesting; and conflict is interesting. The importance of picking an enemy or group of villains to fight with cannot be overstated. Despite conflict being at a premium Labour now has fewer clear villains in our story than perhaps at any time in our history. Even super-centrist Tony Blair, who was obsessed with reassuring voters and de-risking Labour, had ‘fat cats’, ‘bad dads’, ‘old Labour dinosaurs’ and ‘the forces of conservativism.’

Drama needs antagonists. Yesterday’s recall had a corporate villain, and a Chinese Communist Party one at that. Jonathan Reynolds clearly defined against those killing British Steel and it made the moment all the more interesting.

3. Create Community.

Opponents matter because they create a sense of community and connection. The mirror opposite of our villains are the values of a community who we are fighting for. Yesterday, Reynold’s obvious ire at the industrial vandalism by the steelworks owners made his concern for the workers all the more authentic.

Across the Atlantic Mark Carney’s transformation of the fortunes of the Liberals in Canada has benefitted from the presence of truly great villain: an overbearing US President who is threatening annexation of his neighbours. However, Carney is also using those dramatic moments of conflict against Trump to positively define who he is for. Consider this passage from his leadership acceptance speech:

The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. Think about that. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life. In America, health care is a big business. In Canada, it's a right. America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic. In the United States, they don't recognize differences. They don't recognize First Nations. And there will never be the right to the French language. The joy of living, culture and the French language are part of our identity. We must protect them, we must promote them.

We will never, ever trade them for any trade agreement! America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape or form.

Populists use conflict to divide. Progressives must use it to create community. This is about strategic discipline not just political philosophy. If moments of conflict are only about defining against our opponents in negative terms we risk amplifying their moments of attention rather than creating our own. We need to be proactive in support of a defined community we create, not simply reactive in response to identities others create or exploit.

The recall of Parliament, the effort to save British Steel, was a significant moment in the fight against the in-roads Reform has made with working class voters. But it worked as a moment of attention because it wasn’t understood as being motivated by political calculations. Indeed, Reform were almost entirely absent from Reynold’s messaging all day. As a Secretary of State he was utterly focussed on saving steel jobs, as a political communicator he understands we won’t win the battle for attention by amplifying our opponents.

The great advantage of being in government is the ability to act in a bold way which commands attention. We can choose action where others have only words.

More days like yesterday, please.