Labour's Story Has a New Villain

Musk's declaration of war on the Labour Party, and Badenoch's foolish embrace of Trumpism is an opportunity for a new compelling story.

The Prime Minister had one of his best days on Monday. When the Prime Minister’s personal commitment to justice and order is challenged, as happened during the far-right riots in the summer, a passion, that is sometimes not obvious in a man who takes public service very seriously, comes to the surface. That passion resurfaced when he reacted to Elon Musk’s outrageous and dangerous exploitation of the sickening child abuse by Pakistani heritage grooming gangs.

This week should be the start of a new story for the Government that offers an alternative to the dangerous, but powerful narratives of the populist right.

People are more moved to action by information presented in the form of a story. For example, we could simply tell our children about not trusting strangers or about eating things they don’t know the source of, but lessons are more deeply embedded when presented in a narrative of big bad wolves and witches.

I have been thinking a lot about how the left and the populist right approach the job of narrative development from opposite ends of the process.

Political stories, like fairy tails, can risk being simplistic, dangerous even. Populists, demagogues and authoritarians know the reassuring power of a simplistic story in a world where there is so much to be worried about. They are excellent at narrative while those of us on the centre-left struggle to tell stories. The populist right never let reality get in the way of a good story while we are self-conscious about telling a story that doesn’t reflect the complexity of the real world.

A political story has to offer three things empathy, explanation and escape. Empathy shows understanding of the things that people are worried about. Explanation begins to relieve that worry by offering an analysis of why those problems exist. Escape is the policy response, the change that offers a pathway out of the anxiety people feel.

The populist right excels at demonstrating empathy and offer simplistic, false explanations for the problems in people’s lives. Their weakness is the last part. They aren’t interested in escape, rather they are about exploiting the problem.

Any policy isn’t about removing the problem, indeed if the problem went away then so would their source of power. Think about Donald Trump announcing the building of the wall with Mexico over and over again - but never actually building the wall. The lack of delivery didn’t matter because the purpose of the policy wasn’t actually to secure the border, it was to reinforce the idea that the economic and social problems people faced were the result of a group of outside invaders.

The policy is often there to camouflage a hidden agenda, because they know most people won’t support appeals to racism, the greater accumulation of wealth by oligarchs or the replacement of pluralist democracy with a system dominated by a strongman.

Their stories are traps. On the left, we leap on the start and middle of their stories. We criticise the thinness of their policy agenda and the dishonesty of their analysis. In doing so sound like we are also denying the problem that originates the narrative. When they raise awful rape cases as a way to divide communities against each other, we are so angry at the weaponizing the suffering of the victims, or the attempt to paint Muslims as dangerous cultural outsiders, that we forget our visceral anger at the original sexual assaults is not necessarily taken as a given by those watching our exchanges.

When the demagogues are objectionable it is a strategic choice: they are inviting us to appear like we object to the whole of their story, including the legitimate grievances that they are exploiting.

While the populist right offer simple, comforting stories, albeit ones divorced from offering real change, the left have always struggled with storytelling.

We act as if our job is to educate the public, which means we sometimes end up explaining how difficult and complicated change is. We care more about real change than the populist right but our seriousness is mistaken for a lack of empathy. ‘Simplicity’ is often used pejoratively, as a synonym for simplistic, rather than being something to aspire to in our communications.

We also have an instinctive distrust of demagoguery. We are attracted to ideas that bring people together rather than dividing groups against each other. For Labour this is compounded by the historic internal struggle to ensure that our belief in a more equal society can be balanced with the need to build a coalition between the poorest and those in the middle. We are nervous of appeals to class prejudice in case it pulls at the threads of society we need to weave together.

We have to get over this and tell simple, uniting political stories with clear villains. Monday worked for the Prime Minister because there was drama. He was the hero of the story because he had a clear antagonist to overcome.

The danger for Labour at this stage of the electoral cycle is that there has been no antagonist. Kemi Badenoch clearly is not up to the job. She views Reform, not Labour, as the opponent she needs to best. Without a credible opponent Labour risks becoming a target for criticism rather than one of the competing choices available to voters.

If there isn’t someone to box with, you end up as the punching bag. No offence means playing defence.

For whatever reason, the government didn’t grab at the obvious villains offered by the changes to inheritance tax treatment of land. James Dyson is a billionaire who moved his manufacturing overseas after arguing that it is too hard to fire British workers. He reportedly bought up half a billion pounds worth of land to avoid paying inheritance tax – somewhere upwards of £100million. When he attacked the budget, it would have been easy to accept his invitation for a fight. In the absence of that, it was easier to portray the government as being in conflict with small family farms, something with no basis in fact, but which is a more compelling story.

Stories have always needed villains but there is something fundamentally different today. In the social media age clear opponents are an essential to communications strategy. The algorithms reward controversy, so we need to be part of controversy to be seen, and we need to be seen if we are going to persuade and unite. That is a paradox that progressives will need to resolve: a uniting political narrative needs to be clear about who isn’t part of the journey we want to take the country on.

Elon Musk is a villain straight out of central casting. He is a billionaire bully, who is backing the far right around the world, even in Germany for heaven’s sake.

He is also unpopular. The latest YouGov data shows that the unhinged oligarch’s public ratings have tanked as he has become more and more radicalised:

By inserting himself as the antagonist in Labour’s story, Musk has gifted Labour the most powerful evidence that we are on the side of the people and against the unpopular politics of a chaotic elite who are behind a broken system.

Musk is a cipher for a deeply unpopular American President whom Brits, by a margin of four-to-one, wanted to see lose. The need to do business with the US administration means the government can’t easily define against Trump himself, but Musk has literally declared war on the Labour Government. According to the FT this morning, this foreign oligarch is plotting to oust the democratically elected head of the UK government. This is a fight the Government can’t avoid. It’s also a fight they should relish.

Kemi Badenoch, from her first PMQs, has chosen to align herself with the unpopular returning US President. This week she chose to align herself with Musk politically. Her front benchers gushed that the X owner has “saved humanity.” They have picked a side. They did so on an issue redolent of Pizzagate. This week has seen her embrace Trumpism as a political organising idea. That brings with it significant political risks for her leadership, not to mention unpredictable societal risks for all of us.

Badenoch has diminished herself this week. I don’t just mean this in terms of her character and standing, though a think that is true. She has diminished herself by making herself part of the Elon Musk attack on Labour. She will only ever be a supporting cast member in that movie.

This moment is ripe for a narrative from Labour that exploits this strategic mistake by the Tories. What might the story look like? Here’s a starter for ten:

Whether you’re a taxi driver working long hours in a northern town, a young dad in Scotland worrying whether you’ll get enough hours this week to support your kids, a London mum juggling looking after your own kids while caring for an elderly parent, or a small businesswoman striving to build something new in your village, we all have something in common: we’ve lived through a time where things have become harder and harder.

But while the rest of us struggled, a tiny number of people have become unimaginably rich and powerful. They know that the system they built of insecure work, crumbling public services, and hollowed out communities has made people desperate for change and for more control over our lives. That threatens their power and their wealth, so they are now using those to try to take control of our politics and distract us from the broken system.

But we’re smarter than they give us credit for. We won’t be manipulated by rich foreigners. We’ve seen what Musk’s style of politics leads to in Washington and we don’t want it here in the UK. We know that for all the problems we face, we can overcome them by working together rather than being divided against each other by the likes of Trump, Musk and the politicians aligned with him in the UK who also want to treat us like idiots.

The Conservative Party’s tactics have been outrageous and cynical. They have triggered an avalanche of abuse and threats. However, my fellow Labour MPs are energised than they have been in weeks. That’s because we’re now up against an objectionable political opponent and we’re lead by a team that’s up for the fight.

The Tories may have made a huge strategic error this week. Now to tell a story about that.