̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Election

Trump voters believe American values and prosperity are ‘under threat’

fpjl2 — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 08:31:40 +0000

Data also suggests that Democrat appeals to unity were popular across the board, but “politicians need to do more to understand why some people feel under threat”.

Faith in democracy: millennials are the most disillusioned generation ‘in living memory’

fpjl2 — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 07:41:00 +0000

Young people’s faith in democratic politics is lower than any other age group, and millennials across the world are more disillusioned with democracy than Generation X or baby boomers were at the same stage of life.

‘Don’t put yourself through it again’: Thatcher papers reveal ‘distress’ after bruising election win

sjr81 — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 10:02:33 +0000

But despite winning 376 seats and 13.7 million votes (compared to Labour’s 209 seats and just over 10 million votes), the papers for 1987 are striking in their air of uncertainty and despondency, with one particularly prescient letter from Private Secretary Charles Powell imploring her not to fight another bruising election campaign.

As well as fighting off what Conservatives believed to be a particularly hostile press in the run-up to the election, 1987 proved a particularly troubled and unsettling year for both the Prime Minister and the country at large with the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, Hungerford massacre, King’s Cross fire, Enniskillen bombing, ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash, and the Great Storm all taking place during the course of a turbulent year.

̽��ֱ��extraordinary Powell letter, opened to the public in full for the first time by the Churchill Archives Centre and the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, strikes a pleading tone to Lady Thatcher after congratulating the PM on her historic victory.

“All the same I hope you will not put yourself through it again,” says the letter. “ ̽��ֱ��level of personal abuse thrown at you during the campaign was unbelievable and must take some toll, however stoic you are outwardly… In two or three years’ time you will have completed the most sweeping change this country has seen in decades and your place in history will be rivalled only in this century by Churchill. That’s the time to contribute to some other area.”

Responding to the letter ahead of today's opening, Lord Powell said: “I had actually forgotten writing the letter until Charles Moore cited it in his biography. It’s an unusual letter for a civil servant to send a Prime Minister, even on a very personal basis, reflecting the small size and intimacy of Number 10 especially in those days. I had been distressed to observe at close quarters the stress of a third election campaign and the back-biting it involved on Margaret Thatcher’s health and performance. In the light of subsequent events, my advice to her looks pretty sound.”

Although 1987 had its fair share of difficulties – not least a growing Tory disquiet around the upcoming ‘Poll Tax’ – Thatcher did enjoy enormously successful visits to both the USA and the USSR, the latter to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev during March/April.

̽��ֱ��success of the visit helped launch her election campaign and put clear water between her and Labour in the polls at a time when the gap had been narrowing, a constriction that provoked much disquiet in the Conservative ranks at all levels of the party machine.

While the Russia visit and resulting photos provided a bump to Thatcher's and Conservative Party popularity, Thatcher had since 1983 consciously sought a better relationship with the Soviet leadership. In truth, Lady Thatcher was yet to be convinced by Gorbachev and played down expectations both before and after the visit, even in the face of overwhelmingly positive coverage both in the UK and behind the Iron Curtain.

̽��ֱ��1987 papers also bring back to light a forgotten episode on eve of poll when Lady Thatcher, being interviewed by David Dimbleby, made what could have been a potentially election-losing and career-ending comment. Asking a question about social division, Dimbleby suggested the PM never actually said she cared. In reply, she said: “Please. If people just drool and drivel that they care. I turn round and say ‘Right. I also look to see what you actually do.’”

Thatcher instantly regretted her choice of words and immediately apologised for her use of the phrase ‘drool and drivel’.

Historian Chris Collins of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the only person to have read all 50,000 pages of the 1987 papers in their entirety, said: “She was a bit lucky there, I think. Perhaps the immediate retraction and election victory saved her from having to live with endless taunting in later years.

“It’s hard to find anything quite like this exchange in the whole body of her public rhetoric (which amounted to more than 14 million words by the end of her Premiership) and her feelings about it were correspondingly high.”

On a lighter note, the papers for 1987 contain her Press Office briefing notes after Lady Thatcher was persuaded to appear on children’s TV, including the BBC’s Saturday Superstore. A briefing ahead of an interview for Smash Hits magazine carries the ominous warning ‘You may not enjoy this appearance' – and if proof were needed, included an appendix with a short history of punk.

Noting that the genre was at its most extreme phase under the previous Labour government, the briefing went on to outline the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK, both highlighted in yellow to give these classic punk anthems even greater prominence.

Not content with her brief history of punk, the PM also gave a speech in Jamaica later that year referencing Bob Marley. Powell also sent her the words to Get Up, Stand Up.

While Thatcher may have proved her prowess at winning elections in 1987, she did come a cropper on the domestic front after appearing on a BBC science programme called Take Nobody’s Word For It with Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle ̽��ֱ�� to demonstrate some basic chemistry including a recipe for bread.

“If you offer the viewing public a recipe on a TV programme with a title like that, it better be a good one – ideally foolproof,” added Collins. “Unfortunately this one wasn’t. Horrified officials found themselves receiving letters from people complaining they had tried the PM’s bread. One said it was ‘just like chewing gum’ and another ‘that it was bad enough to cry’. Later that same year, the Roux brothers sent her a book of patisserie recipes, though history does not record whether the gift had any connection to ‘Breadgate’.”

Margaret Thatcher’s third and final election victory dominates the 50,000 pages of her personal papers for the year 1987 – opening to the public from today at Churchill College, Cambridge.

I had been distressed to observe at close quarters the stress of a third election campaign and the back-biting it involved on Margaret Thatcher’s health and performance.

Lord Powell

Thatcher speaking in the White House grounds during her 1987 visit to the USA

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Opinion: Angela Merkel to run again: why she's the antithesis of Donald Trump in a post-truth world

ljm67 — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 10:33:56 +0000

Angela Merkel has finally confirmed that she will run for reappointment as German chancellor in the country’s 2017 parliamentary elections. Many have hoped for this moment, despite the setbacks of the past few years. There is a strong sense that the world needs Merkel now more than ever. She has made some unpopular decisions in her 11 years as chancellor but she is, to many, the antithesis of Donald Trump.

Tough times

Chancellorship has been no walk in the park for Merkel of late. In 2015, she upset many supporters of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), by opening German borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees. To curb the influx, Merkel had to commit to a dirty deal with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, offering generous EU visa terms for his citizens in exchange for stopping millions of refugees from entering Europe.

̽��ֱ��pressure intensified in 2016, when a spate of sexual assaults, apparently committed by migrants, stirred up a significant backlash against the new arrivals.

Merkel’s CDU went on to suffer bitter setbacks in federal elections. And an Islamic State-inspired axe attack by a young man from Afghanistan in Bavaria in July 2016 was seen as evidence that Merkel’s open door refugee policy had failed.

In September 2016, Merkel’s popularity reached a five-year low. No more than 45% of German people were satisfied with her performance. During a public speech on German Unity Day in Dresden, angry protesters drew on Nazi language and called Merkel a “traitor of the people” and demanded her resignation.

On the international stage, the Brexit vote was a huge blow to Merkel and her pro-European course. She now needs to negotiate an exit for Britain without also triggering the demise of the entire EU project.

And as if all of this wasn’t enough, Merkel will have to deal with Donald Trump as president of the United States. After Trump’s election victory, Merkel gave a remarkable speech, offering him close collaboration on the basis that the new American president would respect freedom, democracy and the dignity and worth of all people.

While most other world leaders gave bland statements of half-hearted hope that the president-elect would not see through on his more controversial promises, the German leader was sending a strong signal – and even a challenge.

After the open sexism and racism that characterised Trump’s campaign, it looks like close collaboration is an extremely unlikely scenario. Merkel was effectively saying that standing up to such prejudice was more important to her than relations with the US – although whether she remains true to her principles should she be re-elected is another question.

A sense of responsibility

Given the overwhelming number of problems facing whoever wins in 2017, the easiest decision would have been to let someone else do the job of chancellor. But Merkel isn’t one for easy solutions.

There was little enthusiasm or excitement in her voice as she announced her candidacy, and she openly admitted that standing had been a difficult decision. Although Merkel didn’t mention any names, it was obvious that she wanted to send a message to Trump and right-wing populists in Europe. She emphasised that political decisions need to be based on the fundamental values of freedom, democracy, respect for the law, and the dignity of every human being.

Merkel responds to Trump’s victory.

Following her announcement, Merkel appeared on a talk show and left no doubt that she expected difficult times and an “exhausting and challenging” election campaign. Yet, she added that she felt confident that she could defend these values that hold our society together.

Merkel openly challenges Trump because there is a lot more at stake than Anglo-German relations. Fears grow that in 2017 the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen could become the next French president, and that Europe’s far right will grow further. Against this background, Merkel sees an urgent need to oppose the populism, racism and gender ideology of the extreme right, and this feeling is shared by many Germans.

Can she win?

Merkel’s statement was a manifestation of everything that people love and hate about her. She carefully assesses situations before taking decisions, she is stubbornly committed to Christian values and the European project, she seeks consensus rather than victory, and she displays a striking lack of charisma.

̽��ֱ��New York Times has called Merkel “the liberal west’s last defender” and while she is too smart to get excited about such headlines, she knows that her approach and personality traits have become a rare commodity in the post-truth era of global politics.

Merkel has described herself as a “chancellor for turbulent times” and there is good reason to believe that she could act as an important counterbalance to the charismatic, impulsive, erratic, and polemical President Trump.

Recent polls suggest Merkel’s popularity scores are slowly recovering. Although it is to be expected that some CDU voters will switch to vote for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AFD), she has a good chance of re-election. She may not win an outright majority, but her party would be able to form a coalition with various other parties, which would leave the CDU in a strong position to push through their candidate for the chancellorship.

Katharina Karcher, Sutasoma Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

In this article, Katharina Karcher from the Department of German and Dutch discusses the election prospects of the self-described “chancellor for turbulent times”.

European People's Party

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Opinion: German election: is this really a verdict on Merkel’s open door to refugees?

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 11:26:49 +0000

Three German federal states have elected new parliaments in regional votes that have seen major gains made by Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party that wants drastically to reduce immigration to Germany. State parliaments in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt have been reshuffled, although the AfD didn’t actually come first in any of the votes.

These elections were being framed as a verdict on Merkel’s “open-door” refugee policy. Critics of her pro-refugee stance have been eager to observe that it has isolated her in her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and alienated many voters. Now, they say, the electorate has punished the whole party for Merkel’s single-handed attempt to help refugees.

At first glance, it seems they were right. ̽��ֱ��CDU has lost votes in all three federal states, and more than a few former CDU voters have switched to supporting the AfD.

̽��ֱ��anti-Merkel, anti-establishment, anti-immigration rhetoric appealed particularly to voters in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD became the second-strongest party. It also secured good results in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, winning more than 10% of the vote.

But to suggest that Merkel’s refugee policy sent voters “flocking to the populist party” is wrong, even dangerous.

AfD voters are, for the most part, not frustrated CDU voters but people who are so frustrated by party politics that they have haven’t voted at all in past elections. Their discontent with the existing political system is not limited to Merkel’s immigration policy, even if it has become particularly visible. Many people feel that their voices and concerns are ignored by the CDU and other established parties.

Although the refugee crisis has been an important election issue, we shouldn’t fall into the rhetoric of right-wing populists and claim that it is solely responsible for the legitimacy crisis of representational politics in Germany. Rather than addressing the root causes of Germany’s social and economic problems, they blame migrants for everything that is going wrong.

In fact, a closer look at these election results shows that the people who won are, by and large, the people who support Merkel’s refugee policy.

Reading the results

Baden-Wuerttemberg is considered one of Europe’s economic powerhouses, and has the lowest unemployment rate in the German republic. For almost 60 years, it was governed by conservatives. That changed with the elections in 2011 when the Green Party’s Winfried Kretschmann became Prime Minister of the state. Kretschmann is an explicit supporter of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy. He has been re-elected in 2016, achieving an even better result for his party than in 2011.

Neighbouring state Rhineland-Palatinate has been governed by a red-green coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens since 2011. This has long been an SPD stronghold, and the party again won this election – albeit narrowly. Prime Minister Malu Dreyer was re-elected in spite of (or perhaps because of) her pro-refugee stance.

Dreyer’s rival, the conservative Julia Klöckner is one of several prominent politicians in the CDU who have openly criticised Angela Merkel’s “welcome policy” – a strategy which didn’t pay off in these elections.

Saxony-Anhalt is a bit different. It struggles economically and the unemployment rate is almost three times higher than in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

CDU Prime Minister Reiner Haselhoff has been in office since 2011, and will remain there if he can build a majority government (although this might be difficult because he refuses to collaborate with the AfD, which is now the second strongest party in parliament).

Like Klöckner, Haselhoff is critical of Angela Merkel’s immigration policy. However, he also distances himself decisively from the right-wing populism. He has warned that there has been a shift to the right across Europe, and emphasised that the threat of right-wing populists needs to be tackled at all levels of society.

Why so popular?

Due to the strong focus on the refugee question, a number of central problems have been neglected by the mainstream parties in the run up to this year’s elections. They haven’t focused on the growing gap between the rich and the poor in Germany and across the world, economic and political insecurities within and beyond the European Union, and the fact that many people feel alienated from the people supposedly elected to represent them.

There is good reason to believe that all of these factors have contributed to the rise of the AfD, and the ways in which other politicians respond to them could decide the future of the AfD and other right-wing populist parties.

Even if it seems that migrants have become a scapegoat for everything that is going wrong in German politics, nobody can seriously claim that a clampdown on immigration would solve all of Germany’s social, political, and economic problems.

Many of Merkel’s party colleagues disagree with her pro-refugee stance, and have distanced themselves from the Chancellor. But even if she were overthrown as CDU leader, her replacement would have a hard job persuading voters that established parties can meet the challenges of our times – regardless of where they stand on immigration. From austerity to the eurozone crisis, to the global financial meltdown, migration is not the only thing voters think about when they head to the polls.

Katharina Karcher, Affiliated Lecturer in German Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��author will be giving a talk at this year's Hay Festival http://www.cam.ac.uk/public-engagement/hay-festival-2016

Katharina Karcher (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) discusses Germany's regional elections, which saw major gains made by the right-wing populist party.

Thomas Dämmrich

Merkel took a hit at the polls but so have most other European leaders.

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Opinion: Harsh Republican immigration rhetoric is invigorating Latino voters

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 12:20:32 +0000

Donald Trump has said Mexicans “are bringing drugs, and bringing crime” to the US, while his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls are also talking up hawkish anti-immigration policies as the primary season unfolds.

That they feel confident doing so says something about American Latinos' surprising history of not showing up at the ballot box in big numbers. But based on the data we have, it seems the anti-immigration right may have finally gone too far.

Latinos are the largest ethnic minority group in the US, making up 17.4% of the population, yet the Latino electorate has so far underperformed at the ballot box. ̽��ֱ��Pew Research Centre projects that a record 27.3m Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2016. That’s 4m more than in 2012, but still only about half of the US’s Latino population.

Expanding the size of the electorate through voter registration and naturalisation campaigns is undoubtedly an important step towards augmenting the political influence of the Latino community. But the impact of a larger electorate will be mitigated if half of eligible Latino voters continue to stay home on election day.

At the 2012 election, an alarming 12m eligible Latinos chose not to vote, and the Latino turnout rate dropped from 49.9% in 2008 to 48%. Conversely, 66.6% of African Americans and 64.1% of non-Hispanic whites voted.

While mobilising unlikely voters in Chicago in 2014, I witnessed how misinformation and a lack of understanding of how the government functions fuels public disillusion with the political process, a major reason many voters, not just Latinos, opt to reject the ballot box.

But the viciously anti-immigrant rhetoric promulgated by Republican candidates is forcing Latino voters to pay attention.

Waking up

A 2015 survey of registered Latino voters jointly conducted by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and Latino Decisions found that 43% of respondents felt more interested in this year’s presidential election than in 2012. ̽��ֱ��same survey found that immigration reform, deportations and Barack Obama’s recent interventions via executive actions are the most important issues for 39% of respondents, tied with job creation and the economy – whereas immigration issues ranked only fourth among Latino voters' priorities in 2012.

This doesn’t make good reading for the Republican presidential front-runners, who claim to recognise the importance of the Latino vote to their campaigns but repeatedly alienate voters with their xenophobic rhetoric and unrealistic immigration policies.

On some themes, Donald Trump is in a league of his own: at the start of his campaign in the summer of 2015, he described Mexicans, by far the US’s largest Latino subgroup, as criminals and rapists. But all three candidates have called for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and have promised to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an administrative policy that allows certain undocumented youth the ability to temporarily live and work in the US.

These promises alarm me since I’m a DACA beneficiary. DACA, among other things, made it possible for me to gain employment after graduating from Amherst College and to continue my graduate education. I am currently a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and a future Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua ̽��ֱ�� in China.

If Trump, Cruz or Rubio reach the White House, the other 660,000 beneficiaries and I would return to living under fear of deportation without access to legal employment.

From the ground up

Deporting all 11m of us is not realistic and will hurt the economy. ̽��ֱ��cheap labour of undocumented workers subsidises the standard of living of every American. Undocumented immigrants also pay billions in taxes which help support public programs. ̽��ֱ��Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy that undocumented residents paid an estimated $11.84 billion in state and local taxes in 2012 – and that legalising undocumented people would add $2.2 billion a year to state and local taxes.

Republican candidates know their immigration proposals are unrealistic, but they chose to ignore the facts to score political points with their conservative base.

Fortunately, the American people are on our side. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 65% of US adults and 77% of Latinos favour a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. While I can’t vote, most of my extended family members, my colleagues and my friends can, and they will not vote for a candidate who wants to deport my mother and me.

Cruz and Rubio, both Cuban Americans, are perhaps hoping Latinos will ignore their stance on immigration and support them in the general election by virtue of their last names. But, if nominated, their ethnicity alone will not endear them to Latino voters. In the aforementioned NCLR survey, only 4% of respondents said they would blindly vote for a Latino candidate; 55% of Latinos listed the candidates’ positions as the most important factor influencing their vote.

This will only matter if Latinos vote in numbers that can make a real difference. Raised turnout and greater political representation are not the catalysts for political empowerment, but the products of it. If those who stand up for Latino interests want to sustain political participation in a meaningful way, civic engagement at the grassroots level must be their focus.

If they can be brought to the ballot box in representative numbers, they could dramatically change American politics. But without a sustained grassroots organising effort, a significant number of Latinos will remain political bystanders in the US.

Carlos Adolfo Gonzalez Sierra, ‎Gates Scholar in Latin American Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Carlos Adolfo Gonzalez Sierra (Centre of Latin American Studies) discusses how the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Republican candidates is forcing Latino voters to pay attention.

Darron Birgenheier

Donald Trump in Reno, Nevada

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Opinion: A regional election in India ends in a damning verdict on prime minister Modi

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 16:49:13 +0000

An election in the Indian state of Bihar, has delivered a resounding and unambiguous verdict on prime minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. And it’s not a positive one.

̽��ֱ��electorate in the eastern state has supported a grand alliance of political parties, which coalesced against the ruling National Democratic Alliance (BJP-NDA) – led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party.

̽��ֱ��alliance is led by chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has already served two terms as head of Bihar’s state government. Made up of three parties – Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Indian Congress Party – it has now delivered a massive mandate for him to remain. Together, the coalition has secured 178 seats in the 243-member local assembly. Modi’s BJP-NDA has just 58.

Local and national

Unusually, for what might otherwise have been no more than a regional political skirmish, this election has turned the lens on Modi’s leadership, and on the political strategy that has been directed by his party president, Amit Shah.

Both Modi and Shah chose to occupy centre stage in the almost two-month-long Bihar campaign, eclipsing their local party leadership, who were sidelined.

Modi visited the state and addressed 31 separate election rallies. But this had the affect of raising his personal stake in the outcome, and turning a state election into a mini-referendum on his national leadership.

A bellwether state?

Bihar has always mattered in Indian politics. It is the country’s third largest state, with more than 100 million people. As a Hindi-heartland state, it plays a pivotal role in holding the balance in India’s national parliament, with 40 elected members representing the state in the lower house. Of these 40 seats, the BJP and its NDA allies returned 31 MPs from Bihar in the parliamentary elections in 2014, and were hoping to repeat this performance in the state elections. It was not to be.

Bihar has also been a laggard in terms of development, consistently under-performing compared to both India’s other states and its own potential. Nevertheless, Kumar has championed progressive politics over the past decade and presided over the beginnings of a transformation. Meanwhile, the BJP campaign was divisive, stoking issues that risk polarising Indian society along religious and communal lines.

Artists, writers and intellectuals have criticised what they see as a rising tide of intolerance in India. This has manifested in physical and verbal attacks on minority Muslims and in opposition to the activities of NGOs that have criticised the government, such as Greenpeace.

Those who speak out against such intolerance run the risk of verbal abuse or worse.

̽��ֱ��rhetoric that was deployed in the Bihar campaign was increasingly strident, warning of celebrations in Pakistan if the BJP were defeated in Bihar, and playing up the politics of cow slaughter and beef consumption (targeting India’s Muslim community, which makes up more than 16% of Bihar’s population).

Bihari voters rejected this brand of politics, however, choosing instead the combination of social inclusion and Kumar-led development that the grand alliance seemed to represent. Yadav has championed the cause of the lower castes, Dalits and minorities, and the alliance offered a “secular” alternative to the NDA’s more strident Hindu nationalism.

A message to Modi

̽��ֱ��prime minister defied the odds by winning the 2014 parliamentary elections but he now looks politically vulnerable. ̽��ֱ��BJP lost another high-profile local election to the newly-formed Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections earlier this year, showing that he is clearly not an invincible vote-winner.

Modi is still in power in Delhi but this election loss should serve as a warning. He needs to shift from a politics of confrontation and intolerance to building a more inclusive style of governance.

Modi can no longer stay silent while his acolytes and party supporters spread the politics of hate. For a media savvy leader, his failure to respond immediately and act decisively against the perpetrators speaks volumes.

It’s also time to deliver on the promise of job creation and “better days”. Before his election campaign, Modi pledged to provide a generous developmental package for Bihar. His commitment to “cooperative federalism” requires that he deliver on this package even when the state is ruled by his opponents. Modi needs to go beyond political rhetoric, and be prepared to build bridges with those who disagree with him – an isolated, and confrontational, attitude to state governments and to his opponents in the Centre is not likely to help him govern.

̽��ֱ��message from Bihar is clear. As Modi faces more important state elections in 2016 and 2017, he should realise that the brand of politics that has been on display in the last few months will not resonate with the public. ̽��ֱ��question is: is he listening?

Bhaskar Vira, Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College; Director, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Bhaskar Vira (Department of Geography) discusses the result of the election in the Indian state of Bihar and what it means for Prime Minister Modi's leadership.

Al Jazeera English

Narendra Modi at a BJP rally

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'Spin' or be lost: how Corbyn rejected New Labour PR for a more civic vision

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:45:05 +0000

Conventional wisdom has it that a lack of guile contributed to Jeremy Corbyn’s shock triumph in the Labour leadership election. He won because he was the anti-spin candidate.

But having been smeared, derided and traduced by the press since winning the election, Corbyn is being urged ahead of today’s party conference speech to get “professional” – in other words time to get spinning or be lost.

But maybe a glance at how PR itself has changed will reveal that what Corbyn is doing has its own merit. It’s not clear that a more “professional” approach, where this is taken simply to mean returning to media relations as usual – of the kind used by Number 10 in the Blair era – would increase the amount of favourable coverage he gets.

Although Corbyn’s speeches might benefit from more rehearsal, it’s also important to think about where Corbyn has been strong. How he has achieved the the biggest-ever mandate for a Labour leader and massively increased party membership.

One of the most interesting aspects about his successful campaign for the Labour leadership was that – unwittingly or not – it revived an older practice of public relations in the UK. Because the idea that public relations is mainly about managing press headlines, or measuring media coverage is actually a relatively new one.

Alistair Campbell – Blair’s former spokesman. ̽��ֱ�� of Salford Press Office, CC BY

It also an idea that plays into a myth that is comforting to journalists, that media opinion is the same as public opinion: that the whole complexity of the public’s relationships can be contained in the media’s representation of them. Or as Campbell put it to the Leveson enquiry with typically astute bluntness: “It’s journalists that are the real spin doctors.”

1930s-style PR

By contrast, Corbyn appears to see public relations as the pioneers of the profession in the UK saw it, as an add-on to civic society not as a container for it. A local mental health charity event was prioritised over an appearance on the Andrew Marr show.

It’s a little-known story that the pioneers of public relations in the UK were the people who promoted the London Tube map and Routemaster buses, who invented “dial 999”, the speaking clock and the Jubilee telephone kiosk. These 1930s innovations were prompted by many of the same types of challenges we face today: economic depression, new technology, and the unpredictable path of mass democracy.

Having come to prominence during the slump, partly as a way of navigating totalitarianism, during the war these pioneers would build the V for Victory campaign, design new towns and plan the Festival of Britain. These initiatives weren’t done to increase media reach, or win the headlines (which they understood were controlled by the newspaper barons and newsreel censors) but they were about building relationships.

People in interwar Britain – from the poor and marginalised to the new consumer classes – were put into contact by these new media pioneers through discussions, films and even telephone debates. They took the electorate seriously. ̽��ֱ��language for making a new nation was taking shape.

When you look at the artwork that David Gentleman did for the Stop the War campaign, which was chaired by Corbyn, or simply the sharply designed logo of his leadership campaign, you can see something of this older visual tradition of public relations in the UK. Good design and media enabled civic connectivity as a conduit for actual social and attitudinal change.

By contrast, an analysis popular with the commentariat is that young Corbyn voters in the election were a regrettable product of an irresponsible age of social media. An age where people want opinions that project a personal image to the world – so-called identity politics – and which signify something about their personality, rather than picking sensible leaders that could win a grown-up election.

Ironically, this is actually quite an old put down; a curmudgeonly dismissal that tends to resurface every time the prospect of political transformation, for example the responses to full votes for women and the working class, rears its anarchic head.

While it wasn’t the change that the pioneers expected, it’s always struck me that it is no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen arguably came in the wake of the new practices of public relations finding their feet in the 1930s.

Sneer if you want but …

̽��ֱ��21st century may once more show the strength of the pioneers' approach to public relations. ̽��ֱ��short-term managing of headlines is an impossible task – in a 24-hour news environment a politician will likely always look on the defensive in times of crisis (real or manufactured). Instead, political parties are forced to play a longer game while shrewd politicians begin to stock up on integrity for the inevitable moments when their judgement goes astray. ̽��ֱ��wheel has turned and approaches that were once dismissed as old hat are starting to look prescient again. Unwittingly or not, this is the approach that Corbyn has taken.

All of which makes it important that being “professional” at the conference in Brighton does not prelude the Labour leadership from continuing to focus on ways to coax the wide network of civic and social relationships that they can call upon (a network far wider than that of the present-day Conservatives) into the media. Bring these groups together – verbally, visually and emotionally – and unpredictable things will happen.

It’s worth remembering that the UK’s news media generally sneered at the many social and political oddities of the “Million” march coalition against the Iraq War in 2003 but it marked a watershed in British politics, let alone new Labour’s electoral fortunes, that few predicted at the time.

Equally, it’s worth remembering that it was at a low ebb in World War II that the “V for Victory” campaign was born. What came out of existential weakness has now by a strange trick of history come to be seen as part of an inevitable triumph. There was little that was “professional” about it.

Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar , ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar in the Faculty of History, discusses Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign and the history of political 'spin'.

It strikes me as no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen came in the wake of the new practices of public relations

Scott Anthony

Chris Beckett

Jeremy Corbyn campaigning in Margate, 5 September 2015

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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