Culture has been co-opted by the Conservatives, post COVID-19 Labour needs to work hard if it wants to reclaim it
Understanding culture and everyday life, up and down the country, will be critical to the success of the Labour party under new leader Keir Starmer.
The COVID-19 Emergency has turned British cultural life on its head. Overnight we moved indoors, stopped talking about Brexit, and have been forced to discover new ways of living, working and socialising. There has never been a greater respect for the work of the NHS and alongside this a newly re-awakened appreciation for the BBC. Two spiritual figureheads of British society and culture and two institutions that are surely safer from privatisation or mass sell-off. We have also entered a period of steep recession which will change our relationship to work, consumption, and each other, for far longer.
By day I am a cultural researcher and strategist (I've spent my career working for global media and tech companies). But, with an academic background in social policy, I’ve always been engaged in the political process. And since moving to the London suburb of Chingford and Woodford Green five years ago, I became interested in politics at a local level for the first time. I observed at first hand the fast changing demographics of the area (liberal overflow from inner London) and the cultural impact that was having on an area that had always been a totemic seat for the Conservatives (MP’s have been Winston Churchill, Norman Tebbit to Iain Duncan Smith who has held the seat since 1992).
This combined perspective, has given me a more profound and immediate, empathetic and multi-dimensional understanding of contemporary British cultural life, and a sharp sense of one of the most important steps Labour needs to take as we begin to emerge from the first phase of pandemic life.
It’s hard to believe that the General Election happened not even five months ago. But as the campaign wore on it became increasingly apparent that the Labour party had resolutely failed to invest time and energy into developing an updated analysis of British cultural life.
The language and optics, the semiotics, of Labour’s messaging in speeches, communications and in all of its muddled marketing, were at best vague and at worst downright confusing. It felt as though Labour strategy embraced ideology over cultural understanding. And it seemed to me as if it had distanced itself from research and marketing techniques as inauthentic or cynical - perhaps as a point of principle. Instead, at certain points in the campaign Labour felt like it was talking down from on high, what I call the ‘we’re explaining why your lives are shit’ approach -coming across as vague and out of touch - the opposite of the authenticity it sought. There were strong local campaigns (we were, of course, lucky enough to have Fazia Shaheen as a candidate in C&WG) and as a local candidate, she understood at a deep level the cultural codes and values of the community she was fighting to represent.
But the apparent lack of updated cultural understanding by the Labour party nationally left a window wide open (through the course of Brexit and beyond) for the idea of “culture” to be aggressively appropriated by the right and twisted into a package with “identity”. And with a hostile media the lack of clarity in communications left Labour wide open to misinterpretation and ultimately rejection.
The Conservative party, in contrast, whilst presenting, established, residual codes of hierarchy, class and tradition, communicated, during the election in a far more powerful, culturally resonant and coherent way (regardless of what you might feel about the messaging). There was a deep understanding of the language of Brexit culture - both visual and textual - and it was readily incorporated into Conservative campaigning. And, these messages were played back verbatim on the doorstep “I just want to get Brexit done”. It was an approach that felt straight out of the Steve Bannon playbook (apparently he is a reader of cultural theorist of linguistics and hegemony Antonio Gramsci). And now, in the Conservatives handling of the current Covid19 crisis we see the same tactics. Bold, stark, colourful messaging repeated at every opportunity, alongside a rapid co-opting of NHS values.
It is ironic, that the Conservatives, so often the loudest critics of university subjects such as Media and Cultural Studies, have embraced its thinking so wholeheartedly throughout its communications.
As we begin to imagine life on the other side of the immediate COVID-19 crisis, there is a lot for Keir Starmer and his new shadow cabinet to think about. But at a most basic level there needs to be a compassionate and empirical reappraisal of the new post Brexit, post Covid19 landscape and this means a constant drip feed of strong social and cultural observation, extensive on-the-ground listening and then analysis.
There needs to be a genuine openness to being challenged on deeply held views and assumptions. And Labour needs to be far more attentive to the power of language and meaning in its communications. This will help ensure that brilliant policy ideas resonate, that they are communicated in ways that are readily understood, and interpreted in the intended way (what cultural theorist Stuart Hall, described as repressed meaning). These first steps are absolutely vital if Labour is to play any role in reclaiming and reimagining British cultural life.
