Taking back control of our narrative

“Remember how great 2015 was, when hard or soft was a question you only got asked about your eggs?” Kirsty Styles, the podcast presenter, said at the opening of the relaunch of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank that is reinventing itself to do more acting than thinking.

Now it’s about Brexit, not breakfast, Kirsty said, aping a Conservative party conference gaff. Brexit was the order of the day for many of the speakers at the relaunch.

Tom Kibasi, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, remembered when “taking back control” was a mantra for the essence of collective politics, before it was bastardised for right wing gain.

Sunder Katwala from British Future warned that Brexit would swallow up 90 per cent of Government capacity, crowding out any work think tanks and every other kind of tanks might do.

Andy Burnham, Labour candidate for Greater Manchester, hoped that Brexit would mark the end of 30 years in which Westminster had not produced any policies for the country outside London.

But he feared the opposite would be the case. “The government could be about to confound that by acting on the assumption that people voted for hard Brexit — which there is no evidence to support,” he said.

“Hard Brexit” occupied Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party, and Ed Miliband, former leader of the Labour Party. He looked tanned and relaxed throughout a head to head with Vince Cable, former Secretary of State for Business, in a session moderated by Sirio Canos, London representative for the radical Spanish party Podemos.

“For us on the left [Brexit is] an opportunity to confront where we are going,” Miliband said. “I still believe that we are better off co-operating with Europe as much as possible. We have to offer that, tackle inequality and create political reform. That is a much better opportunity than the hard Brexit Theresa May is offering.”

Miliband offered some causes for Brexit. Among them, Labour’s resistance to incremental changes on the minimum wage and zero hours, which, he said, created the conditions for Brexit over time.

Vince Cable reflected on the tragedy of losing his seat in the 2015 election. He said the overwhelming feeling he got from his electorate was a sense of fear that had translated into a shift to the right. He thought there were three reasons for the shift: an aging electorate, property owners making up the majority of voters (just) and a sense of national identity.

Miliband asked: “The politics of identity is real but how do you surmount that?”

Cable responded: “The politics of identity is a nice way of saying it, but it’s nationalism in one way or another.”

Cable puzzled at how two disgraced Labour politicians, Tony Blair and Harold Wilson, had used national identity to speak to a large part of the electorate that was not on the left. He celebrated mixed race families, which, he said, would protect us from a descent into the nationalism of the 30s.

Canos said there was another way. She told how Spanish politics had been dominated by two parties for decades until they became indistinguishable, and irrelevant, allowing for the success of Podemos. This new political party, formed in 2014, had an internal structure that forced it to be in constant dialogue with the man on the street.

She said parties must embrace existing ideas about national identity and use them to build a power base with voters across the county. “Politics is all about trying to create an identity,” Canos said. “We’re not trying to escape that but to embrace it.”

Throughout the day, everyone agreed that a new narrative is needed. NEF announced that it had partnered with the Public Interest Research Centre to spend 18 months figuring out a way to “frame” the economy that will appeal to left wing voters.

Canos said that the answer to this problem already exists within public discourse. “Many Podemos voters were right wing. They didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide to become left wing, but we offered something that unified them,” Canos said.

Dora Meade from PIRC said it was too soon to discuss the results of the framing study. But there were signs NEF had already figured it out.

Not least in the hashtag for the day, a UKIP catchphrase, reclaimed and edited for brevity: #takecontrol.

This post originally appeared at Far Nearer.