The Shock of The Real
Storytelling will not give politicians back their agency
Listening to Lewis Goodall’s insightful interview with Wes Streeting this weekend I was particularly struck by a short section of the interview. Responding to a question about whether Starmer was up for the job of Prime Minister, Streeting :
“We certainly need better storytelling, that is true, but the comms…everyone likes to beat up the comms people, the comms is only as good as the substance and you are not telling me across the four directors of communication we have had, different characters, different styles, different experience, you are not telling me that they are useless comms people, they were talented comms people, that’s not the problem, comms can only reflect the substance".
The clash of narrative, storytelling, the “battle of ideas” (another favourite of Streeting) is increasingly positioned against ‘business as usual’ communications. The latter is the tiresome approach of simply listing off the shopping list of achievements, as Streeting wittily put it.
In many conversations in Westminster you will hear people talk about storytelling in a way that essentially tries to change reality. The inference is that if we told a better story or a different story about the country, it would alter the nature of the decisions that we have to make. We can shift from ‘negative’ narratives about financial crisis and spending cuts to ‘positive’ narratives about reform and change.
Storytelling is the last refuge for a generation of politicians that grew up in a world where the economic settlement was accepted and considered to be working, and where politicians could pick and choose their battlegrounds (Europe, immigration, social mobility etc.). When you hear a politician talking about storytelling, it is simply a plea for agency, a hope that we can deflect from the mess we are in.
The truth is that politicians not longer have control over the story. There is a national story and the debate is really about who can communicate it clearly and write a conclusion to it that ends this chapter of our national life on a good note.
The story is a simple one. Our country has gone from being the epicentre of the global economy, first as producer, then as banker, then as consumer to being on the periphery, dependent on borrowing, prone to shocks and without influence. It has been caused by inevitable global forces, bad policy choices, an insular political and economic elite and increasingly squeezed by rising great power conflicts that are making it poorer, weaker and divided. The psychological blow is crushing the national spirit. The financial blow is fuelling the cost of living crisis. The political fallout is creating instability and division. This is the only story that can be told.
Current debates about storytelling and narrative or even ‘a battle of ideas’ are frustrating because they appear to be attempts to deflect from this story. Sir Tony Blair’s essay was case and point. A clear narrative and attempt to shift the story to a optimistic discussion about the choices of future technological change rather than our current benighted situation. As a consequence, it completely misses the point because it said nothing about our national spirit, nothing about our financial situation and nothing about generations of neglect for the places that are rejecting the current political system.
But, Blair is not the only one. The Prime Minister speaks regularly about the battle for the “soul of the nation” and the need to combat the “politics of grievance” with “hope”. This story tries to make it seem like our current situation is simply about different ethical values. The implication seems to be that we just need to tell a better story about the state of the country we can make people feel better about themselves. But it begs the question, why has the politics of grievance emerged? It has emerged because of the ur-story I have outlined above. People have been driven to desperation because of our current state and the refusal of politicians to confront it. How will telling them that this is not true and that they are being misled by others going to land? Anyone who has been on a focus group know the public do not buy it, yet there remains the hope that a better story can avoid hard choices.
This is not only a Labour problem. The Leader of the Opposition repeatedly insists that Britain is not broken, it is merely “saddled with failing big government” and no doubt, she’d say, big welfare. This comes slightly closer to the reality, or at least the unsustainable levels of consumption we have seen in recent years, but it still does not get to grip with the substance. Does anyone seriously believe that it is merely government spending that has driven us to where we are right now? If we had a smaller government budget, would China stop overproducing and crushing our manufacturers? Would a smaller welfare bill have given an economic purpose back to our nations and regions? It also makes it seem like we have total agency of what happens next, as the world does not exist beyond these shores. Moreover, the choices she is calling for are exactly ones that she would make regardless of the situation. Does anyone believe that Kemi Badenoch would increase government spending or welfare even if times were good? Does anyone think that she would want to raise taxes in any situation? When you are simply offering the public what you would like anyway, the public assume that you have not confronted what is really going on.
Reform and Nigel Farage have got the closest, at times, in speaking the story but baulk at pushing it through because the conclusions force hard, unpopular choices. The flirting with reindustrialisation, the union movement and welfare spending at times makes it seems like Farage ‘gets it’. That all the old assumptions need to be thrown in the bin. This is secret to the success of populism. It uses the power of fundamental forces shaping society. The danger is that it takes this kinetic energy and galvanises people around solutions that either deflect from that reality (e.g. tax cuts) or lead to even worse effects (e.g. war). They thrive on opponents unwilling to tell the story or that want a different one. We are yet to see what Reform’s conclusion to the story will be.
Most politicians are reeling from, adapting Lacanian philosophy, The Shock of The Real - the inability to integrate the chaos of the world into the subjective narratives that order our lives. Conventional politics is currently unable to adapt to our current situation, because it is so vast, so completely unlike the world that most British politicians have grown up in. Unfortunately, The Real cannot be negotiated with and offers little chance to pivot to debate the issues that they have grown up wanting to talk about. How many times do we hear a politician say “I didn’t come into politics to do X, but…” You may wish to talk about buses or AI, but that is not the story.
Instead of being liberated The Real, in the same way that politicians like Callaghan, Healey and Thatcher were liberated by 1976 IMF Loan Crisis, our politicians are now prone to telling themselves (and their supporters) comforting stories about how we tell stories. It’s the endless conferences about digital technology, disinformation and supposed foreign influence that are making it harder to “tell the story”. In this world, democracy is under threat because we cannot get the public to talk about something else. This makes it seem like if only we could find the right means, control can be reasserted. The truth is more banal. Reality is the problem, not the means of communication or bogey men.
Politicians grew up in a world with considerable agency due to Britain’s privileged economic and geopolitical position. This agency has been lost through a combination of poor economic choices and inevitable global forces, much as happened during the end of the 19th Century as British hegemony slipped away. Blair, Starmer and Badenoch are the Lord Salisburys of our time, wishing for Splendid Isolation, except this time it is an isolation from reality rather than foreign entanglements. It was only when a generation of politicians, shaken by rise of Germany and the United States as well as the Boer War, decided to accept The Real, that radical change was made. This is why politicians and thinkers like Chamberlain, Lloyd George, Haldane and Churchill feel like such titans compared to our present day. They were invigorated by change, not cowed by it.
You may not be able to rewrite the story, but you can write the conclusion. However, that means accepting what has gone before and not ignoring reality. The next successful leader in our politics will be one who is prepared to write the response to this the real story, our national story, rather than the one they would like to tell. Until that time, Westminster will continue to tell stories to itself.