In early 2018 I attended a conference that has stuck in my mind.
Titled “Talking about Poverty”, the conference was ran by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), and hosted in The Guardian’s glassy building on Regent’s Canal. Considering the subject matter, the whole thing was jarringly lavish. On arrival delegates were given copies of Darren McGarvey’s “Poverty Safari” and Stephen Armstrong’s “The New Poverty”. Very serviceable food and drink was on offer, and an assortment of comms experts addressed an enormous hall full of the representatives from the nations highest profile campaigning charities.
The purpose of the event was to talk about talking. Specifically, in the context of what was at that point eight years of Tory austerity, we were talking about the most effective ways to talk about poverty, so as to get the public on the side of doing something about it.
Anchoring discussion was a newly published bit of research that JRF had commissioned from the Frameworks Institute (available here). In their own words, Frameworks are an American “nonprofit research organisation that helps mission-driven organisations build public will for progressive change”.
What they offer are a series of ‘insights’ from psychological anthropology, which, taken together, are supposed to create a kind of science of communications and story telling. You can hear them explain how this works in detail here, but what I took from the conference is as follows.
Ordinary people think in terms of cultural myths. These myths are stories that they already believe to be true. So rather than convincing people of something new, effective communication ‘frames’ itself in terms of stories that are already accepted. Your job, if you want to make change in the world, is to work out a way of getting your message across so that it activities useful myths in the public imagination, and avoids ones that might work against you.
With the issue of poverty, that means avoiding talking about poverty itself – because according to Frameworks, the British public largely believe that poverty is something that happens abroad, and doesn’t exist on these islands. What you can talk about instead though is fairness and compassion, because people see these things as virtues we should be striving towards. So rather than saying “isn’t poverty terrible”, say “isn’t this situation unfair”.
The purpose of this blog is not to attack the Frameworks approach to communication. What I would like to discuss though is what the Frameworks approach reveals about the way the charity sector sees the world – which I also think tells us something about British liberalism.
The first thing to say about this way of seeing things is that is explicitly not interested in changing anyone’s mind about anything. It is agnostic on the question of whether changing minds is theoretically possible – but it is clear in its stance that attempting to do so is a waste of time. This is an odd place for lots of people who might otherwise claim to be interested in debate and reasoning to have got to, but their logic is clear.
Changing minds is simply not necessary for success. If you, the communicator, are skilful enough, public opinion can be bent to your will, simply by hitting the correct notes at the correct time. This is a natural endpoint of viewing communications, politics and social ‘changemaking’ as professions. The key actor is you - the professional - and through research and innovation, you can get better and better and better at your job.
In this way of looking at the world, people – the general public – are simply an instrument for you to play. People believe what they believe. They are what they are. It’s not worth trying to understand why they are this way or seeking to change it. Your task is simply to work with what you’ve got. Understand the forces that you’re working with, and adjust accordingly to achieve your goals.
What are the political implications of ideas like this?
When you are trained in campaigning approaches like this, you are given a clear account of how change happens in society. Change is a top down phenomenon, and it lives and dies by the professional skills of people who attended fancy conferences in King’s Cross. This sets liberals in the charity sector at odds with the socialist left – even on issues like poverty where they agree on what good outcomes look like.
A focus on the grassroots, on organising, on bottom-up change that puts people in control– this is often anathema to the charity sector view of how progress is actually made. Similarly, an account of the world that focuses on structural forces and the slow grind of history is at odds with a belief that skilled professionals can shape the world around them.
A further tension emerges from the fact that by suggesting that change can be brought about by ordinary people – you are essentially making the sectors self-styled ‘experts’ in ‘changemaking’ redundant. You are telling them that their professional skills are not valuable. This means that no matter how much synergy there might be between their objectives, grassroots movements (and leftists who see this as the route to change) and the liberal charity sector will always have a somewhat difficult relationship.
A second implication of all this for politics is that the charity sector ends up with a view of making change in the world that is highly instrumentalist (they would say pragmatic). This sits uneasily with both democracy as a process, and perhaps if I may be a little more controversial, with honesty in campaigning. The entire approach to communications that we learned at this JRF conference was about working out what you need to say in order to achieve your goals. What happens when people who come from this world become MPs, or go and do comms for political parties? They take this same approach to things with them, and you get things like New Labour’s approach to spin, Nick Clegg’s tuition fee pledge or Keir Starmer’s campaign for the Labour leadership.
When you work in a charity, your ends are everything. Indeed, charitable objectives are what define charities as legal entities. However, in a democracy, means are supposed to matter too. And when you have a revolving door between these two worlds – charities and politics – wires are going to get crossed.
Why does this matter?
My intention with this blog has not been to besmirch charity campaigning, or particular approaches to communications and PR.
All I really want to say is this: charities are a major part of the machine of left and liberal politics in this country. Huge numbers of SPADs, MPs and other people who end up in formal politics come through charities - and in those charities, they are learn things.
They do not learn about coalition building. They do learn about media strategy. They do not learn structural accounts of history. They do learn about how clever campaigning can make change. They do not learn about engaging people on the ground. They do learn about forging productive working relationships with elites.
Whether this is appropriate for the charity sector is not the point here. The point is to ask whether this is appropriate for politics – and to consider whether we are thinking enough about the ways in which the charity sector shapes Westminster more broadly.
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I would add that the grassroots side has its own failure mode - it tends to pull its ambitions down to its own scale and also to require a great deal of, essentially, indulgence to nimbyism.
The missing-middle is very often *how* things can be achieved; the Kings Place view kind of assumes that it knows what the problem is and what the solution is (although it is often wrong about both), and the rest is just a question of the right advertising campaign, while the grassroots one tends to be much better at *preventing* things from being achieved through protest and what you might call administrative warfare than, you know, doing them.