Infographic by the One Spot. (Fair use)‘Take Back Control’ – it was the slogan wot won it. Those three words offered everything and promised nothing. They appealed to the desire for dignity and autonomy, but allowed voters to project their own grievances and remedies. The slogan appealed to the precariat as powerfully as it did to the aristocracy, because it suggested that order could be (re)established in an age of dizzying instability. In response to this vision of emancipation – however dishonest and deceitful – the Remain campaign offered an arid set of data, based on the mean-spirited calculation that people ultimately only care about money. There was one spark of inspiration: ‘Lead not Leave’, which promised a post-imperial nation, still grieving for its Empire, the influence that it craves. But Remain sidelined the messenger, Gordon Brown, for fear of his unpopularity over immigration.
Why is a story so important? Recent neuroscientific research illustrates what the ancient poets knew: that our comprehension and retention of information is enhanced when it is presented in a narrative. UKIP donor Arron Banks’ infamous quote about the Leave campaign’s “American-style approach” (“Facts don’t work…You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success”) actually frames it incorrectly: rather than facts vs story, facts have power only as part of a story. To adapt the adage of the other Clinton: It’s the story, stupid!
Stories don’t stand alone: they compete with one another. Stories don’t stand alone: they compete with one another (hope vs fear; change vs status quo). For the social democratic Left, and for the Remain campaign in particular, this has led to a defence of the status quo – an unsustainable position in an unpredictable global climate. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, social democrats were both averse and unable to develop a new narrative, instead embracing technocracy, embodied by the European Union. The shortcomings of this approach were demonstrated by the political fallout of the 2008 financial crash. Although the market meltdown and the stunted recovery exposed the New Right’s economics – a failure of de-regulation and austerity – in subsequent elections almost every centre-left party in Europe was defeated at the ballot box. The Right has been able to draw on simple but powerful analogies that are persuasive despite being economically illiterate (e.g. the national budget as the household budget). By contrast, social democratic technocratic concepts such as ‘predistribution’ have had little appeal and no imprint on the public imagination.
