‘Thinking politically, not in terms of policies but of images’.
‘Increasingly, the electorate is thinking politically, not in terms of policies but of images’.
Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall is reflecting on Margaret Thatcher’s re-election for a third term in 1987. The ‘Iron Lady’ had defeated Argentina in the Falkland Islands, triumphed over the mineworkers, and teamed up with Rupert Murdoch using ‘Fortress Wapping’ to prevail over printing unions. Now she had defeated Labour at the ballot box—again.
Hall is addressing a paradox: polls had shown that ‘significant majorities consistently preferred Labour on unemployment, health, housing, education’. Voters named these as the most important issues; however, ‘both before and during the election, if asked about image—who was “doing a good job”, “giving the country a lead”, making people “feel good to be British again”—a majority consistently said “Maggie”’.
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Policies don’t capture people’s political imaginations unless…
Hall reflects:
This doesn’t mean that policies don’t matter. It does mean that policies don’t capture people’s political imaginations unless constructed into an image with which they can identify… Electoral politics—in fact, every kind of politics—depends on political identities and identifications. People make identifications symbolically: through social imagery, in their political imaginations.
Familiar ground for the climate movement
The dilemma of how to address a gap between how issues are imagined and the level of stated support for policy positions is familiar for climate campaigners who have seen politicians dismantle Australia’s price on carbon and voters in Australia’s 2019 federal election support a government led by Scott Morrison, a politician famous for bringing a lump of coal into Parliament.
If images provide a primary way for thinking about politics and are central to the task of ‘winning hearts and minds’ or ’capturing people’s political imagination’, then it is worth thinking through how the climate movement is using imagery to shape people’s political imagination.
Hall argues that one reason Labour failed to ‘shift minds, hearts and votes’ was that it lost the struggle over political imagery:
‘how else can you discuss what Britain and the British people are to become, except in terms of broad images? The future has to be imagined—“imaged”, to coin a word’.
He adds,
‘Images are not trivial things. In and through images, fundamental political questions are being posed and argued through. We need to take them more seriously than we do.’
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If Hall is on to something, what does it mean to factor it in to climate movement ‘theories of change’?
Further comments on UK politics and the power of narrative
British political commentator Andrew Rawnsley offers these thoughts:
“There are many components to being a successful leader, but the ability to construct powerful narratives is one of the most essential.
Margaret Thatcher displayed that gift when she convinced 1970s Britain that the country was in a decline only she could reverse. Tony Blair used his skills at deploying an argument to persuade 1990s Britain it needed New Labour to build a New Britain. Boris Johnson displayed his talent for storytelling when he made “take back control” a salient pitch of the Leave campaign and “get Brexit done” the most cut-through message of his winning election campaign in 2019.”