Just days after the 2015 General Election, politicians, pundits and journalists alike had dedicated plenty of column inches to the reasons for such an unexpected result.
Of all the factors that have been cited to explain away the poll that toppled three election leaders, communication is a common theme. In fact, Labour's below-par performance has been variously attributed to three key communication failures:
- Targeting the wrong audience
- Losing control of the story
- Offensive communication
1. Targeting the wrong audience
Labour MP Chuka Umunna's post mortem of the 2015 election in the Guardian attributed much of Labour's poor performance to speaking to the wrong people. Labour politicians, Umunna said, targeted core voters rather than aspirational, middle-class ones. They talked about people at the bottom and top of society but didn't focus on the majority of people in the middle. As fellow MP Tristram Hunt put it, Labour needed to appeal to the "John Lewis community".
How to improve: it goes without saying that if you want to engage a range of audiences, you need to craft messages that appeal to each of them. One of the challenges for Labour, as researcher Robert Ford has pointed out, is that they need to communicate different offers to different demographic groups. In such a situation, misdirected communications could alienate some target groups.
2. Losing control of the story
Both Chuka Umunna and former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott have highlighted how effectively the Conservatives developed and presented a narrative that blamed Labour for wrecking the country's economy. Prescott describes this as a "myth which grew into a publicly accepted 'fact'". Tony Blair's former Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell, has also reflected that Labour had allowed the Conservatives "to frame the politics surrounding the economy for the entire [2010-2015] Parliament".
How to improve: while it may have seemed a smart move to focus Labour communications on the future rather than obsess about the past, the party ultimately lost control of a story about their own actions. They should have acted faster to counter Conservative claims and could even have spread a story of shared responsibility (since the Conservatives had agreed to Labour's spending plans).
3. Offensive communication
Two days after the 2015 election, Labour MP Liam Byrne wrote a newspaper article apologising for his much-publicised 'leaving note', a letter left in the Treasury before the 2010 General Election. Brandished by Prime Minister David Cameron during the 2015 campaign, the hand-written communication was addressed to Byrne's successor as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It said, "I'm afraid there is no money" and was signed "Kind regards – and good luck!"
Byrne says he intended the letter as a friendly handover note, akin to messages that other outgoing politicians have jocularly passed on to their successors in former decades. What Byrne later realised was that his 'friendly' note was actually a crass and offensive mistake. Not only did it provide sharp-shooting ammunition for his political opponents, the letter also showed little sensitivity for the British people who had been forced to make sacrifices due to spending cuts.
How to improve: if Byrne had taken the time to think about how the note might have been perceived by someone other than its intended recipient, and how he would feel if it was made public, he probably wouldn't have made the mistake he now says burns him with shame every day.
Of course, communication isn't everything. No one will vote for a party if they don't agree with their policies. But in the General Election 2015 Labour failed to target the right people with the right messages and let others tell their story. The party will need to improve on that – as well as looking at its policies – if it wants to do better next time.
Anna Faherty is the author of a new course on accountingcpd.net, Communicating for Professional Success
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