Four mistakes campaigners against no-deal Brexit must not make this time
During the first quarter of last year you couldn’t move for warnings about a no-deal Brexit: the TUC (the organisation for workers) and the CBI (the organisation for bosses) even set aside their differences to make a joint statement about how bad it would be. And yet it was notable that even during this cacophony of disapprovals, support for no deal was stubbornly consistent.
In order to better understand the public discourse around no deal, I spent last summer working on an analysis of the language both its supporters and opponents were using; what was going well and what wasn’t. I’ll be making the 10,000 word report I wrote public in the coming weeks.
In the meantime I thought it would be interesting to revisit no deal in 2020, given that it may well rear its ugly head again as the Brexit deadline draws nearer. To that end I asked the comms team at NEON if they would be willing to commission YouGov to repeat a couple of poll questions that were already asked in February 2019 to see whether public opinion has shifted much. Here’s one of the results:
As you can see, nothing much has changed. Support for no deal is driven almost exclusively by Leave voters who see it as a good thing. No deal is also more popular the older you are, with only 7% of 18-24 year olds seeing it as a good thing compared to 35% of over-65s. The generational divide in British politics persists.
Now, if I spent the rest of this blog post analysing the reasons why some people are so attached to leaving the EU that they’re willing to risk tanking the economy to do it, the resulting text would probably be longer than the report I spent writing last year. So instead, I want to share three mistakes that I identified in the comms of no-deal opponents last year in the hope that if we find ourselves fighting this fight again this year, things might be a bit different.
Enough with the apocalypse talk
Look I get the reasoning behind continuously issuing apocalyptic warnings about a no-deal Brexit. No deal is going to be terrible, people need to understand that. Maybe if they realised how bad it would be they’d change their minds etc etc.
In fact last year, catastrophe was overwhelmingly the most popular frame amongst opponents of a no-deal Brexit. Words like “catastrophe,” “freefall,” “chaos,” “disaster” were frequently at the forefront of press releases and tweets on the matter. And yet very few communicators seemed to ask themselves why the polls weren’t shifting when people were constantly being told that no-deal Brexit was world-endingly bad.
Most of us already know the answer: when you scare people, they don’t tend to turn around and say, “how alarming! Please, tell me more!” Scared people shut down - especially when they have no control over the thing that’s scaring them. We’ve all got experiences of this: when you bring up politics at a family dinner and you get told off for ruining the mood (no? Just me?), when people in your life tell you they don’t watch the news because it’s too negative. Have you ever wondered why people aren’t rioting in the streets about climate change every day of the week? Considering the level of risk, they probably should be. Simply put, they’re freaked out. They can’t control it, so they just keep their heads down and get on.
We don’t have any research on why people aren’t responding to catastrophic warnings about no-deal Brexit (or at least none that I know of - if you’ve done some I’d love to see it). But there are a lot of studies on applying the catastrophe frame to talking about climate change. A 2015 study on engagement with climate change found that presenting participants with apocalyptic scenarios is “more likely to provoke rejection, fatalism and disengagement than adaptive responses.” We can speculate that the same thing is happening with no-deal Brexit, especially given the state of the polls.
Don’t make people feel afraid, make them feel galvanised.
2. Factor in what the other side are saying
The catastrophe frame also reminds us of another principle of communications, covered by my first blog: all of our communications exist in a context that we often don’t create, and very seldom can control. This context includes the frames our opponents are using.
In the case of no-deal Brexit, Brexiteers spent much of last year tapping into the system-is-rigged frame. From the outset, key Leave spokespeople have sought to portray the Remain campaign as an establishment conspiracy which uses fear as a tool to con the public into staying in the EU. In 2016, Boris Johnson wrote in the Daily Telegraph that “the agents of Project Fear” were trying to “spook” the British public with warnings about the risks of leaving the EU. This system-is-rigged frame may have even had more caché in 2019 than it did in 2016, as Brexit still hasn’t caused the “profound economic shock” Remainers predicted after the referendum result. I sat through many focus groups on this issue last year, and I always recall one participant describing these warnings as lies from “the Remain establishment.” In other words, using the catastrophe frame may actually strengthen the system-is-rigged frame no deal advocates used to win support for Brexit.
Your communications do not exist in a vacuum; they interact with everything else around them.
3. Tell a clear story
As part of the analysis I conducted last year, I looked at what people in focus groups were saying. The frame they used most often was clarity. On the one hand, they complained of being bombarded with information; on the other, they would say things like “if you just gave me the information I could make a decision.” Often, the people observing focus groups with me would exclaim, “I don’t get it! We give them information all the time and now they’re saying they’re not getting any!”
But the most important - and most frequent - way in which the clarity frame came up was people saying they didn’t understand what a no-deal Brexit meant. Thus, their requests for information were not about being given more facts and statistics: they were requests for people to explain the whole thing to them clearly. They wanted to be told a comprehensible story that made sense to them. In the report, I wrote “The current state of limbo on Brexit, combined with no-deal opponents continuously evoking catastrophe, seemed to exacerbate an undefined sense of panic amongst participants - but it did not turn Leavers against no deal.”
At the time, a popular frame amongst advocates of no deal was purity. They talked a lot about a “clean” Brexit, they said Brexit should not be diluted, they said a soft Brexit meant bits of the EU would still be left in Britain. The attraction of a clean break like this is that it is decisive and clear. And of course, the Labour Party’s position was pretty indecipherable. When you consider this context, it becomes easy to understand why “Get Brexit Done” became such an appealing slogan.
If you want to persuade people against no deal this year, tell them a story about it that resonates with them and that they can easily understand.
4. Know what you want
This should be obvious, right? If you’re going to campaign, you need to know what you’re campaigning for. The problem is that progressives spent last year campaigning against a no-deal Brexit, and what they were for instead wasn’t often spelled out. Indeed, different elements of the anti-no deal coalition wanted different things to replace a no-deal Brexit. Some wanted a Norway-style arrangement, some wanted a loose relationship with the EU, others wanted to reverse Brexit altogether.
This time around, opponents of no deal must decide what they want the alternative to be. Is it Boris Johnson’s deal? Is it a Norway-style arrangement? Or is it something else altogether?
Once there is some kind of shared aim in policy terms, campaigners must then spell out what achieving that aim would look like for ordinary people. So instead of talking about “retaining freedom of movement,” for example, campaigners could advocate for “a Brexit that makes summer holidays easy.” Brexiteers have been quite clear about what the world they want to create would look and feel like. What does our world look like?
No deal opponents need to convince a segment of the population that support no deal to turn against it. But the best way of persuading people to turn against something is by giving them something else to turn towards.
Perhaps if I was going to insist that the readers of this blog tattoo any communications mantra on their forearm it would be this one:
Stop talking about what you are against, and start talking about what you are for.
***
There is a coda to this piece.
At the beginning, I said I had asked NEON to repeat a couple of poll questions. Here are the results of the second one:
Now, as you can see there has been some movement here. More people do believe that warnings about no-deal Brexit damaging the economy have some truth to them. Why has there been a shift on this question that hasn’t been reflected in the levels of support for no deal? What caused this shift? These are questions that are worth investigating before the Brexit deadline arrives. If I was campaigning against no deal, that’s what I’d be looking into.
