Narrating the economy.

AuthorBerry, Christine

What is the story of the economy in Britain? Who gets to shape public opinion about what it's for, how it's broken and how it can be fixed? And how can progressive forces tell a new story to help accelerate the shift to a new economic system?

These are the questions the Framing the Economy project--a partnership between the New Economy Organisers' Network, the Public Interest Research Centre, the Frameworks Institute and the New Economics Foundation--set out to answer. We wanted to help civil society communicate and organise more effectively, to help bring about the changes needed to move to a sustainable, equitable and democratic economy.

Shifting sands--the context we're working in

The dominant story told about the UK economy, and the politics of that story, have changed repeatedly in the past three years. From 2010-2015, the defining story of British politics--the one that gave many progressives a rude awakening to the power of narrative--was the austerity story. The airwaves were full of politicians repeating that we had maxed out the nation's credit card and needed to stop borrowing; that the Labour government had spent too much and crashed the economy; that without drastic cuts to public spending, the UK could end up like Greece.

This story was remarkably resilient - against sluggish economic performance and failure on its own deficit reduction measures; against the reasoned arguments of Keynesian commentators; against the anger of anti-cuts campaigners. It not only reinforced austerity politics but crowded out space to talk about real threats to our economy, like climate change. It spread the feeling that sustainability and social justice were luxuries the UK could no longer afford.

At the same time, George Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant! (1) was popularising the idea that the way we frame issues radically shapes the way people think about them. Many on the left became increasingly convinced that our tactics needed a radical rethink--that trying to combat a simple and powerful story with facts, statistics, myth-busters and appeals to fairness was doomed to fail. As one senior press officer put it to us, 'We brought a spreadsheet to a knife fight.' More fundamentally, many began to suspect that our efforts to rebut the austerity story were actually reinforcing its boundaries--that we were playing into the hands of our opponents, and urgently needed to tell a new story of our own. It was against this backdrop that Framing the Economy was conceived.

In the years since then, British politics has been turned upside down. Over the past two years, the meetings of the Framing the Economy Network--a group of 40 top progressive communicators and campaigners who have been part of the project--have sometimes felt like group therapy. Brexit, Theresa May becoming Prime Minister, Trump becoming President, the shock 2017 election results--each of our meetings seemed to be accompanied by a new political earthquake. It was easy to feel bewildered, politically jet-lagged, struggling to remould our assumptions around an ever-changing reality. But it was also a huge privilege to be able to navigate this increasingly unpredictable world with such an impressive, committed and diverse group of people.

In 2016, a new story took hold of the public debate: the Brexit story. The Leave campaign insisted that the UK needed to 'take back control' from distant elites in Brussels, that our economy would thrive if only we could make our own decisions. This proved an immensely powerful story for millions of people who felt ignored and disenfranchised. (Though of course, many comfortably-off people in the south east and elsewhere also voted for Leave.) But of course, the Brexit story is not only a story about elites, but about outsiders of all kinds: it has gone hand in hand with the demonization of migrants and a terrifying rise in racism and xenophobia.

In 2017, we saw a glimpse of what could happen if the British people were offered a more positive story about our collective future. Against virtually all expert predictions, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party came to the brink of power with a message of ending austerity, rebuilding the public sphere and reclaiming common ownership of resources like energy and the railways. Ideas which had been taboo for a generation were suddenly back on the political agenda.

It is not only the content of these stories...

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