Polls, modernising and how a narrative needs to be knit

On Monday, I quickly tweeted an observation from Peter Kellner’s regular commentary from YouGov.  I wasn’t planning on returning to the whole modernisation/change issue any time soon (we did have rather an extravaganza of posts about it before Christmas) but I think the coverage that the Big Society has recently received is a salutary lesson in why it’s still vital.

I noted that the Tories’ rating for “It seems to have moved on and left its past behind it” has dropped a third in about two weeks. Their rating for “Even if I don’t always agree with it, at least its heart is in the right place” has dropped to 21 per cent.

Now polls are, of course, subject to all sorts of things like margins of error, a rogue poll, a bad run of headlines that distort a trend… I could go on. But this time, I could see why this is true.

Let me explain…

The fundamental question for Labour about the Big Society is this: If you were so in favour of the principles of decentralisation, local control and community, why did you do so much in the last 13 years to undermine it? I’m not terribly interested in the answer, because I think their actions speak louder than their words – I would, however, like someone to ask Labour that question…

Equally, the fundamental question for the Tories is this: given the way that people perceive you (and I disagree with the myths, but let’s leave that aside for now), how do you persuade people that you have indeed left behind the baby-eating and the aggressive individualism of the 1980s and prove that you are on the side of, to coin a phrase I hate, ordinary hard-working families?

There are two answers to that. The first is the way we govern – I’ve talked before about the risks and opportunities of governing with the Lib Dems (briefly, they are that either the Tories are seen to have only been moderate because the Lib Dems forced it, or that the Tories are sufficiently moderate already that the Lib Dems are comfortable being in coalition anyway). The second answer is that the Conservatives needed to have proven beyond all doubt by May 2010 that they were the change, that they had changed, that they fully understood and internalised the reasons we were so loathed by 1997 and into the mid-2000s and that we had irrevocably turned away from what was perceived to be the bad bits of our heritage.

Now I – obviously – do not agree with all of the myths. But among my theories of why we didn’t win a majority in 2010 is that we stopped really pushing the change in early 2008. Yes there was a desperately bad economic situation – but we failed to outline why the pain we were promising was going to lead to better times. We failed to illuminate the gloom with some sunlit uplands.

People are fearful that we are not concerned with the most vulnerable in our society. They are concerned that we do not care about opportunity. They are terrified that we want to slash and burn. None of this is true – but there has been no real effort (apart from when things get to boiling point, as on Monday with the Cameron Direct on the Big Society) to explain why what we’re doing will make things better.

Those polling numbers should concern Andrew Cooper (though he comes via Populus, I imagine that his firm is showing similar trends). He needs to do some things that are simple to say but difficult to implement. He needs to make sure that every department pushes three straightforward ways in which their legislation will improve peoples’ lives (and if they can’t – no legislation). He needs to make sure that those things are then woven together into a strategic grid so that they all hang together to make a coherent narrative about why this government is doing the things it is. And finally he needs to make sure that the third parties related to each piece of legislation are pre-briefed with the facts and the ideas behind those policies, so that they understand them  – BEFORE those organisations are given the attack points by the opposition and sent on the news to complain.

I accept that this will take some doing. But done it must be.

Related posts:

1. Could the coalition actually set back the modernising cause?
2. Do the polls mean what they say?
3. What today’s polls tell us
4. On polls and persistence
5. As McCain Tanks In The Polls The GOP Smear Machine Is Unleashed