Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

The political and cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert identifies two competing
approaches as to how Labour should address the question of electability:
marketing and movement-building. The marketing approach treats the
electorate as consumers with fixed preferences, where the ideal politician is
a polished salesperson armed with a perfectly calibrated retail policy offer.
The movement-building approach treats public opinion as a changeable
landscape, where elections are won not only by competent politicians but
by social forces mobilised in support of a transformative agenda.
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As Gilbert notes, the problem with the marketing approach is that it
cannot explain how socio-political change happens. Imagine if Sylvia
Pankhurst or Rosa Parks had said that ‘we have to accept where people
are’ on women’s rights, or ‘we understand the public’s legitimate
concerns’ on desegregation. The legacy of those figures, and thousands
of activists like them, is a standing rebuke to the oft-repeated, ahistorical
nonsense that Labour can achieve nothing with protest, but only by first
winning power. In reality, the power to enact serious change can only
be won by first preparing the ground through patient and committed
grassroots action.
The other problem with the marketing approach is that it encourages the
erasure of moral red lines. If majority opinion blames immigrants and
people on social security for the country’s problems, then Labour must
appeal to these voter-consumer preferences. Consciences can always be
soothed with some feeble rhetoric about how it is, in some tortured sense,
progressive to collude in the politics of scapegoating. The marketing
approach precludes not only a transformative agenda, but sometimes
even basic levels of human decency.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 16