Pilot 19: Activate The #Memes

I’ve written about the deep-seated resistance to innovation in British politics before. The new Tory ‘youth movement’ unleashed at the height of silly season is yet another example of chronic lack of imagination.

Activate is the Conservative Party’s latest and possibly weakest attempt at courting the youth vote. It is supposed to be their answer to Momentum, an activist movement that communicates directly with young people disillusioned by politics as usual.

This apparently mostly involves the inept use of memes. Or should I say #memes.

(Activate has since deleted all their much derided memes and claimed they were hacked. Their members Whatsapp group chat was leaked, showcasing some extremely classy ‘jokes’ about gassing chavs. We’ll be discussing that in next week’s pod.)

We’ve discussed this on the podcast before but it really does show a staggering level of myopia from the people at CCHQ. Willingly or not they are blind to the fact that their platform doesn’t appeal to young people. It’s not a question of messaging and no amount of (extremely stale) memes will bring young people who care about things like freedom of movement, housing and the NHS to a party which is attacking them.

Linked to the Tories complete failure to connect with The Youth™ is this hilarious article from the Adam Smith Institute which says the youth vote can be won with tax-free flights to Ibiza. The full document also comes out in favour of drug decriminalization, but otherwise it has a singular solution (hint: deregulation and reduced taxes, who would have thought). Also this hilarious passage which reveals that the author has never even seen a joint never mind smoked one:

“Many young people take recreational drugs. Occasionally some of them smoke a cannabis spliff with friends. Many of them pop an ecstasy tablet to help them enjoy late night dancing at a club. Some of them try amphetamines or snort a line of cocaine. Consumption of any of these drugs is currently against the law.”

This isn’t a movement. It’s a stagnant. A stall. If it is a movement, it’s a bellyflop. They missed a big opportunity to brand themselves “Inertia”.

It’s staggering that anybody seems to think memes are the youth vote holy grail — as though churning them out will do anything to address the hurt and outrage caused by their actions in government. They don’t care about the youth vote — if they really did then would they have been approaching policy very differently.

The Tories don’t care because they have calculated that they don’t have to — and they’ve proven it in the last few years. You only need to look at the findings of the Prince’s Trust in its annual Youth Index.

The overall wellbeing of young people is lower now than at any point since it launched the index eight years ago.

Over a quarter of young people report feeling a lack of control over their lives; over a third feel they will have a “worse standard of living than their parents”;

42% feel that “traditional goals” such as owning a home, or getting a steady job are “unrealistic”

Nearly six out of 10 say that recent political events and the current economic climate make them feel anxious for their future.

I am not a huge fan of Momentum. But it is a genuine movement, born out of grassroots upswell in support for a particular candidate. It has members, it has people willing to proselytize about it (on and offline), it has meetings and aims and organising bodies. It is not a cynical attempt to target a different segment of the population. Even if Activate come back with a more sophisticated social media strategy it still won’t have that.

In the previous pod*, I spoke to Sam Jeffers of Who Targets Me. This is an organisation that looks to scrape and quantify which parties are targeting people on Facebook. Funnily, Who Targets Me are an example of innovation in British politics.

They did that because they wanted to know if micro-targeted ads could make up for the lack of grassroots supporters: i.e. can the Tories leverage technology to overcome the sheer foot traffic of Momentum? (Spoiler alert: no).

In the USA, sophisticated targeting and social media ads helped create the monster of Donald Trump. But even there — with vastly more money and two full years to do the research — it wasn’t enough by itself. Political campaigning has two main components: 1) Mobilizing people 2) Convincing people.

The most successful political campaigns succeed because of the first point. And memes don’t mobilize people. Not just yet.

*No blog post on that one as we were all on holiday.