As I think I have mentioned here before, Iman and I facilitated a workshop with a group of migration experts in Istanbul in October. This provided an initial set of ideas for the report which we then developed with some supporting research and analysis.

The report can be downloaded here.

I’m sharing here a version of the section of the report on the challenge of making migration a less toxic political issue. It’s a bit more academic in style than my usual articles here.

The road ahead: a (geo)politics of migration

Because parties and politicians across the world make political capital out of migration, the public and political discourse around migration is routinely described as “toxic.” In a recent article about the narrative construction of “migration”, Sommer (2022) notes that

pragmatic policy narratives of crisis management clash with aggressive discourses of xenophobia and racism, cosmopolitan counter-narratives and the humanitarian storytelling employed by NGOs.

Over the last decade, though, it is these populist and “xenophobic” discourses on migration that have been normalised by the mainstream. These play out in public attitudes. More than with any other policy area, there is a chasm between what the data tell us about migration, and what people believe to be true about it. In a survey of six developed countries,

respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants are culturally and religiously more distant from them, and economically weaker – less educated, more unemployed, and more reliant on and favored by government transfers – than they actually are (Alesina et al., 2022).

Globalisation shocks

This fits with a perspective which says that the rise of global populism is a reaction to two things: the over-reach of globalisation in the 1980s and 1990s, and a long secular shift in generational values.

Alesina et al. say “there is compelling evidence, from a variety of settings, that globalisation shocks, often working through culture and identity, have played an important role in driving up support for populist, particularly right-wing, movements.” This also positions “reimagining of migration and mobility” as a fundamentally political project.

Processes therefore matter. Different political and media actors are enrolled at different moments in a cycle that uses migration to feed right-wing rhetoric (see figure). External shock leads to an internal dislocation of some kind, which becomes a media subject in traditional and social media.

This then feeds through into the political system, at the level of both rhetoric and regulation (Angeli, 2018). Since migration is a necessary part of well-functioning labour markets, however, there is always a gap between the rhetoric and the outcomes.

Figure: The vicious cycle of migration discourse

‘Migration’, ‘crisis’, and ‘control’

Recent behavioural research has focused on the construction of the underlying schema of “migration as crisis” that sits behind this cycle. Taking the Ukraine war and the Afghanistan evacuation as examples, Cantat et al. (2023) observe that migration is not always a “crisis”. The activation of that particular framing is always a choice.

On this reading, “migration” and its “control” become an expression of deeper anxiety about the control of the State, at both a national level and an individual level. This “crisis” framing is then expressed through rhetoric about “control” and “containment” that is always incomplete. This is the policy cycle that sits behind the political cycle in the figure above.

These narratives

rely on the assumption that migration is not (or should not be) a normal phenomenon… This blocks the recognition of migration as a structural feature of today’s world, and the elaboration of long-term, systemic political strategies.

Migration, then, which first became an issue with the development of the modern nation-state in the twentieth century, has become a signifier of a whole range of problems experienced by the twenty-first century state.

This suggests that rethinking migration requires strategies that can operate at two levels. There is the immediate challenge of finding ways to break the political cycle; then there is a deeper challenge, which is to detach the notion of “migration” from the deeper anxieties for which it has become a proxy.

Changing the narrative

Battles over narratives are typically also battles over political frames. Lakoff (2004) characterizes the difference between conservative frames and progressive frames as being expressed in metaphors about the family. Conservative ideas stem from a notion of “the strict family”; progressive ideas from a notion of “the nurturant family”.

These conflicting sets of ideas can also be seen in the frames deployed against modernity and for it, by authoritarians and populists and their political opponents respectively, as discussed earlier. Clearly the current discourse about migration comes from “the strict family”.

In Lakoff’s description, the values that sit behind the nurturing family include freedom, opportunity, prosperity, fairness, community-building and trust. The advantages that flow from migration – economic, sociocultural and civic–political – resonate strongly with these values. They also underpin a different narrative about the purpose of the state. They speak beyond migration to tell broader stories to all citizens about the role of a supportive and infrastructural twenty-first century form of government.

Telling your own story

As Sommer (2022) says, “The pro-migrant narrative and the anti-migrant narrative are incommensurable.” Reframing involves telling your story on your terms, rather than trying to argue with opponents on their terrain, which serves only to make their argument resonate more strongly. In the words of Alesina et al., “views on immigration are more sensitive to salience and narratives than to hard facts.”

The challenge of reframing, therefore, is to build a base that is willing to speak for migration in narratives that progressive and centrist voters can support. Since part of the politics around migration is a response to globalization, this cannot only be done top-down by global institutions. However, local activist groups get lost in the noise; the contrast between well-funded and organized anti-migration parties and the bootstrapped community groups that seek to defend refugees and migration could not be sharper.

Filling this gap requires a serious coalition-building project – bridging the local, the national and the international. One successful precedent would be the peacebuilding project, which brings together concerned scientists and technical experts with religious groups such as the Quakers that work both locally and globally.

This is slow work. As Lakoff reminds us, when your opponents have control of the frame, it takes time to build a different version of it; but there is a political audience for this story and it is likely to grow as time passes. Migration politics is at its core a struggle over values, and the values of the younger generations are much more aligned with the story of opportunity, fairness and trust.

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There is also a playlist that was developed during the workshop and curated by Iman afterwards.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/1qR8dJBPpsRXs0SgrQ3b4z

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References

Alesina, A., A. Miano and S. Stantcheva (2022). Immigration and redistribution. NBER Working Paper 24733.

Angeli, O. (2018). European migration policy and the rise of populism. European Insights.

Cantat, C., A. Picoul and H. Thiollet (2023). Migration as crisis. American Behavioral Scientist.

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont.

Sommer, R. (2023). Migration and narrative dynamics. In: P. Dawson and M. Mäkelä (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. Routledge, New York.

They say that your syntax always finds you out. Metaphors can be just as revealing. As George Lakoff observes, metaphors are the devices we use to frame the way we think about the world. In politics, according to Lakoff, it the competition for the frames–effectively, competition between the metaphors–that resolves electoral and political competition.

Tax, for example, is harder to raise when it is a “burden” and not an “investment in the common good”.

Cameron’s view on austerity, according to his memoirs, is that he and his Chancellor, George Osborne, should have cut deeper and cut faster when they came to power. Here’s the extract from the book, quoted in Politics Home:

My assessment now is that we probably didn’t cut enough.

We could have done more, even more quickly, as smaller countries like Ireland had done, to get Britain back in the black and then get the economy moving. Those who were opposed to austerity were going to be opposed — and pretty hysterically — to whatever we did. 

Given all the hype and hostility, and yes, sometimes hatred, we might as well have ripped the plaster off with more cuts early on. We were taking the flak for them anyway. We should have taken advantage of the window of public support for cuts when it was open.

(My emphasis). I haven’t read the book, but this line from it has been widely quoted, from The Times to the Telegraph to the Independent to the New Yorker. Plasters, for American readers, are Band-Aids.

Counter-productive

This suggests that, whatever he’s been doing in his expensive faux-shepherd’s hut, he hasn’t been keeping up with the recent economics research. The International Monetary Fund, not normally regarded as a hotbed of radical thought, has concluded that austerity was counter-productive (pdf). The stated intention of the policy was to reduce debt to free up productive capital that was being “crowded out” by public spending (spot the metaphor).

But even on its own terms, this is wrong. The IMF research found that public sector cuts shrink the private sector faster than the public sector. If we’re doing metaphors, it turns out that the public and private sectors are co-dependent species. One of the associated mysteries to this is why George Osborne thought for a moment that he might be a suitable successor to the IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

Austerity and UKIP

Nor has Cameron been catching up on his politics research. Research at Warwick University published on the LSE blog found that exposure to austerity had a significant effect of UKIP’s share of vote in the years running up the referendum decision. It was of course, the share of UKIP vote that spooked Cameron into calling the referendum:

Estimates indicate that, in districts that received the average austerity shock, UKIP vote shares were on average 3.6 percentage points higher in the 2014 European elections and 11.6 percentage points higher in the most recent local elections prior to the referendum, compared to districts with little exposure to austerity.

The impact of austerity is estimated by the research as having increased the Leave vote by 9 percentage points.

On the High Street

The third thing he hasn’t been doing is getting out much, or getting out beyond the pleasant crescents of Notting Hill and the tree-lined avenues of Witney. Because the other effect of austerity has been to wreak havoc on the High Street. The conventional wisdom is that this is the result of online shopping, and obviously online has had an effect.

But austerity, with the flatlining household income and economic growth it caused, has had a bigger impact–and this on top of the online effect, happening anyway. The sums: analysis of data from the Office of Budget Responsibility by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the impact of austerity in 2018-19 alone to the overall economy is £100 billion, or £3,600 per household. Retail has high fixed costs, and small downturns in income can tip it over the edge into being unprofitable. This doesn’t just matter if, say, you used to work for Maplin. It matters because a thriving high street is a public good that extends well beyond shopping.

In short, Cameron has had a decade to think about this, and two years since resigning as an MP to think about nothing else. His conclusion: austerity, which as it was wrecked his economy and his Referendum, should have been pursued even more vigorously. It is the conclusion of a fool, or a zealot.

Empty metaphors

Here is the metaphor again:

‘we might as well have ripped the plaster off with more cuts early on’

As a metaphor it sounds good, at first hearing. It is tough, dynamic, and decisive, etc. But as a figure of speech, it is also completely empty. In one line we have an accurate summary of David Cameron’s Prime Ministerial career, maybe his whole political career.

So what’s the metaphor about? Well, that’s the problem. Let’s walk it back through.

Plasters go on cuts to help them heal. You take them off after the cuts have healed. How you take them off is a tactical decision: do you go quick, and a brief moment of pain when the hairs are pulled up? (This may also be a male metaphor). Do you go slow, and ease it loose? The strategy is about the healing. The skin has had time to knit itself back together over the cut.

So when Cameron says he should have ripped the plaster off more quickly, the question is, what is the plaster being ripped off from. Of course, “cuts”–by government–are a metaphor too. So maybe this discussion of plasters is actually the return of the repressed.

In other words, the entire metaphor is empty. If he’d been being honest, he’d have been talking about amputation instead, As I said at the beginning, your metaphors find you out.

Tactics and strategy

Of course, Cameron and Osborne were obsessed with tactics, constantly mistaking them for strategy. This led them to the process where their reputations have been trashed by the outcomes of their politics.

Anthony Barnett’s assessment, in his Brexit book, The Lure of Greatness, was succinct. “Cameron is one of those politicians who enjoys unlimited personal ambition untroubled by the burden of larger purpose.”

Falling stock

In the intervening couple of years, Cameron’s stock has fallen. The assessment this week of David Cameron’s career by Ian Dunt, on politics.co.uk, is brutal:

Cameron promised to match Labour spending, until he didn’t think it beneficial and turned fiscal hawk. He promised to get the Tory party to stop “banging on” about Europe, until that wasn’t useful either and he announced a referendum. He was green until he wasn’t. He was liberal except not really. He was relaxed about immigration but against it. He loved multiculturalism but insisted it had failed. There was simply nothing there. None of it meant anything. He was a tactic where a strategy should be.

We’re all still paying for the price for this, literally and metaphorically. And Cameron? He’s still doing empty soundbites.

He’s not a typical academic: almost the first thing he told us was that neither of his parents went to high school (secondary school).

Anyway, the most important thing to know about his work is that it’s based on neuroscience and that once you have heard him explain it, this changes the way you think about political language and political discourse.

Every thought is physical

There are several building blocks to his work.

• The first is that “Every thought you have is physical”, meaning that it is produced by neural circuitry.And what this means is that an individual can’t understand anything that doesn’t fit the neural circuits of their brain.
• The second is that all politics is moral. (And the role of political language is to make the moral basis of politics explicit).
• The third is that morality is in one part of the brain, and detail is in another part of the brain.
• The fourth is that there is no middle ground. There are conservatives and progressives, and – at both ends of the spectrum there are people with some elements of ‘conflicting’ thought (e.g. progressives with a subset of conservative views, and vice versa.) But the notion of the ‘middle ground’ in politics is plain wrong.
• The fifth is that there are ‘mutual inhibitors’ in the brain; if you turn on a receptor to a particular thought, you turn off the receptors that might entertain an opposing thought. The more receptors get used, the stronger they get. And vice versa. And when you try to negate a ‘frame’ that’s used by an opponent, all you do is strengthen the frame.

Family metaphors

In short, then, progressives and conservatives think in different ways about what is right. This insight isn’t unique to George Lakoff; it’s also the argument made by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind. In the States, this translates into different mental models of the family, a discourse that runs through American political language (Founding Fathers, Daughters of the Revolution, sending sons and daughters to war, homeland security). For conservatives, that family is a strict family, for progressives it is a nurturing family.

The history he told about the rise of the conservative hegemony – in terms of framing – in the US is that it started in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson humiliated the Republican right-winger, Barry Goldwater, in the Presidential election (Johnson got 62% of the vote, Goldwater 37%). Richard Nixon, Goldwater’s successor as Republican candidate, decided to do something about this. So the Vietnam war protestors were re-positioned as “communists”; feminists were positioned as being against “traditional family values”; the civil rights movement was (irony of ironies) positioned as being against law and order. He created a version of conservative populism in which the “liberal elite” were the enemy. The result: generations of (white) working class voters who voted their instincts instead of their pocket books – and, of course, got flat or declining household incomes for 30 years.

Framing the discourse

So, as Lakoff observes, in the US the conservatives have been using frames for more 40 years. And they work hard at it: they’re not stupid, they just happen to have a moral framework which makes little sense to progressives. And people like Frank Luntz are highly skilled at the business of framing discourses to suit a conservative worldview. Progressives don’t tend to work at this, partly because they have an ‘enlightenment’ view of the world in which people respond to reason.

So, by way of a more recent example, George W. Bush on the idea of “tax relief” – actually a huge government handout to the rich. He started talking about it early in his Presidency and kept talking about it every day until it had become the dominant story about tax. “Relief”, as Lakoff observed, is a feeling you get when you take away the pain. In contrast, although Ed Miliband does seem to get the idea, he doesn’t yet get the “dripping tap” part of it. Lakoff pointed out that his June speech had a number of good frames in it. And each was mentioned once.

Switching the debate

For political discourse, there are some simple but sharp lessons. The most important one is that “Facts and figures mean nothing unless you frame them. It is important to say why every number matters”. And you win debates, as every high school debater knows, by switching the content of the debate into your “frame”.

Lakoff ran through a few examples from current discourse. Carbon tax sounds like an imposition, but a citizen rebate is a good thing. “Living wage” is OK, but “fair wage” is better. “Contribution” is a good word (and especially things “earned by contribution”) but “entitlement is a terrible word. Never use it.”

And one clear success story: equal marriage (not gay marriage). It happened that Lakoff had advised the equal marriage campaign in the States, and he ran through the main principles of the way the campaign was framed:

• “Equal marriage”, not gay marriage
• Love, not sex
• Taking responsibility
• Making commitment

“And then”, he added, “we said to the conservatives, now come out against it.”

Frames and filter bubbles

While a lot of this makes sense, it does open up some difficult issues. The fact that Lakoff was speaking against the backdrop of the US government shutdown speaks to some of these. While the US political system has its own distinctive peculiarities the shutdown is what happens when frames over-ride evidence, and, indeed, frame-based politics capture political parties.

If one of the problems of politics in a net-based age is the rise of “filter bubble“, frames exacerbate that. And while Lakoff would argue that the frame is not a substitute for proper discussion of political and public outcomes (and the moral basis for these), in the hands of more unscrupulous operators it turns politics into a battle of soundbites in which the mark of success is how well your whistle can round up your supporters: the politics not so much of the dog whistle as the sheepdog trial.

It turned out, by the way, that the TUC’s conference on “welfare” was misnamed. Ruth Lister, now a Labour peer, asked if Lakoff agreed that we should instead be talking about “social” and “security”. “You’re right on that”, he shot back.

The image at the top of this post is from Wikimedia, and is used with thanks.

Miliband’s election, and the reaction to it, tells us much about the nature of long-term social and political change.

I’m not a member of the Labour Party and didn’t have a vote in the leadership election, but I am a social democrat. There were cheers in our house when Ed Miliband won the leadership – and some perplexity since then as to why the Conservatives seem to think it’s such a good result for them. It’s probably worth explaining this, for wrapped inside both of these arguments is a larger story about the nature of long-term change.

As a social democrat, I am one of those who has voted, quite often, for Labour in the past, but didn’t this year. I didn’t recognise it as social democratic any more. My list is much the same as everybody else’s, and there’s little need to rehearse it here at length, but authoritarianism, attacks on civil liberties, complicity in torture, failure to reduce inequality, creeping financialisation of the public and personal sector, a disregard for the environment (Runway Three?) and an undue interest for the opinions of the wealthy would all be there, along with, of course, the illegal war in Iraq.

It’s not a surprise to me, therefore, that a number of these were highlighted in Ed Miliband’s first leader’s speech this week, as a re-statement that the Labour Party ought to be a social democratic party. Sadly, for all his social democratic instincts, we’d have heard less of this from David in the parallel universe in which the older brother won.

So part of my perplexity is why the Conservatives are so sure that the clear expression of social democratic values is going to be electorally damaging.

Long waves of change

At this point it’s worth stepping back, quite a long way, to look at some of the long waves of change. The drivers of long term change are generally regarded by futurists as being technology, economics, and generational change. (There’s a good paper by James Dator on this, opens in pdf.) One useful model of generational change is that of ‘The Fourth Turning‘ by Strauss and Howe, which suggests that over an eighty-to-hundred year period, societies move from crisis, through institution building (“High”), through an Awakening, through an Unravelling, and back to Crisis again. The High is a clear phase in which there is shared social purpose; the awakening starts challenging this, and the Unravelling period is a reaffirmation of more individualism. The crisis emerges when the contradictions within the Unraveling period finally overwhelm us.

The Fouth Turning model – which is based on analysis of US history – is quite complex, and sometimes too precise for my taste, and it is supported by much close generational analysis. But at a high level, looking at the UK, one can see the 1920s and 1930s as representing a crisis phase, followed by the institution building of the late-wartime and post-war period. ‘Awakening’ corresponds to the late 50s through to the early 70s (‘you’ve never had it so good‘), and we have been unravelling since the late 70s, before crisis arrived in 2008. By the way, if you think this seems unduly schematic, as a model it aligns surprisingly well with the Panarchy model of systemic change.

Accenting the common good

And looking at the technology, economics, and innovation waves proposed by Carlota Perez (I’ve written about this here before) the story seems to overlap. The ‘installation’ phase of a technology wave is driven by finance capital and is more individualistic (the current technology wave started in 1971). The “deployment” phase, which we are in now, is driven by production capital, and tends to be more inclusive. As she argued last year in Open Democracy,

Installation periods, and especially bubbles, bring the system to extreme individualism and callousness; bubble collapses and the ensuing Deployment periods tend to bring back the balance and put the accent on the common good.

But it’s also worth emphasising that these transitions are messy, and the signals which emerge between them are also ambiguous. There’s a piece of more short-term data from the Futures Company, where I work, which underlines this. The company has been asking people for around 25 years – in part of its earlier guise as the Henley Centre as well – whether the quality of life is best served by looking after the community’s interests or looking after ourselves.

The outcome seems to track closely the political mood of the country; Labour does well when ‘community’ is in the ascendancy; the Conservatives do well when ‘individualism’ is at the top. (Click on the image for a closer look). What’s striking about the data – apart from regret at the size of the transformational opportunity which Tony Blair threw away – is that this year the Conservatives won despite the data pointing back towards community (the year on year shift is 6%). This partly reflects the Conservatives success in appropriating some of that language, and also the evident weakness of the Labour Party, but it may also be an explanation of why the Conservatives didn’t manage to get the overall majority they expected.

Cuts and the middle ground

This ought to be a clue about what’s going on when Blairites complain about the new leader – such as the comments on crime, or on the ‘middle ground. In a phrase, we’re not in the 1990s any more. The financial crisis has moved us into a new phase. If the Coalition government pushes through cuts of even 10% – and there seem to be striking differences between their ‘slash and burn’ rhetoric and the numbers in the Chancellor’s Budget statement – it would be a larger reduction in public spending than any achieved in the 20th century. Even 5% cuts in public expenditure would affect all but the richest earners. Talk of ‘middle England’ suddenly seems misplaced.

The other thing about crisis moments is that they are more open politically. They offer spaces in which it is possible to reframe public issues. And framing, as George Lakoff reminds us, is a central political issue. My perception is that Miliband understands this but hasn’t found the language yet. But it means, for example, that the answer to a question about public sector pensions is to suggest that the more pressing question is why it is that the financial sector seems unable to deliver reasonable pensions to private sector workers. Or that the answer to questions about ‘which cuts’ you will back (as seen from the ever-strident Paxman on Newsnight this week) is to argue that the way to improve the value of public services, whether reducing costs and improving outcomes, is not by the sort of piecemeal cuts within departments that the Coalition has already made, but by looking at the flows of value through services and the way these are perceived by users. (See Hilary Wainwright’s book on Newcastle, or Vanguard’s work in the area of lean service, if you doubt this.)

It might also mean explaining to the Blairites who are addicted to be being ‘tough on crime’ why this policy which is hugely expensive and also utterly toxic in terms of its social and economic effects, leading to social labelling and the spiralling absurdities of the ASBO regime. It is also, whatever your view of electoral arithmetic, anathema to social democracy. As the Conservative Ken Clarke understands, short-term prison sentences are utterly destructive, in more ways than I have time to explain here. If Clarke gets this, perhaps Labour’s Alan Johnson can also work it out.

Open moments and open questions

It is, then, an open moment. The long hegemony of the notion of the primacy of the global market has unravelled. It is also unstable and unpredictable, and could be for a decade or more. But the opportunity is there to change the discourse. Whether Labour can do this is an open question; they may prove be hopelessly trapped in a 20th century world of economic growth and production. But the opportunity will be there for a progressive politician, with a vision about the new institutions we need to repair the damage done during the unravelling, over the course of the next decade.

Thanks to The Futures Company for their data. The photograph is from Labour List, also used with thanks.