Today, ComRes has published a new poll showing Conservative Boris Johnson 8 points ahead of Labour’s Ken Livingstone in the race to be London’s Mayor.  After YouGov showed them running neck and neck at the start of the week, UK Polling Report suggests that the overall picture is a small lead for Johnson.

The result seems extraordinary, given Labour’s strong polling in the capital and the pile-up of political problems now engulfing the Conservative-led government.

If Johnson makes it over the line, he’ll prove that one theory of American presidential elections has crossed the Atlantic: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.  The journalist and commentator Jeff Greenfield has explained it like this:

Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries. Sometimes he is glimpsed with his elbow on the fireplace mantel of his remarkably well-appointed lair, clad in a smoking jacket. (Jones once said Cary Grant was his inspiration for Bugs. Today it would be George Clooney.) Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor. When he is pushed too far and must respond, he borrows a quip from Groucho Marx: "Of course, you realize this means war." And then, whether his foe is hapless hunter Elmer Fudd, varmint-shooting Yosemite Sam, or a raging bull, Bugs always prevails.

Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury. His response to bad news is a sibilant sneer ("Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!"). Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them.

And:

In every modern presidential election in which the candidates have personified a clear choice between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Bugs has prevailed.

I never had much time for Bugs or Daffy, but Greenfield has a point.  He cites Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960, Reagan vs. Carter in 1980, even George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000 (though, as I always feel obliged to remind people, Gore got more votes).  Then there’s Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, followed by Obama vs. McCain in the general election.

The infamous tiff in the lift aside, Boris is playing Bugs in this cartoon-like campaign, with Ken as his Daffy.  (Click here, and here)  London voters seem prepared to put aside party labels, and downplay some key personal attributes to vote for the candidate they like most. For instance, according to YouGov this week, Ken had a 22-point lead over Boris for being “in touch with the needs of ordinary people”.  But when it came to who was the most charismatic candidate, Boris was 35 points ahead.

The migration to the UK of Greenfield’s theory should not come as too much of a surprise.  After all, it’s a well-worn cliché that elections for London mayor are personalised, celebrity contests, more like American presidential races than a noble contest of ideas between parties of the left and right.

But British general elections are getting more “presidential”. And Bugs keeps beating Daffy: Tony Blair defeated Michael Howard in 2005 and, even if he did not win the 2010 general election, David Cameron prevailed over Gordon Brown.

Footnote: It should be obvious from my profile whom I will be voting for, as first preference.  Ken was my second preference vote in 2000, 2004 and 2008.  I haven't yet decided who will be this time.

Let’s forget Bradford West, just for a moment, and assume that it’s an out-of-the ordinary and unique constituency, a one-off result for a one off politician, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson says.

Shouldn’t the Liberal Democrats be enjoying a new wave of popularity?

After all, our ministers didn’t look silly this week over Cornish pasties or the fuel tanker dispute.

More seriously, lifting the personal allowance and the higher level of stamp duty for people buying properties over £2m were significant Budget victories for the party.  

In the first line of the 2010 manifesto the party pledged to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 to remove low-income workers from paying tax. This is now on course to be delivered a year before the next general election in 2015.

The move vindicated Nick Clegg’s decision to set out his big negotiating demand for the Budget in public. 

Now for the bad news.  The public still do not see the increased personal allowance as a Lib Dem policy.  The Populus post-Budget survey, published this week, found that only 23% of voters thought that the Lib Dems deserved most credit for the change.   19% gave the Coalition most credit and 16% said the Conservatives deserved most credit. 22% said “none of them”.  Voters have still not heard Nick’s political story behind the Budget, proving how the Lib Dems made a difference.  

Moreover, Populus found a net plus-10% of respondents agreeing that “increasing the tax-free allowance before people start paying income tax will make little or no difference to me”.  Voters have not heard a story of the policy, which would show how real peoples’ lives will be better as a result of the increased personal allowance.  

Meanwhile, the story of the party – the Lib Dems’ brand narrative, the sum total of all the stories – remains negative.  According to Populus, the Lib Dems now have the least positive scores for competence, having the best leaders, having clear ideas and being united and the second lowest scores for being honest and “sharing my values”.   The figures have changed little since last autumn, when the Populus eve of conference survey showed the brand image continuing to bottom out.

It looks like the higher tax threshold was drowned out by the abolition of the 50p tax rate, the “granny tax” and the prevailing narrative that the Budget did not go do down well with the public, who saw it as mostly unfair.   More worrying, these findings show just how hard it is for the Lib Dems to campaign for party policies from within the Coalition.

Yet the party can’t afford and shouldn’t give up on trying to build its own brand.  The question is what kind of brand, and how to do it.  Nick Clegg wants the Lib Dems to be seen as more competent economic managers than Labour and fairer and more compassionate than the Tories.  It’s clear from other Populus figures published this week which of these themes works best for the party. 

On party attributes, the Lib Dems’ best score was on “being for ordinary people”, with net agreement of minus 2%, way ahead of the Conservatives (minus 35%) but well behind Labour (+18%).  This used to be the party’s strongest suit, and voters may be prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt.

Otherwise, the Lib Dems fared lead least poorly as the party voters trust to “cut the deficit without hurting the most vulnerable” (just 2% behind the Tories) and to “look after the NHS” (just 2% behind the Tories).  (Note, however, that Labour had a decisive lead in both these areas.) 

The Lib Dems’ worst ratings were as the party trusted to “help business to recover and grow”, “steer the economy through difficult times” and “get a grip on crime and disorder”.

Crucially, the job of reviving the Lib Dem brand won’t be achieved in a few weeks.  This is going to be at least a three year campaign, which won’t succeed unless the entire party is involved.  But listing policies (like this) and providing vignettes (like this) simply aren’t working.  We have to start telling stories to voters about the positive difference Lib Dems in government are making - assuming, of course, that the public wants to listen at all.

Budget Day.  This morning’s Guardian reports:

Wealthy individuals are to face a rise in stamp duty on properties worth more than £2m, as George Osborne helps fund a demand from Nick Clegg to remove taxation altogether from 2 million of Britain's lowest paid workers over the course of this parliament.

In a victory for the Liberal Democrats, who have reluctantly accepted abolition of the 50p top rate of tax, the chancellor will announce in the budget that stamp duty is to be raised from 5% to 7% on properties worth more than £2m.

The rise will help the chancellor raise an extra £2.2bn to meet the Lib Dem target of raising the personal income tax allowance to £10,000 from 2014, a year earlier than planned.

Clegg, who persuaded Osborne last year to meet this target by 2015, irritated some Tories in February by calling on the chancellor to go "further and faster".

It’s now widely agreed that if the Liberal Democrats are to have any chance of avoiding a total debacle at the next general election, we need to do a better job of differentiating ourselves from the Tories, come out from under the coalition brand and show how Lib Dems in government make a difference.  In opposition, the party built, partly lost and then rebuilt a brand: the decent party, who stood up for “ordinary people not the best off”.  But this narrative has steadily faded since the coalition government was formed.  Nick Clegg and colleagues need to revive it.

Both the rise in stamp duty and the rise in personal income tax allowance are hard won, key totems for the Liberal Democrats.  But their well “trailed” mentions in today’s Guardian and FT don’t mean the party’s political problems are over, far from it.

As the veteran US Democratic political consultants James Carville and Paul Begala once said:

“Facts tell, but stories sell . . . If you're not communicating in stories, you're not communicating.”

Nick Clegg and his colleagues will need to quickly get across three connected types of story.

The story of the process.  Okay, that’s a bit dry, maybe it’s the story of the politics.  At its most simple, this story tells how Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander (the heroes) set upon George Osborne (the villain) and persuaded / forced him to bring forward Budget measures to “help the millions and not the millions”, as he had planned.  The Lib Dems have to brand “our” policies in the Budget.  The Guardian story quoted above is a very good start, but stories over recent weeks about Lib Dem splits over the “tycoon tax” and disappointment over  the 50p tax rate being scrapped may have muddied the message.  And watch for counter stories in the media about “the policies that George Osborne planned to do anyway”.  This morning, the Spectator Coffee House blog foreshadows “a Budget by and for the Coalition”.

The story of the policy, which shows how real peoples’ lives will be better off as a result of the Liberal Democrats’ Budget victories.  Just mentioning the policy is never enough.  Moreover, yesterday’s ICM poll suggested that the public are quite indifferent to lifting the personal allowance and Labour and others will charge that it’s not really a policy for the poorest.  This video from the White House, with President Obama asking people“what does $40 mean to you?” contains the kind of story that’s needed.  (Maybe Tim Farron and Jo Swinson e-mailed me to ask what I’d do with an extra £60 a month because they were planning a Lib Dem version?)  Most importantly, we don’t need more lists of policies or more vignettes.

The story of the party, the “big story”, explaining who the Liberal Democrats are, what the party is about and what the public “gets” by letting them have a chance in government.  This one takes longer to tell, and it’s really the sum total of the other stories.  In his spring conference speech, Nick Clegg set out the story he would like the public to hear:

The Liberal Democrats are once again a truly national party of government. The only party of the centre ground, not of the left or right, of north or south, rich or poor but doing the right thing for the whole nation . . .

. . . A one nation party of the radical centre, representing all regions and nations. Seeing not what divides us - but what unites us. Sound on the economy, passionate about fairness: doing the right thing and battling vested interests. Challenging the status quo.

But will the voters see it that way?  Will the Budget prove to be a help or a hindrance?

And in the wake of the Health and Social Care Bill, however, Labour are out for blood and the forthcoming local election campaign will show their mettle at spinning counter-stories.

I think it’ll be clear within a few days whether the first two stories have got up.  The state of the party’s brand won’t be clear until usual the round of pre-autumn conference polls have been published.  But the heat is on.

At last November’s general election, the New Zealand Labour Party received its lowest share of the vote (27.5 per cent) since 1928. 

After the wipeout, with John Key’s National-led government riding high, Labour MPs elected a new leader, David Shearer, who had been in Parliament just over two years.  The other contender had baggage, but Shearer’s real attractiveness lay with his newness, his firm positioning in the middle of the road, his laid back style and his authenticity.  This time, Labour wanted a "real person" at the helm, rather than another technocrat. 

It all sounded so familiar.  My erstwhile comrades had found their own version of John Key, the banker who went and made squillions in Singapore and London, and then went home to become prime minister, after just six years (two terms) in Parliament.

The sympathetic commentary picked up on David Shearer’s unusual and inspiring “back story”: his time overseas in international development and humanitarian work. Some of the best tellings are here, here, here and here.  His backers came up with this strapline (which is, by the way, a kind of story):

John Key went overseas and made $50 million, David Shearer went overseas and saved 50 million lives.

Shearer and his campaign team told with great skill a story of the politician.  This establishes the politician’s or leader’s right to be heard, as well as his or her credibility and sense of authenticity.  Two of the best examples I have seen were also given by near-unknowns: Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s famous “Man from Hope” campaign spot from 1992 and the speech by an aspiring US senator called Barack Obama to the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Of course, neither Clinton nor Obama stopped there.  They both won the presidency by telling compelling stories that demonstrated how the Democratic Party was now relevant to the needs and expectations of the electorate. 

And they both told stories about the country – spelling out where they believed the United States had been, what was right and what was wrong, and where it should go next.  (Obama was my political storyteller of the year in 2008 - click here.) 

This is not some American hocus pocus.  Remember Tony Blair’s speeches about a “new, modern Britain” and “a young country”. 

Back in 1984, David Lange defeated Sir Robert Muldoon with a promise to “bring New Zealand together”.  Lange’s government went on to unleash an historic whirlwind of economic change, reducing state involvement in the economy and delivering greater efficiency.  In his first three years as prime minister, Lange talked New Zealanders through real, fundamental change with an inclusive message, and rhetoric that projected his personality and sense of fun.  Lange embodied his words. (1)  He was the first Labour prime minister since 1946 to lead his government to re-election.

And in 1999, Helen Clark took Labour back into power with her promises to restore trust and transparency in government.  They were part of her narrative that a “correction” was needed in New Zealand’s economic and social course, after fifteen years of neoliberal dominance.  She was re-elected twice.

In 2012, David Shearer needs his own “story of the country”.  This week, he started to build it, with a speech called “a new New Zealand”, about a revitalised, clever economy and first-class education system.  He may have been a bit light on policy, but the speech was a good case study in how to tell a “time for a change” story.  Shearer followed the three steps in Stephen Denning’s language of leadership. (2)

First, he got people’s attention, using one of Denning’s suggested devices, a striking metaphor:

You may know that P.T. Barnum was the man who founded the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

He was a showman, he was a businessman, he was a scam artist.

Early in his career, he created an exhibit called The Happy Family.

It had just one cage, and in that cage there was a lion, a tiger, a panther, and a baby lamb.

It was a huge hit.

People would line up to see it.

And as it grew more and more popular, the newspapers would ask him what his plans were for this amazing display.

He said to them: "It'll probably become a permanent feature - but only if the supply of lambs holds out."

In any sense you want to put it, literal or figurative, that's how we're running things in New Zealand.

We're going to keep on doing things the way we are ... for as long as the supply of lambs holds out.

We're going to go right on relying on property market bubbles and a small basket of primary produce exports to earn our living and we're going to go on borrowing money to pay for a standard of living we can't afford.

We owe too much. We all know that.

We earn too little. We all know that too.

Far too many of our eggs are in the one basket

Second, Shearer tried to stimulate a desire for change in his audience.  I spotted three of Denning’s devices.  There was a “springboard story”, in the example of how Finland took bold economic decisions twenty years ago, and is now doing better than New Zealand. 

There was a trigger to a common memory story. 

We were talking about making changes even before Britain joined the common market in the early 70s.

We've talked about added value, lamb-burgers, Knowledge Waves, and NZ Inc, and yet somehow success is still just over the horizon.

People have grown tired of hearing about it. Many of them are sceptical it'll ever happen.

At a certain point, you have to stop talking about what you're going to do, and start doing it.

And there was a metaphor that worked – the education “marathon”. 

Third, Shearer reinforced his message with reasons. This was, admittedly, the weakest part of the story, but he outlined some specific education reforms, and said, albeit briefly, how they would work.

Don’t get me wrong.  One clever speech won’t make David Shearer the prime minister.  Labour’s new policy package needs to be fleshed out and deepened, which is easier said than done, and the counter stories to his “new New Zealand” are already being launched.  (Here’s a good example)  Shearer will need to tell more stories, with more colour and more emotional cues, the symbols and the metaphors need building and polishing.  There’s a long. long way to go in this marathon.  My point is that David Shearer showed this week that he understands what telling a vision story is all about.

There is a more immediate challenge.  Shearer’s story of the politician is up (now to tell it to the voters) and the story of the country is under construction.  One narrative is still missing: “the story of the party” – the disrupter showing prospective Labour voters that David Shearer will make the party hear them.  A drastic example was Tony Blair’s exhortation to the British Labour Party to ditch the Clause IV commitment to nationalisation , along with other policy shibboleths.  In 1992 and after, Bill Clinton made sure that middle America saw him as a “New Democrat”, with his “opportunity, responsibility” rhetoric and "new choices rooted in old values", that broke with party orthodoxy.

I wonder if this is where David Shearer will come unstuck.

(1)  Jon Johansson, Two Titans – Muldoon, Lange and Leadership (Dunmore Publishing, 2005) pp. 210-212

(2)  Stephen Denning, The Secret Language of Leadership (John Wiley & Sons, 2007)

Today, The Guardian reports on the OECD's new study of the global environmental outlook until 2050. The report found four key areas that are of most concern – climate change, loss of biodiversity, water and the health impacts of pollution.

I was impressed by this comment by Simon Upton, head of the OECD environment directorate:

Upton said that if governments took action now, and developed long-term views of these environmental problems, it would give them a much greater chance of avoiding the worst outcomes. “The key thing is that these four biggest problems are interconnnected – biodiversity is affected by climate change and land use, water is linked to health problems, for instance. You can’t solve any one of these in isolation. So to be effective, governments have to focus on all of these four and look very closely at the connections between them,” he said.

How can we explain the decline in public concern about climate change over the past four years?

A new study of over thirty years of public opinion data about the environment and global warming, by Lile Scruggs and Salil Benegal of the University of Connecticut, puts it down to economic insecurity caused by the Great Recession.

The alternative explanations focus on partisan politicization (in the US), biased or waning media coverage and fluctuations in short-term weather conditions.  But none of these appears to drive public opinion in anything like the same way as economic worries. 

I was especially interested in their examination of European countries, using the results from Eurobarometer surveys.

. . . [Among] European countries there is a very strong association between increases in unemployment rates and increases in sceptical opinion. A one point increase in national unemployment is associated with a 2.5 point decline in the percentage saying that warming is a serious issue, and almost a one point increase in the percentage of the country saying that warming is exaggerated or saying that it is simultaneously not serious, exaggerated, and not due to CO2 emissions. We do not find a strong association with unemployment and the percentage of people who say that carbon dioxide has a marginal impact on climate change, though the estimated effect is in the expected direction. These regression results suggest that a shift in the national unemployment rate from 5 to 9% in Europe (approximately the increase in unemployment in the United States during the time period) reduces the percentage of people reporting that global warming is a very serious problem by about 10 points.

And:

In summary, the effects of the Great Recession on public opinion about climate change were very similar in European countries and the United States. All European countries experienced declining public opinion about warming as the Great Recession has developed, and those that fared the worst economically tended to see the largest declines in opinion.

In their conclusion, the authors suggest that climate change opinion will rebound as the economy, and more specifically the job situation, improves.  They add:

Both would obviously improve more quickly if planetary stewardship can become a catalyst for economic recovery and transformation, and not instinctively seen as a barrier to that goal.

As well as pushing for “green growth”, Scruggs and Benegal caution against letting environmental policy wait for public demand.  They show that in the United States, some major green policy innovations have taken place in tough economic times, most notably the 1970s.  It’s harder to prove a similar pattern in EU or UK environmental policy, but in the early 1990s (a recession), the scene was set for some important UK measures, for instance, the landfill tax and participation in the Kyoto Protocol.  And the years since 2008, when the global financial crisis hit, have not been dull on the environmental policy front.

Interestingly, the authors use the example of the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s to show that the public may not accept efforts to cut back environmental policy in a recession.  

The administration of the day may have misinterpreted low public support for progressive environmental policy as a permanent change rather than a temporary response to economic conditions.   

That has some relevance for the UK today.  For instance, public concern about climate change increased during 2011 and most people think that action is needed to address climate change, but don’t believe that enough is being done.  George Osborne take note.

There you have it, another political psychodrama is over.  Julia Gillard remains Australia’s prime minister, having soundly beaten her nemesis, Kevin Rudd, in Monday's ballot of ALP MPs and senators.

Today’s Guardian features an incisive analysis, by Richard Flanigan, of the serious personal failings that led Kevin Rudd’s colleagues to evict him from The Lodge and, on Monday, to keep him out.

And, in an excellent round-up, the Economist’s Banyan blog notes there were almost no philosophical or strategic differences between Rudd and the PM.

Now for the inevitable question: why, then, did the Rudd challenge get so far, attract so much interest, and become so brutal?

There are some obvious explanations.  The media the world over love the drama and messiness of party leadership elections and internal rows. The Australian Labor Party did not disappoint. Then there's the nature of the ALP and its internal politics.  The players I have met over the years seem to be jet-propelled by a unique, compelling mixture of raw calculation, off-beat sentimentality and high-octane adrenalin.  Given the government’s dismal polling, a sense of political survival drove some into the Rudd camp.  On the day Labor parliamentarians voted, Newspoll showed 53% would prefer Rudd as Labor leader, almost double the number for Ms Gillard. 

Yet the most convincing explanation for the force and attention surrounding Rudd’s gambit that I have seen comes from a stand-up comic who has portrayed him.  In The Age on Friday, Anthony Ackroyd* wrote:

I believe at least part of the answer is to be discovered by considering one of the lines from my Rudd shtick that invariably gets a huge response. It comes towards the end of the act; “Gotta zip, folks. I'm busy working on my next children's book entitled The excruciatingly painful death of the evil red queen and the return of the golden haired king. . .

. . . When Gillard and her accomplices deposed Rudd in swift and ruthless fashion they were messing with something much more powerful than politics. They set in train the archetypal energy of story. Rudd became the exiled king and thanks to his own excruciating pain, so evident in his resignation speech, he also became the character in the story with which a sizeable portion of the Australian public has identified. In a very real sense Gillard lost control of the narrative and has never regained it.

And so, to the frustration of his opponents, fascination with Rudd continues. His journey ticks every box in the mythological structure so favoured by contemporary Hollywood screenwriters. Flawed hero falls from grace, hits rock bottom, wanders lost in strange lands, slowly rebuilds his forces, returns to reclaim what is rightfully his.

What Ackroyd calls “the archetypal energy of story” is overlooked too often, yet it is a powerful force in politics.  A few UK examples:

• More than one commentator drew comparisons between the Miliband brothers’ contest for the Labour leadership and the Biblical story of Abel and Cain. 
• In the space of a few short months in 2010, Nick Clegg was the latest politician to take the well-worn journey from media hero to zero. 
• Was Margaret Thatcher a twentieth century version of Athena, the ancient Greek Goddess of war and strategy, or a new Boadicea?

In today’s Guardian piece, Richard Flanigan suggests:

It may be that the Rudd challenge will prove the making of Gillard. There has always been something oddly Elizabethean about Gillard – her ambition, her cold and inexorable will, her determination to stitch up whatever deal is needed. And she has never looked more formidable than in her steely resolve to take on Rudd and her obvious determination to destroy him.

Politicians rely on archetypes to market policies.  To defend their tough fiscal targets, George Osborne and the coalition government have invoked a narrative that's about good housekeeping: by paying off our national credit card bill and living within our means, we can enjoy fiscal redemption later on. [Click here and here]

Redemption is the often the underlying morality when “the story of the policy” is told.  A few years back, the BBC Radio 4 documentary Jackanory Politics brought out the redemption narrative underlying the then Labour government’s policies for drug rehabilitation.

Lest we forget, Julia Gillard soundly thrashed Kevin Rudd on Monday.  Labor’s federal parliamentarians, and not the public, choose their leader and they ignored both the polls and “the archetypal energy of story”.  The vote may well have been as much anti-Rudd as pro-Gillard, for her backers had to hand a good supply of plausible stories about how terrible he was, and weren’t afraid to remind their colleagues, often via the media.  (The most telling anecdotes that I have seen are here and here.*)

That’s right, it was stories that swung it for Julia Gillard.  An heroic archetype may have made Rudd’s challenge seem plausible and provided him with a narrative.  In the end, however, he was finished by counter-stories that were more powerful to the people who really mattered. 

* A hat-tip to my friend Shawn Callahan of Anecdote for pointing me, via twitter and his company’s blog, to the Ackroyd article and Cassidy excerpt.

The following e-mail arrived in my inbox earlier today:

Dear Neil

When the votes are counted on Friday 4 May, it'll take only a small change in votes from last time to defeat the BNP and elect myself to the London Assembly.

To make that happen and kick the BNP off the GLA we need to raise more funds for our campaign.

It will only take a small increase in the Liberal Democrat list to elect myself - and to push the BNP below the threshold for winning a seat. Any donation you can make really could make the difference between having a racist member of the BNP on the GLA - or myself, a Asian muslim woman who grew up in Tooting and has lived in London for decades.

Please help make this happen and donate today.

Thank you,

Shas Sheehan, Lib Dem London List candidate

Respect to Shas Sheehan, who has understood what the 2008 Lib Dem campaign for the GLA singularly failed to grasp, at some cost to the party.  [click here, and here.]  In an election using a PR list system, at which every vote can count, parties need to tell voters a clear story showing what they will “gain” by voting for them.  The “gain” can be about issues and specific policies, but doesn’t have to be.  In this case, the gain for Lib Dems is the chance to rid the London Assembly of the British National Party.

Shas Sheehan’s e-mail makes the narrative real by offering Lib Dem supporters a clear choice.  The subject line reads: “Do you want me or the BNP?”

Her e-mail reminds me of the campaign run by the Australian Democrats in 1998.  The Democrats were fighting to hold their seats, and the shared balance of the power in the Senate, in a PR (STV) election.  Their main rival was Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who promised to drastically cut immigration and axe multicultural policies, and were polling well. The Democrats exhorted their sympathisers, and anyone else who had no truck with One Nation, to keep them out. Their campaign theme was "Who do you want holding the balance of power in the Senate?"   The Democrats returned four senators, One Nation returned one and Hanson herself failed to win a seat.   The Democrats, with nine senators in total, held the balance of power.  [Click here for some Australian Democrat campaign literature from 1998.]

Like Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem candidate for London mayor, [click here, and here], Shas Sheehan is on to the power of political narratives.  But what about the Liberal Democrats at national level?  They are trying hard to differentiate themselves from their Conservative coalition partners, by publicly urging George Osborne to ease the tax burden for people on low pay and make up the difference from those higher up the scale.  I’ll post on that soon. 

In today’s Guardian, Adam Price calls on the “dismal” European left to learn from its American counterpart.  According to Price, “the real secret to progressive success” is the wisdom of Professor Marshall Ganz, of the Hauser Centre at Harvard. Price calls Ganz “the Mark Zuckerberg of activism” and says:

At the core of his teaching is the idea that leaders must build a public narrative explaining their calling, a sort of progressive elevator pitch in three parts: why they feel called to act (story of self), how this act relates to the audience (story of us) and what urgent challenge this action seeks to address (the story of now).

Price goes on:

It sounds simple (which is part of its success), but if you doubt its power take a look at a then little-known Senatorial candidate's speech in the Boston Democratic convention in 2004. You'll hear how a son of a Kenyan goat-herder running for [the] Senate (self) was a symbol of American meritocracy (us) threatened by the policies of the Bush White House (now).

I think Price has identified the correct framework for politics.  Done properly, “the story of self” establishes the politician’s or leader’s right to be heard, as well as his or her credibility and sense of authenticity.  Most importantly, they will embody and symbolise the other aspects of their narrative.  Price cites Barack Obama as the best example, but he could also have mentioned:  

•  Winston Churchill, who showed great personal courage by staying in London throughout World War II;

• Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter who worked her way to the very top and, once at Number 10, toiled day and night; and

•  Tony Blair, who looked and sounded like a young, modern new leader in the mid 1990s and then set out modernising the Labour Party while promising a New Britain and, later, “Cool Britannia”.

There's more to it.  The Blair example shows how the “the story of us” can be “the story of the party” or “the story of the country”. The successful leader will tell both of these.  The story of the party demonstrates values in action.  In telling it, the leader will eschew talk about the past and show how the party can be relevant to the needs and expectations of the electorate.  

The story of the country explains the leader’s vision, where s/he thinks the country has been, what’s right and wrong, and where it should go next.  

Each UK party leader faces his own challenges in telling these stories.  As Price says:

Flash forward to Ed Miliband and we see the source of his difficulty. Miliband has a plausibly good story of now ("responsible capitalism"), a so-so story of us ("squeezed middle") but hardly any story of self – so we fill in the blanks with our own version: David's brother, Gordon's spad, or the son of England's greatest Marxist theorist (my favourite).

David Cameron has a story of self, even if it’s one he would never have chosen (his tragic family experience).  He also looks and sounds like a prime minister.  And he has a strong story of now (paying down the debt).  But Cameron’s story of the party is incomplete -- the Conservative brand has still not been detoxified -- and his story of the country (“the Big Society”) goes way over most people’s heads.

Nick Clegg has a story of the party (working with the Conservatives in the national interest; a softer heart than the Tories and a harder head than Labour). His story of self (successful career in Europe) appeals to liberals, but was derailed by the tuition fees debacle.  Since the start of the year, Nick has been fighting hard to tell his own story of now, separate from the coalition’s.  It’s still too early to say if the voters are buying.  Beyond that, however, lies the old chestnut, a Liberal Democrat story of the country that people will understand and believe in.

Let’s see who breaks this logjam first.

Today, Business Green reports that several of the UK's leading green entrepreneurs have written to the new energy and climate change secretary, Ed Davey, setting out a policy wish list for clean technologies.

Interestingly, they have also urged him to "stimulate green jobs and communicate a more compelling narrative that UK competitive advantage lies in creating a ‘sustainable green economy'".

One demand that caught my eye was a shift in the debate on green taxes.

"We ask that you adopt the 'polluter pays principle' by incentivising clean purchasing behaviour with 'green incentives' while collecting 'pollution taxes'," the letter states. "The oxymoronic language of 'green taxes' confuses the public that renewable energy will continue to add costs to consumer bills while the converse is the case – renewable energy will actually reduce consumer bills."

The eco-entrepreneurs are on to something. The latest British Social Attitudes survey, carried out largely in the summer of 2010 and published in December 2011, indicated that there was less support for green taxes than was the case a decade earlier.  Only around a quarter of respondents said they would be willing to pay much higher prices or taxes to help the environment.  Such a result is hardly surprising in these austere times.

But “green taxes” aren’t always what they seem.  The Office for National Statistics defines an environmental tax as:

a tax whose base is a physical unit such as a litre of petrol, or a proxy for it, for instance a passenger flight, that has a proven specific negative impact on the environment.

This covers Landfill Tax, Aggregates Levy, Climate Change Levy, EU Emissions Trading System, Fuel Duty, VAT on Fuel Duty, Vehicle Excise Duty, Air Passenger Duty and the Renewable Energy Obligations.

But Treasury has been (slowly) working up a broader definition, focused on meeting green policy aims and effecting behaviour changes that are good for the environment.  The latest draft, as provided to the Commons Environmental Audit Committee, takes in the above list but excludes fuel duty, VED, Air Passenger Duty and the Renewable Energy Obligations.  It covers the Carbon Reduction Commitment and the Carbon Floor Price. 

By leaving out  transport measures, the Treasury’s draft definition risks making the level of environmental taxation less transparent.  Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has for months lumped together a selection of energy and climate change policies as “green taxes” or “green stealth taxes”, and claimed, erroneously, that such measures are responsible for recent hikes in power bills.  (For Carbon Brief’s takedowns of the Mail’s allegations, click here.) 

With the point of “environmental taxes” lost in this melee, we need some new frames.  “Pollution taxes” is a good start.  And how about “clean energy incentives”?    Or a revival of the Lib Dem pledges from the 1990s to “tax bads not goods”?  Any other ideas?