Why Labour keep losing the attention war

One year into Labour’s term, half of voters admit they still don’t know what the government is trying to do. Just 16% of those polled by YouGov think Labour have a clear sense of purpose, with 65% saying they’re unclear what they stand for - up from 42% last year. Worse, seven in 10 voters said Keir Starmer’s government was at least as “chaotic” as the Tories’ last term, with about one in three even calling it more chaotic.

This is a failure - and not just of messaging or spin. It's what happens when your entire political strategy amounts to a crude ventriloquising of voters as caricatures immune to persuasion. The question to ask is not 'what does the median voter want?' It's 'how does the median voter change their mind?' When you’re 54 points underwater, that’s the only question that matters.

We need a strategy that’s attuned to the current moment and adapted to the networked public sphere we now inhabit. In the attention economy – a system where visibility and influence are won by capturing and holding scarce public attention – the rules reward the emotive and contentious over the consensual.

Every government now operates in a hostile environment because the internet is a machine that surfaces sentiments, memes, opinions and arguments that have been selected to generate maximum engagement. This is akin to an evolutionary process: what survives and replicates is adapted through a selection pressure (it gets engagement) and as such is much more powerful than government comms cooked up by a Spad, (see the “Plan for Change”).

Opting out of this process is not really an option. Faced with a continuous barrage of criticism – exacerbated by missteps already made (in particular over welfare and the winter fuel payment U-turn) – Labour have to do much more to change hearts and minds. That won’t happen by asking people to applaud the mere prevention of collapse. It also requires more than win-win policies that command broad assent – they simply have no claim in an attention economy. What is needed is a more offensive strategy which wields controversy to the government’s advantage.

Shifting the median - the foundation of a different strategy

If there is one clear strategy Labour have pursued, it is the deprioritisation of its base in favour of some idealised median voter. It is certainly true that social democratic parties cannot win with the support of their base alone. However, the current approach is strategic suicide in the modern information environment.

Consider how averages shift. Why do we rarely see products with 3-star averages? Because in a polarised system, the middle is unstable. When passionate users vote at the extremes - 1 star or 5 stars - even a small imbalance tips the average decisively toward 4+ or below 2. A stable 3 would require either universal mediocrity (everyone votes 3) or perfect polarisation (equal 1s and 5s) - neither of which persists in practice.

This is why losing your five-star advocates is catastrophic. You don't drop from 4.5 to 4 - you collapse toward 2, because now only your detractors are motivated to rate. The mathematics of averages rewards intensity, not moderation. Politics operates on the same principle. The median voter is not some fixed point you can triangulate toward. They're the product of a dynamic system where passionate minorities are constantly competing to shift the entire distribution in their favour.

In other words, chasing the median sabotages your mean.

How digital networks create ambient opinion

Every politico will tell you that Westminster obsessives hold different views from the general public. The standard advice is to ignore them in favour of 'real voters’. This misunderstands how opinion spreads in the current information environment.

Traditional media no longer creates the narrative. By the time a story reaches the front pages, it has already been tested and refined through thousands of digital conversations. The Times and the BBC legitimate controversies that bubble up from below. They amplify what already has momentum.

Your politically engaged supporters inhabit the networks where these narratives form. They populate the WhatsApp groups, the comment sections, the office conversations where political meaning gets made. When you demoralise them, you surrender these spaces to your opponents. The passionate few shape the context in which everyone else encounters politics.

When something generates sustained controversy, it creates ripple effects far beyond formal media consumption. A policy announcement spawns workplace debates, family WhatsApp arguments, overheard conversations on trains. People who never read a political article still absorb the general emotional tenor.

Take the winter fuel payments controversy. The detailed policy arguments reached perhaps thousands. But millions encountered some version of "Labour is taking money from pensioners" through casual conversation. The framing matters more than the facts because the framing is what travels through these informal networks.

Your base supporters are crucial because they're the ones sharing, discussing, and framing these moments in everyday conversations. When they're demoralised, they either stay silent or actively undermine your messaging, allowing opponents to dominate the narrative space. This is why you cannot repudiate your base – they're your distributed communications network!

The trap of attention: What Labour and Reform get wrong

You might think that the implication of this argument so far is to become something Labour are clearly not - a populist party skilled in generating outrage to set the agenda. The ability to generate and capture attention is important, but there are traps if you optimise for this alone. 

The problem for Reform is that they have built an apparatus to do just that, regardless of whether that controversy actually benefits them. Climate skepticism energises their base, but it is unpopular amongst the general public and also galvanises Reform’s opponents. Its not clear that this is a fight they win by making it more salient. It alienates the broader coalition they'd need to actually govern, and forces them to defend impractical policies. They have been incentivised to climb the attention gradient without asking where it leads. This means they gravitate towards whatever provokes the most immediate reaction, even if it means marching toward terrain where they are outnumbered, off-message, and defending positions that damage their long-term prospects

Labour's failures are more perverse. The 'island of strangers' speech generated attention on par with any Reform stunt, but it armed their opponents while disarming their supporters - hence the reversal. The recent capitulation on planning reform – abandoning the YIMBYs who actually believed in Labour for opponents who never will – follows the same pattern. Half measures that please nobody are generally counterproductive. 

A functional strategy would acknowledge that Labour are not operating from a blank slate: there is an existing set of pre-conceptions they operate within. For this strategy to work Labour need to understand why raising the salience of an issue will benefit, not just any government but a Labour government, with its particular coalitions, and pre-existing ambient perceptions. 

The alternative: How to wield controversy to your advantage

So what would it look like to generate controversy that actually serves Labour's purposes? Labour need to identify policies that harness the dynamics of the attention economy while playing to Labour's strengths. This means being deliberate about which fights you pick and why. There are three specific criteria strategists could use to help narrow down what is likely to be effective while avoiding downsides: 

1. The scissor effect: Your opponents must hate the policy viscerally; your supporters must love it. Opponents should be driven to write article after article, finding the policy ideologically threatening and difficult to counter. But this does not work if you don't have some significant supporters who are enthusiasts. You need advocates and those are most likely to come from your base.

2. Emotional resonance: The policy must connect to ordinary people’s lived experiences. But it’s not enough for people to notice it — they need to feel it’s right and that opposing it is wrong. That moral dimension is often what makes a narrative powerful enough to travel. The simpler and more intuitively just the policy feels, the faster it spreads and the harder it is to counter.

3. Robustness to critique: It must be defensible on policy grounds, even if there are flaws or downsides. If you have generated controversy over something that fails in the long term it damages you. Worse, an entire class of political argument can be delegitimised with a highly salient failure (see Liz Truss). A good strategy should not divorce means from ends you actually want to achieve. 

What sort of policies might fit the bill? One example might be a development rights tax. When land gets planning permission, its value can increase 100-fold overnight. Currently, landowners pocket this entire windfall that society creates. A development rights tax that captures 50%+ of the planning gain would meet all three criteria.

Firstly, landowners and developers would go nuclear - you're taking "their" billions. But YIMBYs and housing activists would champion it because the revenue explicitly funds infrastructure and social housing. In addition, it would favourable terrain for Labour because this is fundamentally a redistributive policy.

Secondly, the moral dimension is crystal clear and connected to ordinary people. "Why should landowners get rich from planning decisions we make as a society?" Everyone understands that getting permission to build shouldn't create instant billionaires while young people can't afford homes.

Thirdly, while it may have some challenges, the policy is at root defensible. South Korea, Singapore, and parts of Germany all do versions of this successfully. It could raise serious money (£10bn+ annually), directly enable more building by funding infrastructure, and would be hard to avoid - the land is here.

The point here is not that a development rights tax would solve government’s political problems: rather, this is simply an example of the kind of measure that could generate the forms of attention and controversy that would be politically beneficial, rather than detrimental, to Labour.

Conclusion

Four years may be a long time in politics, but it will not feel so if the government continually plays defence while its public approval craters. We need to divorce the practice of sober competence from its deflating political aesthetic. This is probably asking a lot from politicians for whom controversy is not instinctive. But we need to face up to the fact that just focusing on delivery is not enough, especially in a short time frame we have.

There is no effective counter other than to start trying to seize initiative. The government has one advantage - it has the power to propose rather than react. It should start using it soon. Because, in the attention economy, you don't get points for good intentions. You only get what you fight for.

AE Snow is a British social-democratic essayist whose work bridges political economy, technology, and philosophy. They write a Substack called The Democratic Futurist.