“If you’re about to join, welcome. If you’re coming back, welcome home.”
How the Corbyn campaign rode the wave in 2015
“If you’re about to join, welcome. If you’re coming back, welcome home.”
Earlier this week1 it was the anniversary of that advertisement, placed on the back page of the Guardian by Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign, to encourage people to register as a Labour supporter and vote in the leadership election. It was a highly novel move for an internal Labour election.
As a piece of political advertising and messaging it is a model. It is also part of a myth about the left’s success in that election, build around the recruitment of ‘three pound’ registered supporters.
As the Tories bludgeon each other into the ground in this summer’s leadership battle, here is some background to a vital moment in one of Labour’s most extraordinary leadership contests, and an ad that helped symbolise that time.
The origins of the recruitment of registered supporters in 2015 are to be found in the Collins review into the Labour-trade union link, following the Falkirk controversy. In the mix of the reforms that were agreed at the Labour Party’s special conference after Falkirk was the creation of a new category of participant in leadership elections – registered supporters.
This new category was a nod in the direction of US-style primaries. It was a notion that had been floated by figures primarily on the right of the party, including David Miliband, and supporters of Progress.
Primary-style registered supporters were by no means the most important reform in the package. Collins’ main innovation was the creation of equal votes: one person, one vote – no duplicate voting, no weighted votes of MPs. That democratic principle is so offensive to some that as recently as last year the Labour leadership sought to abolish it in favour of the old electoral college.
Of course, at the time the Collins review was agreed, the question of whether the registered supporter category would ever be used effectively in any future leadership question was an open one.
Fast forward to 2015 and Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign was determined to utilise this new category of voter. The chair of the campaign – John McDonnell – was not prepared to leave any potential area of advance alone. I had said to John when I took the position of director of the campaign that we may not win, but we would campaign entirely as a campaign that was seeking to win - not merely to make a few good arguments. That was entirely his ethos. Personally, having been involved in the Collins review as it had developed, I was interested to see how the different aspects of the new system could be made to work.
At the heart of what was possible through the registered supporters was the presence of progressive opinion within in British society. The Labour left is often seen to have been in the wilderness from the period after the defeat of the miners’ strike - or at least since the late 1980s – until the summer of 2015. This is not wholly right: Ken Livingstone had been in office in London with the single biggest personal mandate in British politics for eight years from 2000. In reality the Campaign Group in parliament was connected up to all of the major progressive social movements that worked their way through British society during this time. At almost every big, serious campaign or protest over this period, the Labour left was present and usually the parliamentary voice of these movements. On many issues they spoke for a large minority and sometimes a majority of the wider public. In other words, there is a basis for the politics of the Labour left in sections of the population, even when it is apparently isolated in parliament. These political strands within the electorate are not homogenous. They are by no means uniformly socialist, or Bennite or what might now be called Corbynite, although they do of course contain a great many socialists. By 2015 they encompassed current and former Labour supporters disillusioned with the party’s offer, all the way through to young people radicalised after the crash. If the situation had been different many of them would naturally already have been Labour party members. In Labour party terms, the question was whether at least some of these layers of British society could be brought to bear on the politics of the party, either directly or indirectly, to rejuvenate its ideas and activity.
Thus it had seemed to me, as someone who had involved in the discussions around the Collins review from my time in the the Labour leader’s office, that the ‘primary’ element of the review was every bit as much an opportunity for the left as it was a bright idea of the right, although it was not clear that it would ever take off for either. There was a huge constituency of people who wanted change and a better society, who weren’t getting it. It was obvious why some on the right wanted it – to bypass unhelpfully left wing Labour members. But it was not apparent that, if it came to it, the right would be so happy with the outcome.
So, combine a left candidacy for the Labour leadership and a new category of registered supporters as voters and you have something really spectacular in the making.
The “welcome/welcome home’ Jeremy Corbyn ad campaign was a key point at which the registered supporter issue moved into overdrive. That Saturday’s Guardian was Corbyn Central. A major piece by Nick Watt dominated the paper’s political coverage.
Meanwhile the back page was entirely taken over by the Corbyn campaign.
The Guardian and the Mirror readerships are key target audiences for internal Labour elections. That weekend’s push could not have landed better.
Why do I say the ad was a model of this form of campaigning communication?
The ad itself, which was then pushed out far and wide, worked on several levels. First it is an example of an ad that simply gives you what you need – in this case a clear practical guide on how to sign up. Labour’s membership systems had never seen anything like what was happening in that summer. The ad was part of that unprecedented movement.
Secondly however, the ad’s content – both tone and message - was what the campaign needed. Warm and engaging, the headline positioned the Jeremy Corbyn campaign as the authentic home of Labour and of Labour people. “If you’re about to join, welcome. If you’re coming back, welcome home.” Then a carefully pitched section of copy underneath, written in approachable common sense language: ‘a lot of people, both new and former Labour supporters, seem to agree with us on the sensible way forward.’ All of this was both ideal for the purpose of the ad and in messaging terms; and in its reasonable, welcoming tone it was a counterweight to the inevitable framing of the left as extremist.
Third, ads like this have the function of giving a campaign perceived momentum. They provide a hook to hang a process or messaging story, and – with luck – also help demoralise your rivals. Every campaign grid needs focal points along the way, especially ones that can unify comms, field, social media, print. In this case we need a crystallising mechanism to move the campaign’s message forward and into an important new phase.
Finally, timing was key. It was the final Saturday before the deadline for registration. Timing-wise it was at exactly the point where potential supporters needed a reminder to push them over the line to join up. Good timing based around voter actions in internal ballots is essential.
In the discussions with John McDonnell and Anneliese Midgley, the deputy director of the campaign, we agreed that the deadline for registration could not pass without such an eye-catching new boost to recruitment, and we resolved that the hook to hang it on would be a national newspaper ad. And this required the involvement of Harry Barlow.
Harry Barlow is the doyen of the left for a particular form of political ads and marketing, specialising in issue-based design and advertising communication. His relationship with advertising and progressive campaigns goes back as far as the Greater London Council, where he got to know John McDonnell. I first worked with him on Ken Livingstone’s campaign to be Labour’s candidate for London mayor, over twenty years ago. Subsequently he worked on a series of brilliant communications campaigns for London government. Perhaps his simplest and most affecting was in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, with the “7 million Londoners, 1 London” messaging. It formed part of the initiative to maintain London’s unity and guard against division in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
Harry Barlow works at the interface between a campaigning organisation or politician and the creative professionals who are tasked with producing visual identity, copy, and branding. He has a rare skill that includes helping find the right creative agency or team to fit with the needs of the political leadership of the campaign, as well as interpreting political ideas in a creative framework. All of this is incredibly useful in smoothing the often very difficult cultures and expectations between the worlds of politics and of advertising or marketing. As a process it usually has to go through a series of iterations to find the successful meeting point between a political imperative and its creative interpretation. And as a facet of political campaigning it is one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling.
In this case the ‘Welcome home’ campaign was an example of a copy-driven ad rather than relying on visuals. Its visual strength was more to be found in its clear, simple design and the large, arresting headline copy, staying with the reader through its “welcome/welcome home” sequence. As a piece of advertising aimed at politically-engaged people who might be persuaded to take the step to become a supporter of a political party, the emphasis on words was a natural fit for the copywriter Chris Herring, a longstanding ally of Harry Barlow who had worked with us before on London mayoral campaigns. Chris Herring is a genius with copy - how words flow and how they pull the reader into the message that is being communicated. Harry took him through what we needed and the nuances involved.
In fact this ad was completed right up against the deadline. We had viewed options for it laid out on the table of Harry Barlow’s Camden flat, not far from the campaign’s Euston HQ. Feedback and ideas went back to Chris Herring before completion. And the design was a continuation of the clean Corbyn campaign branding, again developed with Harry Barlow. (I will write separately about the evolution of the campaign’s branding, strap line and design).
During this period sign-ups to the party spiked massively. The Guardian on 8 August including the ad campaign was part of that: giving it shape and providing yet more momentum.
The spike has sometimes been responsible for a myth: that the left won by flooding the party with three pound sign ups. (Three pounds being the price of becoming a registered supporter).
The truth is not quite so simple.
By the time of the registered supporters-drive, the nominations stage had finished. All the momentum was with the Corbyn campaign. Jeremy Corbyn had won 152 constituency party nominations. In second place Andy Burnham had secured 111. In the affiliates, the Corbyn campaign had gained the support of more union nominations than the other campaigns combined, including three of the five largest unions – Unite, Unison and the CWU. In the days before Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign began its phone-canvassing operation we trialled the phone-bank script out with a small group of volunteers, to check its usability. It was deliberately tested in more than one Constituency Labour Party, including locations that might be seen as geographically or politically removed from Jeremy Corbyn’s inner London home turf. At the end of their session calling members, the volunteers were smiling. They had found a warm response from the members they had spoken to. It was clear that something was happening on the ground amongst existing members – and it did so before the spike of three pound sign-ups.
Of course, the three pound spike widened Jeremy Corbyn’s win to a crushing level – he secured over eighty per cent of the votes of registered supporters, within a result that saw him win 59.5 per cent of all votes cast. He won just shy of fifty per cent of the members, compared to 22.7 for Andy Burnham, and 22.2 for Yvette Cooper. He also won just under sixty per cent of the votes of affiliated supporters.
The numbers of people joining meant their presence became contested ground. In late August a summit of the leadership campaigns in Stevenage was called to discuss the controversy over new supporters and members, chaired by the acting leader Harriet Harman. There was a push from amongst the other campaign teams that the final result would be broken down by the different categories of voters. We were obviously suspicious that the intention behind this was to delegitimise the result if Jeremy Corbyn won overall, but not amongst the membership. Exactly such a discourse had hung around Ed Miliband’s leadership. He had lost in the constituency section, whilst winning amongst members of the affiliates. (In fact Ed Miliband had won significantly more votes in the election in total – over 28,000 more than David Miliband. They were not, however, the kind of votes his critics liked. The way the electoral college worked meant that the formal result was much closer than the votes cast). In any case the Collins review was aimed at eliminating differences between votes so that each was equal. There were not ‘sections’ any more.
Since the proposal was now being put at the Stevenage summit, it was necessary to make a judgement. Jeremy and I sat next to each other around a table that included the other candidates and a member of each candidates’s team. We had to take a decision about whether to agree that the votes might be shown by category of voter when the result was released. It was more a question of body language and brief whispers, rather than a conversation. By this point we had enough knowledge of our position amongst the membership that I felt we could call the bluff and agree, although it was a risk that caused sleepless nights for weeks. The downside was obvious. The upside would be that the left’s critics would have nowhere to turn in terms of the legitimacy of the vote. So, we looked at each other and then called the bluff. On this question, the outcome in September was a moral victory, as well as a win.
With the push to recruit registered supporters, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign did not leave anything to chance. It was necessary to ride the wave of enthusiasm his candidacy had generated and to ensure that the people who wanted change were not let down.
But the registered supporters’ spike had a different, less quantifiable feature. It added to momentum for the Corbyn campaign. Campaigns with momentum are prone to gathering yet more support around them. Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign understood this and worked to generate momentum throughout the contest.
That early August messaging was one of the ways we did it.
The ad campaign launched on Saturday 8 August