Don’t let the devil have the best tunes………how campaigners need to mind their language.

George Orwell wrote consistently about the importance of language, especially political language. He thought it ought to be transparent, like a pane of glass, allowing the reader to see through to the ideas it contained. Language which was not clear in expressing its key ideas was the enemy of good politics as politicians used it to obscure meaning, not illuminate truth. Language can also corrupt thought he argued.

But what does good language look like for politics and for campaigners? In my blog ‘It’s public sentiment stupid’ I argued that we have to look at the emotional content of how to frame an argument if we want our campaigning to resonate with public. This would imply far more use of identifying what narratives and images resonate with the public values and using language that also resonates with people’s emotions as well as their intellect.

This means often looking at and reflecting on what people are thinking. Many worry about the implications of this – might it not imply a dumbing down to the campaigning equivalent of tabloid journalism, looking for the lowest common denominator, when campaigning is actually about lifting aspirations beyond current ways of thinking and doing? The honest answer would be if done badly, yes-but it doesn’t have to be like that. As Orwell argued, language can be used for good or ill. He was not against metaphor or emotionalism in language, rather its misuse to hide and obscure to protect the powerful and insincere.

The simple fact is that language frames political argument - change the words people use and you can change how people think about something - or more accurately trigger one set of thoughts and values over another. Pollsters spend huge amounts of time running focus groups to see what words and concepts resonate with people and then deploy these in political arguments.

Think of recent campaigns around the environment or taxes. Drilling for oil becomes energy exploration and suddenly something that might have lost public support sounds positive. Environmental damage becomes securing our future energy - images of pioneers, powerful in an American context, replace images of people destroying natural habitats. Death tax was another example both here and in the States. Proposals around using inheritance tax (itself a loaded term) were turned into something toxic in voters’ minds by labelling the proposals a tax on death - who was going to support that? The fight over these labels is also the fight over resonating with public values and finding the words and narratives that fit with your audience’s underlying values but which can also trigger more positive responses if you get them right. For a good example of this see Johann Hari’s article about Ed Milibands failure to get this point in The Independent.

Campaigns are about narratives and getting them right can make a huge difference to how much your campaign will make headway. But it does mean looking for what is going to chime with your target audience rather than beating people over the head with what you think they ought to do. Even the climate change deniers’ can often be motivated to protect their own local environment if the right triggers about community and looking after your local area can be deployed. Death tax can become giving back to future generations. We should care about language so that we don’t allow the devil to have all the best tunes. Orwell was right that no amount of bad language will hide a really bad idea for long. But we also need to ensure that we connect our language with our audience’s values and trust them to take the right actions.