No Slogan

With one or two notable exceptions (like the execrable “are you thinking what we’re thinking?” Con, 2005), every election slogan boils down to one of three: “Let us finish what we started”, “Don’t let the other lot mess it up”, and “It’s time for a change”. See how uncannily consistently this rule applies: 

“Labour isn’t working” (Con 1979) 

“New Hope for Britain” (Lab 1983) 

“The Best Future for Britain” (Con 1992) 

“New Labour, New Danger” (Con 1997) 

“The work goes on” (Lab 2001) 

“A fair future for all” (Lab 2010) 

“Britain can be better” (Lab 2015) 

“Strong and stable” (Con 2017) 

“It’s time for real change” (Lab 2019)

The challenge is on the incumbent to justify their achievements so, for a party which has been in power a long time, asking the electorate to "let us finish what we started" often sounds more like a threat than a promise.  

After 14 years in government, and anticipating Labour’s likelihood to adopt “it’s time for a change”, Rishi Sunak tried back in October to distance himself from the policies of his predecessors when he announced the rolling back of HS2 and watering down of Net Zero targets. The trouble with trying to pitch himself as the change candidate is that the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years, Mr Sunak has spent six years in ministerial office (four of those in Cabinet), while the Leader of the Opposition has never been a Minister. 

The other option is to paint the Opposition as a threat and not to be trusted. While that worked to a degree in 2015 (“coalition of chaos”, Con), success is never guaranteed – indeed it seems almost quaint now to think that Tony Blair was portrayed with ‘demon eyes’ in 1997.  

The slogan of choice for the Conservatives today is a variation of “don’t let the other lot mess it up”  in Rishi Sunak’s current warning about “going back to square one with Labour”.  

The weakness of this slogan is that it leaves open the obvious corrective that if “square one” is a return to 2010 levels of immigration, hospital waiting lists, debt, inflation, interest rates and economic growth, voters may well conclude that going back to square one could be a very good thing. 

We have months of this to come, so for all those political nerds out there here’s a challenge: whenever you see a slogan, see which of the three it actually is. It can be more revealing about the strategy of the party behind it than you think.