Make political slogans great again: harder than it looks?

With party conference season well under way, Britain's political parties have been searching for mission statements they hope will have an impact on the public. 

There's no "magic bullet" for an effective campaign slogan, said advertising magazine The Drum's co-founder Alastair Duncan, but "using creativity does strengthen a campaign". As the American speechwriter William Safire wrote, it helps if slogans have "rhyme, rhythm or alliteration to make them memorable". It helps too if "people can get behind slogans that have immediate meaning and capture a zeitgeist", said the marketing site. 

'Corporate bore speak'

Boris Johnson "got plenty of things wrong" in his tenure as prime minister, "but he at least knew how to come up with a punchy slogan", said Tom Goodenough in The Spectator. The tagline of the 2019 Conservative conference was "Get Brexit done"; a "work of genius" that united both sides of the referendum campaign, both "exhausted by infighting and frankly bored with Brexit", he said. "Its simplicity might have been deceptive but it summed up what people wanted: to move on." 

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Rishi Sunak's conference slogan for this year – "Long-term decisions for a brighter future" – "is more likely to send people to sleep than encourage them to vote for the Tories", continued Goodenough. "In seven words it captures nothing" and is little more than a tagline that "appears to have been lifted from a PowerPoint presentation". 

Presumably it is a slogan conjured up with focus groups, but people walking past the conference venue will have recognised it as "corporate bore speak that sounds exactly like what you would expect a politician to say".

"I can see why he’s chosen it," argued The Drum's Duncan. "Sunak’s only chance is to distance himself from his predecessors and talk abstractedly about the future," he writes. "But voters tend to be interested in specifics, like how they will pay the bills this winter."

'Oddness may not matter'

But "creating political catchlines that mean something is hard", wrote Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Speaking from experience, he said, "even if you understand what you are trying to say, it mostly sounds like a load of random words to everyone else. If you are too specific, the slogan seems to exclude most of the things you want to talk about, but if your slogan is broad, it appears meaningless."

It hasn't been a "vintage year" for political sloganeering, agreed Sean O'Grady in The Independent. The Conservative slogan may have been "a mouthful" but if anything, "Labour is even worse". Keir Starmer's party has "decided to enthuse the nation with 'Give Britain its future back'" – a slogan that "immediately conjures up the plaintive image of some kids asking an annoyed neighbour to return their ball, as if the Tories have been so irritated at having Britain's future land in the back garden that they've spitefully stuck a fork in it and deflated it irreparably". 

The slogan "suggests Britain was on the right track not so long ago", said Finkelstein in The Times. "Presumably that means before Brexit", but "did Labour mean to write a change slogan so strongly aimed at Remainers?", he asked.

"The compensation is that if the change mood is strong enough, the oddness of their slogan won’t matter."