The Unstoppable Many vs. The Immovable Few (Emergency P for the Snappy G)

Oh god, not another one! When BREAKING NEWS bursts through the wall, we spring, gently and apologetically, into action, with a (cough) emergency p for the snappy g. That’s right guys, we’ve got a bootleg Keir Starmer mug and we’re not afraid to do a podcast about it.

Real change. Change you can believe in. Change for you, change for me, change for the entire human race. This week we are talking about campaign slogans, and the surprisingly long and contested history of “for the many, not the few”. Who is the ‘many’ in this sentence?? And who are the few? How can it be that figures as diffuse as Blair, Corbyn and Starmer have all deployed the same slogan? And what was Theresa May’s unique twist on it?

We also call in on one of our favourite subjects, TIME. How have the 1983, 1997, 2017 and 2019 election years come to stand-in for an entire political philosophy, and strategy? And what does it mean when election campaigns try to invoke mythical pasts – ‘we want our country back’, ‘let’s make Britain great again’ – rather than imagined or promised futures? Also, can the Microsoft Paperclip icon help our political parties make a bit more sense?