Former Community – We Moved
🆕 Coached community here, for posts & feedback public community here.
Political battles for identity: winning the right for representativeness (Thatcher VS Kinnock)
The leader who better represents the group is the one the group wants in charge.
And to represent the group, you must embody its identity and stand for its identity.
Is it too abstract?
Then keep on reading and this post will clarify everything.
Kinnock VS Margaret Thatcher: Background
Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher were battling it out in the 1984 Party Conference speeches (see Reicher & Hopkins, 1996b).
At the time, there were major miners' strikes, representing some of the most heightened social conflict in Britain after WWII.
Kinnock wanted to leverage the strikes to attack Margaret Thatcher and her policies.
After all, it seemed like an easy win, right?
Kinnock's Move
So Kinnock set out to show that the Iron Lady's values and policies were at odds with the life and needs of ordinary people.
Kinnock started very well.
Instead of attacking right away, which usually carries little weight, he prepared his attack by first listing all the policies Tatcher had enacted and that were hurting the common people.
In the list there was a VAT (sales tax) on takeway food.
But framed like that, it would have been weak.
And that's not how Kinnock framed it, indeed.
Instead, he thundered that Thatcher imposed a tax on fish and chips.
Why did he say that?
Why narrowing down the effects of the tax instead of keeping it general?
Well, as someone said "a million dead is a statistic, but a story about a person dead is a tragedy".
Similarly, Kinnock here picked the fish and chips to make people relate to the tax in their everyday life.
The goal was to make people feel how the tax was impacting them.
But there is something more.
Fish and chips had a strong symbolic reference for Britons.
Fish and chips were a national dish, and thus Thatcher's policy was an attack on in the in-group, it's an attack on "who we are", which helped pain Thatcher as an out-group person who "doesn't get us" and doesn't work for us".
That was a great move by Kinnock.
Margaret Thatcher Reply
Thatcher framed the strike as an attack on the country.
An attack on the country's democratic tradition.
And she framed the Mineworkers' union as a revolutionary minority protesting "our way of life".
She shifted the focus to the miners who actually wanted to go to work, but couldn't because of the striking miners.
And she framed the miners willing to work as courageous. Courageous men against the rebellious minority of bullies who did not want to work.
She said those courageous men fought for honest work in spite of intimidation and insults.
They are called "scabs", she said.
"Scabs"? She asked again emphatically, raising her voice.
Then she paused.
And then, slowly and loudly, she said "they are lions!"
Masterful persuasion technique.
And again, have you noticed what animals she picked?
It's not by accident.
Lions are also the symbol of Britain.
Figuratively, she is framing the strike-breakers as the ones embodying the nation. The "real" ingroups, the "real" Britons.
And those who stand against them become the out-group and the bullying enemies.
Thatcher won the battle there as "lions" carried more weight than Kinnock's "fish and chips".
Thatcher Knew The Importance of Representativeness
Remember this:
Who represents the group leads.
And, for politicians:
Who represents most people, wins the election.
Margareth Thatcher knew this very well.
And she knew that if she let the strikers win the battle of representativeness, she'd lose the battle.
And she went into overdrive to paint them as a bullying minority.
If you think this is over-analyzing, think again.
Listen to Thatcher here where she discusses exactly the battle for group's representativeness:
She knew what she was doing.
And that's one of the reasons why she was such a master politician.
