One dimension I took from my career in campaigning was the swings between hope and despair. This would be particularly relevant if you were centrally involved in organising campaigns that, from any rational assessment at the time, didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.
Perhaps public opinion wasn’t with you, perhaps the public was with you but no major political party wanted to be associated with your issue, or maybe to win you had to get the government to spend a large amount of money – never an easy ask.
So you go to work some mornings under a grey cloud and asking ‘are we just wasting our time here’. But through your persistence, or through a dramatic, perhaps unforeseen, change in the issue environment, suddenly your objectives look realisable again. Perhaps through a combination of keeping the candle alive on your issue, and external events that prove to be a catalyst for shifts in public opinion, it’s game on.
I thought of this in regard to the campaign for the Tobin Tax, or as it has been re-branded this week in the UK – the Robin Hood Tax. The campaign to raise a tax on international currency speculation to discourage damaging short-termism and raise considerable funds for social investment, great idea in principle, but seemingly a political impossibility.
But with the credit crunch and the banks nearly bringing the global economy to its knees the whole issue environment has, almost, been turned on its head. World leaders such as Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel now publicly support such an initiative and media and public opinion are now certainly much more open to this proposal. Suddenly a small tax on transactions that would raise billions to fight global poverty and help reduce public deficits, well, it’s game on.
The Robin Hood campaign has launched this week with a nice video viral directed by Richard Curtis and starring Bill Nighy. It’s a very good use of celebrities for a campaign – don’t just get their names, get them to do something. Interesting to see how this one goes. Here’s the video:
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