Abstract
Abi Rhodes provides an activist’s perspective of the role played by Momentum, which evolved out of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership in the summer of 2015. Rhodes describes this as a movement-led campaign, contrasting with traditional political marketing approaches which focus on selling a political product. The focus is on encouraging and empowering activists to get out there and connect with other voters, and to use their own political knowledge to respond to people’s concerns. This approach linked well with Jeremy Corbyn’s own personality and style of campaigning. There was a strong digital component to this “people-powered political communication”, for example in the use of Facebook and Twitter to help people identify My Nearest Marginal, and in encouraging campaigners to personalise their online messages.
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Notes
- 1.
From his first victory speech in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn made it clear that his relationship with the press would be very different to previous Labour leaders’, which suggests that there would have been a conscious choice not to court the press even if the landscape had been favourable (Mason 2015).
- 2.
See http://www.peoplesmomentum.com/ for latest figures.
- 3.
In order to obtain articles about Momentum as a noun rather than as a verb, the terms ‘group’, ‘movement’ and ‘Labour’ were added to the search and sought within the same paragraph of each article. Over 2000 articles were returned (12 September 2015–4 December 2017) from British newspapers: telegraph.co.uk (1290); Guardian (London) (669); Mail Online (208); Independent (United Kingdom) (166); The Times (London) (67); Daily Telegraph (London) (55); mirror.co.uk (52); Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday (39); The Observer (London) (28); Sunday Times (London) (23); Sun (England) (18); Sunday Telegraph (London) (18); i—Independent Print Ltd (11); Express (10); Mirror and The Sunday Mirror (8); and Sunday Express (6).
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Rhodes, A. (2019). Movement-Led Electoral Campaigning: Momentum in the 2017 General Election. In: Wring, D., Mortimore, R., Atkinson, S. (eds) Political Communication in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00822-2_12
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