Archive for: Stakeholder Engagement

Green peer Baroness Natalie Bennett of Manor Castle writes about the challenges of getting the Government to agree to environmental standards and the kind of people therefore needed in opposition.

There are, it appears, two Government trade policies. One is a cutting-edge, environmentally revolutionary plan to be ‘world-leading’ in standards of environmental health, slashed carbon emissions, best-in-game workers’ rights and respectful of human rights. The other is ‘Singapore-upon-Thames’ Elizabethan ‘buccaneering’, polluting, rights-abusing goods flowing through wide-open freeports where the rules are abolished and neoliberal capitalism rules raw in tooth and claw.

It is a function of our first-past-the-post politics that profoundly incompatible coalitions, such as that between the Thatcherite ideologues of the South East and the fed-up impoverished, ignored ‘Red Wall’ seats, get into Government and produce such policy paradoxes.

The issue of making the UK a democracy is something I’m always working on, but in the meantime I’m also doing what I can on trade to push us in the direction of a policy that acknowledges that there is no exchange of goods and services on a dead planet, and ours is right at, or beyond, its physical limits.

One tactic is to try to get the Government to commit, as the House of Lords has collectively been trying to do for years through the Trade Bill, the Agriculture Bill, the Internal Market Bill and many others, to put ‘on the face of the Bill’, as we say, commitments to decent standards. Even the National Farmers’ Union has, however, been unable to get Tory MPs from the rural seats to stand with us in what we call the ‘Other Place’.

Second-best, but still worth trying, is to get verbal commitments, which is why this week I asked the Government if it planned to sign up to the New Zealand-led Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS), a still fairly modest but important initiative, operating within the World Trade Organisation framework, that aims to end fossil fuel subsidies (in the UK now at about £10 billion a year, far above what is being put into renewables), agree tariff-free trade in environmental goods and services, and agree a global eco-labelling scheme.

You can see the debate here, or read the debate for yourself in Hansard. If you watch the video through once, you might be positively surprised. It is clear, as the Talk Radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer grumbled to me last year, that everyone is now talking Green.

But were you to sit down to analyse every sentence, check the meaning of each clearly very careful assemblage of works, you have to conclude that when it comes to the Government’s commitment to, or even interest in, ACCTS, as Politico’s morning trade newsletter put it: ‘close but no cigar’. It concluded: ‘Trade minister Lord Gerry Grimstone, who will also lead on the Government’s new Office for Investment, sidestepped.’

Which is where we come back to the politics. The Government won the last election with a strategy of mobilising the disaffected, uniting and energising the angry and the self-interested, with a populist, Trumpian, evidence-free repeating of simple slogans. It is clear which policy approach fits with that.

The politics seems unlikely to change any time soon. Which indicates that we need to build new coalitions in opposition, of the sensible, the evidence-driven, the practical people – who know that the future of the world has to be Green.

People who know that businesses that get ahead of the curve for the transformatory circular economy, one-planet living, model, will flourish. That communities built around strong local economies with food and good production for local consumption, promoting biodiversity and wildlife (just look at Paris), providing security for all (hello Universal Basic Income) will be attractive to the educated and capable in a world in which human resources are in increasingly short supply with plummeting birth rates.

Buccaneering belongs in the time of Queen Elizabeth (the First that is). As we’ve seen with its management of Covid-19, it’s New Zealand that’s the truly leading world nation, with a very different model of politics, society and trade. But it is equally clear this Government has no intention of following its lead.

This blog post is part of a cross-party series on Vuelio’s political blog Point of Order which publishes insight and opinion to help public affairs, policy and comms professionals stay ahead of political change and connect with those who campaign on the issues they care about. To find out more or contribute, get in touch with Vuelio Politics.

Vuelio has launched Political Reports, a new tool for public affairs and communications practitioners to analyse the increasingly complex political landscape by delivering stakeholder insight across a range of channels, from Twitter to Parliament itself.

Political Reports was developed in 2020 to meet the changing political landscape and needs of Vuelio’s clients. Here, the head of political services and a senior product manager walk us through the innovation journey and explain why these reports will be a gamechanger for public affairs and communications in 2021.

Kelly Scott, head of political services
Political discourse has been unquestionably growing as the rise of social channels and the digitisation of Parliament and Government have offered groups, organisations and individuals an opportunity to engage and inform policymakers without the barriers that previously hindered access.

This is widely considered to be a positive because the more policymaking is informed with evidence and data from a broad range of stakeholders, the more it should meet the needs of the public.

However, the by-product of an open and digitalised structure is that it is increasingly time intensive to track issues of interest, not just because there is a bursting legislative agenda, but also because key political actors debate issues across channels, from the floor of Parliament to the Twittersphere. Following the conversation and knowing where to engage, myth bust and campaign is no longer a simple and economical task for communicators.

In 2020, this challenge hit a tipping point for Vuelio’s Political Services clients. With a new Government agenda following the General Election, Brexit and the pace of policy change caused by the pandemic, staying on the front foot and ensuring the issues, organisations or people you represent are recognised was becoming an overwhelming and at times impossible task.

Through structured discussion, we identified the problem was that the workflow for analysing the whole environment was highly manual. Communicators use their own specialised expertise to identify the right stakeholders to engage with, check the temperature of the landscape or analyse momentum. The heavy lifting they had to do to get to this point was extensive, as was the time spent on interpretation to share with internal decisionmakers.

We shared this problem and key data on the external political environment in which our clients operate with the Vuelio product team, challenging them to develop a technology-based innovation that could improve the current workflow. It needed to be easy to use, not restrictive in how it could be applied to the complex political environment, and it had to acknowledge the fast-paced and unpredictable nature of politics and the different objectives our clients have when looking at issues or specific political stakeholders.

Chris Axe, senior product manager
When assessing the market of available tools for analysing political activity it was clear there was a real lack of options when it came to easily visualising the key trends and patterns in this information. Given the ever-increasing digitisation of political content and the number of sources available, it is vital that any political analysis tool has these capabilities to meet the evolving needs of the sector.

Given our position as a leader in the world of PR analytics, we were well placed to construct the best ways to surface this information. By working directly with our clients in the political sector and assessing the ways that they used our political monitoring functions, we established the most important data elements that we would need to focus on.

Additionally, it was clear from feedback that we needed to make it as easy as possible to dynamically change the sets of data under interrogation for maximum flexibility. We shared an initial set of visualisation tools with our clients for feedback and enhancement prior to launch.

We’re now pleased to make this solution available to all of our political services clients, both new and existing. It includes a selection of charts that allow you to see the published activity and contributions of individual stakeholders or institutions in near real time. We allow you to export this data in multiple formats, segment it with a variety of filters and choose whether you want to drill into the detail or look at high level trends.

We will continue to develop our offering and work alongside the sector to solve new challenges as the external environment evolves.

Do you need Political Reports? Save hours of time, expand your stakeholder map and track the issues that matter to you – book a demo.