What’s in a name? Potentially a lot, if you are launching a movement with ambitions “to shape something truly transformative” in British politics.
That’s the challenge facing Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, the former Labour MPs who announced plans last month, if not in the most coordinated fashion, to launch a leftwing political party. More than 600,000 people have already signed up for updates on the new group, which will be called … what?
“The members will get to choose,” Sultana said earlier this week, as a consultation on the subject closed. It will not be called Your Party, however, despite having launched on a website with precisely that name. Her own preference is the Left Party, “because that’s what it says on the tin … We’ll obviously put that to the members and we’ll see what we get”.
The fact that so many have already signed up to a nameless project might suggest that what it is eventually called matters less than the involvement of Corbyn, the still totemic (to some) former Labour leader, and Sultana, an effective and savvy digital communicator.
But, say political insiders, history shows how parties’ fortunes can be shaped by the names they adopt, both good and bad. For every En Marche! (Forward!), the French centrist movement that propelled Emmanuel Macron to his country’s presidency, there is a Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance party, launched in 2015 and inevitably known as CCRAP until its name was hastily re-jumbled.
Or take the short-lived alliance of disaffected centrist Labour MPs and Tories that in 2019 called itself the Independent Group, then TIG, then Change UK before being forced by a branding dispute to settle on the Independent Group for Change. With even their own candidates dismissing their “terrible name”, they made little electoral impact and quickly folded.
On the other hand, the body once known as the Brexit party now claims 29% opinion poll support, after rebranding in 2020 as Reform UK. In the party-naming fashion stakes, indeed, long strings of descriptors are out of vogue these days, while dynamic slogans or abstract verbs (Forza Italia! Propel! Aspire!) are very much in.
“I think what you call yourself is really important, it’s one of the most profound calling cards of what you offer,” says Rohan McWilliam, a professor of modern history at Anglia Ruskin University and director of its Labour History Research Unit.
He cites the example of Tony Blair’s mid-90s rebrand of “New” Labour, which he says the defeated Conservative party came to see as the single most important reason for the party’s huge victory in 1997. “Their conclusion was they had been defeated because Labour used one word and one word alone, and that was ‘New’. Just that word alone spoke volumes.”
John McTernan, formerly a member of Blair’s core Downing Street team and now a political strategist, agrees about the name’s impact. “The important thing was that calling yourself New Labour created a category called old Labour. It created what you were against – and that’s a very important thing in politics. That gave us the ability to have a clean break with the past, so we could say: ‘No, no, that’s old Labour.’”
The Liberal Democrats had been through their own naming dilemmas almost a decade earlier, when the merger of the Liberal and Social Democratic parties in 1988 prompted a heated debate that was also settled by a vote by party members.
“At one period, election materials from us were appearing with Liberal Alliance, Social and Liberal Democrats and Liberal Democrats, all on different posters within a very short period of time,” says the Lib Dem peer and former communications director Olly Grender. “It was very vexed at the time.”
Ultimately, however, “Liberal Democrats feels a very comfortable fit,” she says. “Liberalism is the absolute bedrock of our history and firmly underpins our current beliefs.”
So where should Corbyn and Sultana land? Gareth Morgan, an executive director overseeing government relations at the brand consultancy Cavendish, urges clarity above all. “I think it’s always useful to have a name which conveys the purpose to people who check in with politics for 10 minutes each week, max. The best name is one where, just by reading it, I understand what you’re for and what you’re about.”
Chris Bruni-Lowe, a campaigns strategist whose book Eight Words That Changed the World examines which political words resonate, says: “A party name or slogan should be emotionally intelligible to everyday people, not just to political insiders. Words that sound elitist or academic are the least likely to work. New political parties often fail unless they define themselves clearly and simply.”
Bruni-Lowe has advised parties across the political spectrum. “The most successful parties have a name and slogan that succeeded because it was immediately clear what it stood for,” he says.
Over to you, Corbyn, Sultana – and your many thousands of supporters.
