Impact Evaluation: Analysis and Rebuttal of the 2024 Labour Budget
Assessing the public engagement and educational impact of our research.
Analysis and Rebuttal of the 2024 Labour Budget: A Vindictive Class War
Graphics and links for social media: X-Twitter
Headline message: The attack on SMEs, farmers, pensioners, bus travel, and private schools sacrifices economic growth for a counter-productive and brazen act of class war, targeting voters who were historically not loyal to the Labour Party. Here, we analyse the public impact of our output.
The Centre considers public engagement and education, as a vital part of its work - complementing its research output, as two sides of the same coin.
Whilst assessing the most contentious elements of the 2024 Labour Budget is a good exercise in itself, we are very interested in how effectively our key conclusions, and principal political messages / actions are translated across the ‘political space’.
Rationale
When it comes communicating to the public, the fewer words the better.
The future contest of the ‘political space’ and gaining ‘market share’ will rely on how effectively we can visually present our data and research - to educate and tell a coherent story.
Whether it is easy-to-understand graphs, animations, GIFs, videos, or new media formats, old principles still hold true - ‘a picture tells a thousand words’.
For the Rachel Reeves’ Budget Analysis and Rebuttal, eight tables and graphs, with relevant links were shared on X-Twitter, to communicate our research, and capture the public attention.
Impact & Metrics
Three particular graphs went viral, reaching a total of at least 1.9+ million views. This dwarfs the reach of any Budget Analysis published by the established think tanks.
The original ‘main’ graph highlighting the injustice of the 2024 Budget, and a more simplified version (commissioned by Max Tempers), reached a minimum of 1.25 million views. These graphs were directly shared by Dave Atherton, Rory Stewart, Callum Darragh (Akkad Secretary), James Melville, and well-known data account, JUICE.
Alongside direct engagement, Ed West, Lord Miles Routledge (traveller), Carl Benjamin, Peter Hague, Alex Armstrong (GBNews), and Connor Tomlinson helped promote the graphs and the general message, either through comments or indirect quote-tweets.
One of the graphs also found its way to Reddit, and returned to Twitter with some extra red text annotations. This particular variation reached over 650 thousand views.
Whilst these are not particularly large figures in the grand scheme of things (compared to say an Elon Musk, or Donald Trump tweet), but as commentary of the 2024 Labour Budget goes, the impact of our research is a (100x) cut above the existing think tank ecosystem - shared widely, by both anons and established public figures.
Lessons Learnt
There is so much low-hanging fruit for insurgents reach and educate the public. The existing think tank ecosystem have a good reputation with insiders and access to established politicians and their adjacent audiences, however, their reach to the wider public is limited.
The effectiveness of our graphs, came from being clean and simple. And most importantly, they must not look amateurish - Excel graphics are not good enough. Basic MATLAB, and Python skills goes a long way in this endeveour.
In an age of low-attention spans, constant scrolling, and having to reach a public with mixed educational attainment, the strategy of producing easy-to-understand graphs and then telling the story around it, is a winning approach.
Given the traction of our graphs and graphics from tackling the 2024 Labour Budget, it is clear there are a lot more policy areas for which good data analysis combined with savvy presentation, can meaningfully shape the public-political discourse, and drive good policy-making.
ENDS.