‘Where the eyes go, the car goes’ (or ‘stop being so f**king boring’) – Part 1

In which Hari becomes a populist sell-out, and introduces a new project

Is this what we want? (Nigel Farage on I’m a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here, ITV/Shutterstock)

Full disclosure before we begin, I am a member of The Green Party of England and Wales (though I might not be for long if they ever find this piece).

Branding is not something we often associate with the environment, but maybe it should be. When Doctor Who viewers were dropping off in droves, what did the BBC do? They rebranded the show. How do you get an audience invested in a product that’s not selling well? You change the branding. How do you get someone to care about something that they otherwise aren’t invested in? You change the way you sell the concept. It’s not very left-wing of me, I know, but if we want to get a new set of people invested in biodiversity and Net Zero pledges, maybe we ought to borrow from capitalist tactics. Maybe we ought to start selling nature.

I don’t mean, of course, selling nature in the way holiday brochures do. I don’t mean Instagramming yourself in the forest. I mean a whole-sale rethink about how you talk about the natural world (and the problems with it) with people who, honestly, couldn’t give a shit about it.

In my other life, I have been a corporate scriptwriter. I don’t do that very often anymore because I transitioned into more consistent work, but I now teach undergraduates about advertising, and support them in designing pretend ad campaigns for television shows. One of the things we obviously mark students on is whether the audience we have asked the students to appeal to would purchase the product that they’ve designed. Now, listen, reader, you are probably reading this because you are a nature weirdo who likes hiking and foraging and can identify several niche bird songs – I hate to tell to tell you this, but we’re not a huge proportion of the population. A lot of people think bugs are gross and would like to believe that global warming doesn’t exist. Al Gore wasn’t appealing to the masses with An Inconvenient Truth. Extinction Rebellion isn’t affirming itself as a national treasure. Their target audiences are important and the work they do is fantastic, but if I was marking them on ‘appealing to the layman’, they would probably get a 2:2 at best.

A good example of what I mean is the difference in the proportion of votes that Reform got in the recent UK election in comparison to The Green Party. While both parties now have four MPs in parliament, Reform had the third largest share of the national vote, with 14.3%, compared to a measly 6.8% for the Greens. If we’re being honest, by the next election, Reform’s vote-share is likely to be even higher. Now, on pragmatism alone, this doesn’t make much sense. The Green Party’s marketing focussed on sensible fiscal and social policies that sought to benefit the working classes, and Reform’s pledges largely consisted of buzzwords and promises to stop foreign people from entering the country. But what did one have that the other didn’t? No, reader, it’s not what you’re thinking - it’s star power.

I love Carla Denyer. I want to be her bestie. I want to drink natural wine in an independent café-bar with Carla Denyer. For me, in the 7-way debates, she was cool and savvy and strong. She presented a measured alternative to the bitch-fits of the major parties, while speaking in a way that the average person would understand. It’s worth noting, though, that only around 13% of the British public pay regular attention to politics. Most people consume less than 10 minutes of political content per week. Of that 13%, not all of them are going to vote Green, because they are tactically voting or they prefer other parties’ policies, or they’re not culturally connected to the party, etc. etc. The other 87% of the population: they don’t really know that Carla exists, and they probably barely know that the Greens do. I’ll tell you who that other 87% do know, though. His first name starts with N, and his second name sounds like how an American would say ‘garage’.

It's easy to say that political parties need to be ‘sexier’. You hear this a lot, someone just isn’t ‘sexy’ enough, they need to be ‘appealing’ in that way. The thing is though, Nigel Farage isn’t sexy, but he has billed himself as relatable. In the attention economy, faux-authenticity is everything. Nigel is out having pints at the local pub, he’s eating insects on live TV and saying ‘big Chungus’ on TikTok. He’s the loudest guy at the party, and he’ll say, ‘what everyone else is thinking, but is too scared to say’. People feel that they connect to him, they feel that he’s confident and decisive, they feel that he’s funny and down to earth. It doesn’t matter if any of that is true, making it feel like it is, is enough to get people to think that you are ‘one of the lads’. The Greens are not any of ‘the lads’. They’re not at pre-drinks, they’re sat in halls studying four months in advance for an exam. So, even though the Greens’ policies would objectively make a greater difference to both the people of Britain and the planet, no one is inviting them out.

When I was learning to drive, my instructor told me that ‘where the eyes go, the car goes’. Ed Davey – the leader of the Liberal Democrats – realised this, that’s why he was bungee jumping and pretending to fall off paddle boards. So, how can we make the eyes go to parties with progressive stances on the environment (like the Greens), and, more importantly, to focus on the benefits of improving ecosystems and reducing fossil fuels? How do we make doing hard things, or making hard sacrifices, seem appealing? More importantly, how do we make it seem easy and fun? How do we pull ourselves out of this beautiful, poetic niche that we all live in, and appeal to the gents in the pub? How do we make the car go the right way?

In the coming weeks, Nature with Hari Berrow will be giving over some time to explore celebrity and branding theory as it relates to nature and the environment. We’ll be exploring the ongoing rebrand of bees, the nature of populism, and much more. I would love it if these discussions were not just fielded by me. If you would like to contribute a piece to the discussion, or post something on your own blog as part of ‘Where the Eyes go, the Car Goes’, please get in touch.