Confidence in the government will not improve unless they get their faces and ideas on online media platforms including YouTube, a group of Labour MPs has warned colleagues.
The Labour Growth Group of about 110 MPs is working with leading podcasters and popular figures to help Labour backbenchers become influencers in their own right, amid concerns that toxic narratives about the party’s agenda, its politicians and its policies are going unchallenged.
The LGG is understood to be seeking to develop the new intake of MPs to ensure the future parliamentary Labour party contains politicians confident enough to express a variety of views to engage an array of audiences, and to prepare them for ministerial roles.
Those involved are working with a popular British YouTuber with more than a million followers who has already provided a trial media clinic. The MPs were told they could only challenge internet creators – who are largely rightwing and male – by neglecting the Whitehall obsession with traditional “establishment media”.
A Labour figure with knowledge of the plans said: “We’ve got to face up to the fact that today’s media landscape is not the same as 1997’s. We have to be where people are – and especially for young men and those considering populist alternatives, that’s on new media.
“Low trust in politics, low turnout, lack of sense of delivery – those aren’t things we are going to change with a nice Times headline. We have to be in people’s faces constantly on YouTube and on TikTok. That is a skill we need to be nurturing within Labour and the PLP.
“If we continue to leave a vacuum in these spaces, that’s where we get toxic narratives emerging and going unchallenged, it’s where people’s real concerns get jumped on and twisted. This is not something we can afford to ignore.”
The LGG approached the economist and YouTuber Gary Stevenson, who runs the multi-platform channel Gary’s Economics, in hope of engaging in a debate with the former financial trader about the government’s plans to raise living standards and end economic decline.
The approach prompted Stevenson, whose channels push content out to millions of subscribers, to publish a 15-minute video titled Labour want to come on Gary’s Economics, should I let them?, which within a week was collectively viewed by about a million people.
Labour figures have long acknowledged the appeal young MPs such as Zarah Sultana have with a specific portion of the electorate, given some of Sultana’s posts are viewed hundreds of thousands of times on TikTok and Instagram, but insist it is time for the centre left to fill a vacuum on new media.
The YouTube star who advised Labour MPs said they could better their chances at the next election if they focused on creating viral moments on typically anti-establishment new media platforms that people could refer back to in years to come.
A further Labour insider said the group believed they would have more success with external help than relying on the machinery of government, which relies on advisers and senior politicians needing to give content signoff, creating delays.
The LGG is expected to have a project in place in time for the autumn budget, when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is rumoured to be implementing tax rises.
“We need Blue Labour people, left people, people who want to discuss plans to build, build, build so we have a project that is creative, filled with people who have a different risk appetite and a lot less rigidity in their message,” the party insider said.
Chris Curtis, the Labour MP for Milton Keynes and a co-chair of the LGG, said: “The centre left of politics has up to now failed to effectively establish a foothold in the online media ecosystem and we know we’ve got to change that. Right now we’re simply ceding the ground while algorithms mainline misogynistic and far-right content. We’ve got to get on the pitch to have a chance at taking that on.”
