Sir Keir Starmer thinks the government has a communications problem. He's right, but not in the way he thinks.

James Austin summarized succinctly what many believe Starmer's problem to be:

There simply isn't a 'good' way to get a message out now; traditional platforms have diminished and have been replaced by a incredibly uncontrolled and fragmented system. That makes it very hard to get central messaging out.

The PM has made two responses to this. On the one hand, he has invited "influencers" into Downing Street in the hope of reaching voters who don't consumer legacy media. But on the other he's retreated into the 1980s by hiring a former Sun editor as communications advisor.

What this misses is that the decline of legacy media isn't a problem for Labour at all.

For one thing, not only are people not reading about Starmer in the legacy media, they're not reading about Badenoch or Farage either. Which is a blessing for Labour as it means people are less exposed to one form of right-wing propaganda. The fact that they're less inclined to read newspapers is very likely one reason why younger voters are less reactionary than older ones.

And for another, the government has a potentially much more powerful weapon than communications - reality. If it can improve living standards and public services as people experience them for themselves then it has a good chance of re-election and if it doesn't it hasn't. Think of "comms" and lived experience as being like a woman taking a dog for a walk. At any single point in time the two might diverge, but ultimately they end up in the same place: "comms" cannot gaslight that many people for a long time. Governments didn't lose power in 1979, 1997, 2010 and 2024 because they got the comms wrong, but because they got policy wrong.

You might think this claim is contradicted by a big fact - that voters are in fact horribly ignorant. Barely half, for example, have heard of Liz Kendall despite her being at the centre of one of the government's most controversial policies. Over one-fifth think MPs' expenses and spending on migrants' benefits are among the three largest items of public spending when in fact they are only a minuscule percentage. Only 15% were within an order of magnitude when asked how much is total government spending, with more over-estimating it by a factor of ten than getting the answer right. 47% believe immigration to the UK is primarily illegal rather than legal, whereas the Home Office estimate that only 4% is illegal. David Leiser and Zeev Kril have shown that people are "remarkably poor" at thinking about complex emergent systems, which is what societies are. And Ipsos and Bobby Duffy have shown for years that voters are systematically hugely wrong about many social facts; they over-estimate the number of immigrants and Muslims and crime rates and under-estimate the extent of sexual harassment for example.

There's nothing new in all this. In Austerity Britain, David Kynaston notes that most voters in 1950 paid little attention to the election campaign, and that in Greenwich (for example) barely a quarter of them could name their local MP. Political scientists have for years pointed to people's lack of knowledge of politics; the phrase "rational ignorance" was coined way back in 1957.

For me, though, this is another reason for the government not to worry about its comms "cutting through". Asking voters to think about abstract claims about the big picture means wrestling a pig in a sty of ignorance and stupidity. Much better to get policy right and then ask them to trust their lived experience. The demise of newspaper propaganda should make this easier.

All this is, however, only half the story. Political communication is not merely a matter of the government speaking to the people. It's also about the people speaking to the government. And legacy media has hindered this communication in recent years. The biggest political events of recent years have come as a surprise to much of the political class: Brexit; the rise of Corbyn (a phenomenon more easily understood by a glance in an estate agent's window than by reading any newspaper); and the collapse of the Tories: remember when Boris Johnson squatted "like a giant toad across British politics" and was destined to be PM for a decade?

Legacy media, with its groupthink, professional deformation and ignorance of social science has done an awful job of telling politicians about reality. Organizations that employ Allison Pearson and Melanie Phillips probably aren't in the reality and rationality business at all.

Its decline could therefore better help the government see ground truth and lived experience. One problem with politics has been that the conditions have not been in place for the wisdom of crowds to hold: the mass media reduces diversity, devalues localized knowledge and increases the correlation across opinions. A more fragmented media could in theory reduce these distortions.

Social media gets a bad rap. This isn't merely because - like most things - there are a lot of idiots on it. It's also because journos rightly feel threatened by it, and because one part of politicians' professional deformation is their preference for hierarchy and aversion to complexity. The truth, of course, is that, properly used, it can greatly enrich our understanding of the world. It has introduced me to people such as Dan Davies, Giles Wilkes, Phil Burton-Cartledge and Sam Freedman among many others, any of whom teaches me more than any newspaper writer has.

"Properly used" is of course the correct phrase. Using social media as a guide to ground truth requires critical thinking, and not merely in the ability to distinguish clever people from idiots - a capacity which the Almighty has conferred upon the producers of BBC current affairs programmes.

For one thing, it requires an ability to pick out information from noise. Edmund Burke said:

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

Noise-makers might be fanatics and hobbyists rather than those with genuine grievances. Indeed, the latter are likely to be quiet either because they're too busy trying to keep their heads above water, because they've resigned themselves to their fate. Amartya Sen was surely right:

Deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible (Development as Freedom, p62-63).

An awareness of correlation neglect is important here. If a lot of people are saying the same thing, is it because they've independently seen a big truth, or is it because they are echoing each other? We know from financial markets that asset prices can become untethered from reality as traders get carried away by information cascades: why shouldn't something similar happen in politics?

Even if people are saying things that conflict with the facts, however, it doesn't follow that we should ignore them. Take Andrew Tate for example. There's nothing he can teach us about how to treat women. But we should ask: why is he so popular? What is it about the lives of young men that attract them to Tate's message? Here, we must avoid simple moralizing on both sides; condemning Tate is not enough, but nor must we assume that those young men attracted to misogyny have "legitimate concerns". Instead, we must realize that beliefs are the (often distorted) expression of socioeconomic conditions and try to discover what these conditions are.

My point here should be an obvious one - but then, political discourse is so debased that the obvious often needs saying. It's that the truth about the world is not fully captured by posh people talking to each other; just as it can be found in music, literature and anecdote so too can it be seen in social media. This evidence, though, must interpreted critically. Media studies is a useful discipline.