Post-wristband Blues: the Mixed Fortunes of UK Development Campaigning under austerity and the Conservatives

2005 witnessed the rolling out of the Make Poverty History development campaign coalition. The general, but not unanimous, view was that Make Poverty History (MPH) made tangible headway on many of its demands. Member NGOs generally declared the campaign a success, and the celebrity advocates that grabbed media attention spoke about historic victories. Seen in retrospect, this moment of success seems rather bathetic, the last great hurrah of a campaign logic that subsequently fell into abeyance. From 2006 onwards, individual campaign organisations each made a quieter and less celebratory post-mortem of the 2005 moment before returning to organisation-specific campaigning.

There was a general understanding that large collaborative campaigns were unlikely to happen again and that some damage to its prospects had been wrought by the Make Poverty History campaign. As a result of economic recession from 2008, the meta-narrative of British politics shifted to crisis and austerity. In 2010, New Labour was replaced by a coalition government of Conservative and Liberal Democrat, in which the latter were dominant. This election outcome removed a key institutional relationship that development campaigners had come to rely on: a ruling party that shared many of the development norms of the campaign organisations themselves. Nevertheless, in 2013, a major national development campaign coalition was once again devised: the Enough Food If campaign (EFIF). This article explores the motivations and strategies that underpinned the construction of a campaign coalition in such adverse circumstances. The first section sets out the difficult legacy left by Make Poverty History before proceeding in the second section to consider the changed environment within which EFIF emerged. The third section looks at EFIF in some detail, paying particular attention to the ways in which it faced both the MPH legacy and the new political environment. The fourth section sets out an argument that the major logic of the campaign was to lock in a success narrative from beginning to end, over and above other strategic campaign aims, and in this sense to shake off the post-wristband blues of its time. Finally, the article concludes.