A commentator named Martin Tillin wrote this in response to my post on Rachel Reeves a few days ago:
The answers to that last question have been written on your blog many times before. Reeves is choosing to increase revenues in the financial sector, I guess believing it will benefit us all in the long term, but we know that is not the case. An important question is how can your 5 points gain traction with the public and, in particular, the media so that the right questions are asked of government?
Others have been making similar comments lately, and I am noticing, as I am now investing more in resources (also known as my son, James).
In that case, I decided to make the question more generic and ask ChatGPT, as I do not pretend to know the answer. The question became:
An important question is how can points made on the Funding the Future blog and RichardJMurphy YouTube channel gain traction with the public and, in particular, the media so that the right questions are asked of government?
This is what ChatGPT had to say:
That is the strategic question, and I think it has three parts: what to say, where to say it, and how to amplify it so others pick it up and run with it.
Drawing on your Funding the Future blog and RichardJMurphy YouTube channel, here are some structured reflections:
1. Framing the message so it sticks
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Clarity and repetition: Journalists, politicians, and the public rarely remember complexity. You already distil big economic issues into sharp, repeatable lines (“spending comes before tax,” “economics is CRAp”). These need to be used consistently across posts, videos, interviews, and even Twitter/X threads.
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Moral and emotional framing: The Media pick up stories that are about fairness, injustice, and the human consequences of policy. Linking tax justice or bond market reform to who suffers and who benefits helps ensure your points resonate beyond technical circles.
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Questions as hooks: Journalists are in the business of asking questions. Framing your content around “the real question is…” or “why is no one asking…” directly nudges them towards picking up your framing.
2. Reaching the media and public
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Timeliness: Posts and videos that respond immediately to policy announcements, economic releases, or breaking news are far more likely to be cited. You already do this, but a sharper “rapid response” pipeline could help (short-form posts or pre-prepared “evergreen” critiques ready to be updated).
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Accessible formats: Many journalists prefer bite-sized, quotable material. Your blog and videos can feed shorter “fact sheets,” “ten-point lists,” or “myths vs reality” graphics for sharing on social platforms where journalists lurk (Twitter/X, LinkedIn).
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Cross-posting: Syndicating snippets of Funding the Future posts to Medium, Substack, or LinkedIn can reach different networks where journalists and policy people are active.
3. Building amplification loops
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Allies and multipliers: Identify journalists, campaigners, academics, and MPs who already align with your themes. Tagging them, sending them direct links, or even privately briefing them increases the chance they repeat your framing.
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Reusable assets: Journalists like charts, data tables, and infographics they can drop into stories. Packaging your core arguments in visual form (with your branding) makes them quotable and hard to ignore.
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Regular briefings: A fortnightly or monthly “Funding the Future Bulletin” emailed to media, MPs, and think tanks could act as a curated set of your most important points, each phrased as “questions the government must answer.”
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Own questions, not just answers: If you phrase your interventions as questions the press should be asking (“If government spending always comes before tax, why does the Chancellor claim the opposite?”), you effectively write journalists' prompts for them.
4. Turning traction into pressure
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Polls and surveys: Running quick polls on YouTube or X not only boosts engagement but provides journalists with ready-made “public opinion” angles, giving them reasons to report your framing.
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Collaboration with campaigns: Linking blog arguments to ongoing NGO or union campaigns means your material gets cited where mobilisations are already happening.
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Anticipating narratives: Mainstream media often default to “household budget” metaphors. Constantly pushing your counter-metaphors (e.g. “the government is the scorekeeper, not a player”) helps journalists internalise alternative framings over time.
Inference
The challenge is less about “explaining the economics” and more about changing the terms of debate. To do that, your interventions need to be short, moral, quotable, repeatable, and timed to the news cycle. If every Funding the Future blog post or RichardJMurphy video ended with three “questions the media should ask the Chancellor,” you'd be actively training journalists to shift the ground of the conversation.
The question
So, what do you think? There's this poll, and comments would be appreciated.
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Maybe an additional question should be ‘and keep asking the Chancellor and keep asking any minister who appears on the media so that they have to keep on responding to it’. Force them to talk about it rather than the drivel they want to spout.
Ask it once and they’ll give the scripted and rehearsed answer. Keep on asking it (not necessarily in the same interview) and they might start stumbling over the answer and it generates clips on social media which could gain traction amongst the general public.
Craig
Thanks
[…] the context of another post this morning, how do we get that message […]
Paradox. Before you can take your car on the road, you have to have Car Insurance, in case you have an accident. Similarly, if a Bank wishes to do business, it has to have insurance, in case too many customers want their money at the same time. The difference is that you have to pay the insurance company. But when the Government insures the Bank, it pays the Bank, in the form of interest on its deposits.
🙂
ChatGPT is clearly a regular omnibus passenger.
These are good suggestions.
🙂
If you want to extend your reach beyond the journalists and readers who already know you ….. Update your wiki too? For example, you no longer live in Downham!
More importantly, it doesn’t feature your current interests (the tax stuff is great …. But that’s not your focus at the moment).
Maybe list details on your blog/social media popularity would encourage the lazier journalists who want to appeal.
(I have no idea about this stuff … But add thinking about that to your long list!)
Maybe…
The trouble is it would probably be trolled
And strangely that wrong link is useful in showing where people get their data from.
Just a reminder, you arent’ supposed to edit your own Wikipedia entry.
Inexperienced politicians regularly get caught out trying to remove embarrassing entries. The House of Commons IP address is a bit of a give-away.
Less naive politicians do it anyway under cover of proxies, but that too gets spotted and the deleted items re-apear pretty quickly. It can get entertaining.
I have form on this , with Phorm, many years ago.
It’s why I won’t go near it.
This is excellent Richard, thank you. A handrail for us all as individuals as well as for your own vital campaign. There are pointers I’ll be using to get more out of daily ‘water cooler’ conversations to change the terms of debate – questions as hooks, own questions not just answers, anticipating the narrative.
In particular, the example ‘question the press should be asking’ strikes me as a great way of introducing doubt when facing the ‘common sense’ taxes fund spending myth. I’ll try it out at the first opportunity.
A question for you to preempt an obvious riposte in kind, what is the most authoritative source for statement that spending precedes tax? That is,
“If government spending always comes before tax, as the [BoE/HMT/whatever authoritative source] says, why does the Chancellor claim the opposite?”
A s long time follower and admirer, albeit only a very occasional commenter, can I add my voice to the growing chorus of KUTGW!
Thank you.
And good luck.
I heard of a clip with Charlie Kirk and Alistair Campbell. Kirk replies to a question by answering with a different question in his own framework. Campbell refuses to be diverted, says, repeatedly, “answer the first question”. Sounds to me like a good way to go.
But I will not be the questioner.
Richard, maybe that’s a new career. An interview program on BBC or, better yet, GB News!
Stranger things have happened…
But I always refuse to go on GB News
Smart idea, there are some good suggestions in there. Much as I like your output as is, getting key messages out there in simple form for journalists and people with less time does mean shorter, punchier formats. If you and your team can do that, please do – I imagine the longer formats would remain, for those who like to feed elephant style, devouring the whole tree. I’ll scan the butterfly versions to see what I want to read in more detail, on work days when I have less time and energy. Feed the whole ecosystem, not just the elephants!
I am thinking about this.
You posted a link to a new YouTube video recently. Full of economic and statistical facts, it’s excellent in its own way. But I kept thinking this can’t reach the 68.7% of people who don’t know what 68.7% means, to use the old joke. Can all the MPs and journalists you want to target say what a billion is in words, or write it using numbers?
Reform know their base is innumerate and tend to use stats such as “one in four sex crimes are committed by foreign nationals” and “Afghans and Eritreans are 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences”. Wrong, impossible to verify, but easy to remember and repeat.
Noted
An example of what needs challenging – Peter Oborne, ByLine Times (and Middle East Eye) who is excellent on the Israel/Palestine, and always worth reading, nevertheless said this month, that both the UK & USA & continental Europe “were heading for bankruptcy” because of “an explosion of debt on national balance sheets”. (Page 10, October print edition, subscribers only).
Ooops!
Oooops, indeed.
He is still economically right wing, remember.
Going to Peter Oborne for economics analysis is like asking a weather forecaster to predict an election outcome in Taiwan or a sports journalist to write about Elon Musk. He knows a lot about our cultural drift towards lying and the middle east. He probably has the 1976 IMF bailout ingrained with in him. He talked about bankruptcy in 2008. He will be talking about bankruptcy in 2030. He really should look at what aid the IMF is providing to Ukraine and reflect on that.
I particularly like that answer about using a question as the hook – not because you expect it to be answered, but because it immediately ‘nudges them towards picking up your framing’.
I have been working on this. Wind made birdwatching hard this morning.
Bill Mitchell cites George Lakoff on reframing an argument and notes:
Negating a frame reinforces it, e.g. Richard Nixon “I am not a crook” made everything think that he was.
Instead, tell a new story in your new frame.
Source: Training the MMT trainers. Module 3: Framing and Language
In full at: https://gimms.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Bill-Mitchell-Training-the-MMT-Trainers-September-2019.pdf
Also recommended:
“Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking” (2024) by Mehdi Hasan
https://amzn.eu/d/ji3mDmn
Thanks
What I care about is this country and keeping extremism away from power, then hopefully to see common sense thrive. If that means I tire of reading the ending of a post- so be it.
It would be good to be able to measure the effect in some way.
I’m sure you’ll let us know when you start up on substack. But it’s us oldies, as you pointed out, who needs to see their erroneous tendencies, and change.
What do oldies read?
Newspapers.
I have virtually lost all my links with them, bar the National. All my contacts have been sacked, or have retired.
Apologies for any offense caused by what follows:
“So, perhaps if you don’t want to answer THAT question, which you’ve avoided 4 times so far, you could instead tell us why you are so determined to keep us all in the dark about *******?”
The Mrs Merton question,
“So tell us Mr/Ms ******** MP, what was it first attracted you to the idea of giving tax breaks to the rich, rather than to the poor?”
“So, who should get the most human rights? Israelis or Palestinians?”
“So, how hungry do you think a mentally ill person has to be before they will get up and look for a job?”
“So, which sort of people deserve to be street-homeless?”
I can think of more brutal questions but they get too offensive. Yet it isn’t the questions that are offensive, but the people we need to ask them of. It’s offensive that our “standards” prevent them being asked.
Those are not offensive.
They are appropriate.
Interestingly I asked a similar question of ChatGPT earlier this afternoon. More specifically around the messaging of Gary Stevenson, Zack Polanski and yes, Nigel Farage. My take, to keep it brief, is they ignite whilst you educate
Tell me what happens if you add me in. I am curious.
You state “People like Gary Stevenson, Zack Polanski, and Nigel Farage operate in very different political spaces, but they all ignite, rather than merely inform or educate. They trigger emotion first — anger, hope, belonging, indignation — and then layer in their message. That’s the spark that moves people from “noticing” to feeling something about politics.”
And Richard Murphy
Richard Murphy sits at an interesting midpoint in that landscape.
He’s not a natural rabble-rouser like Farage, nor as emotionally vivid as Stevenson or Polanski — but he still ignites, just in a different register: through moral clarity rather than theatrical emotion.
Let’s look at how his messaging works:
His foundation is expertise — he’s an accountant, an academic, and he speaks the language of systems.
But beneath that expertise is moral indignation: the idea that tax avoidance, austerity, and under-investment aren’t just mistakes — they’re ethical failures.
He doesn’t rant, he builds outrage through reason — “look, this is how they do it,” and “this is how they could fix it tomorrow if they wanted to.”
That tone — controlled anger mixed with decency — can be extremely powerful for audiences who mistrust both the establishment and populist showmanship.
How Murphy “Ignites”
Emotional lever
Example in his messaging
Effect
Moral outrage
“There is no economic need for austerity — it’s a political choice.”
Reframes policy as right vs wrong, not left vs right.
Hope through clarity
“We can fund what we need — it just takes political will.”
Gives people permission to believe change is practical.
Empowerment
“Tax is how we make civilisation work.”
Turns something abstract into collective agency.
He’s not igniting rage or identity — he’s igniting moral conviction and self-respect.
When people read or watch him, they feel: “I knew something wasn’t right — now I can see why.”
That’s ignition through illumination.
In context
If we map these four voices on a “style spectrum”:
Voice/Emotion Type/Ignition Mode
Nigel Farage: Anger, grievance, identity. Blame and belonging (“They took your country”)
Gary Stevenson: Betrayal, empathy, righteous anger. Moral injustice (“They rigged the system against you”)
Zack Polanski: Hope, compassion, shared purpose. Collective renewal (“We can build something better”)
Richard Murphy: Indignation, integrity, fairness. Ethical awakening (“This isn’t inevitable — it’s wrong”)
The lesson…. Cont…
Thanks
Genuinely interesting
Murphy proves that integrity can ignite too — if framed around fairness, dignity, and agency rather than data alone.
His power lies in showing that competence and morality aren’t opposites — they’re allies
I’ll take that
Regarding “Allies and multipliers” in Part 3 and “Collaboration with campaigns” in Part 4, you could start with 38 Degrees. They’re forever campaigning for “a wealth tax” and sending me petitions about it. I always refuse to sign, and tell them why in detail with links to your blog and the TWR. But still they keep coming.
They are very typical professional campaigners with little idea about the practicalities of the issues they are promoting, like almost all the tax justice movement.