From Visibility to Power: What Stuart Hall Offers Progressive Organisations Now
Summary. This blog post reads Stuart Hall’s “The Great Moving Right Show” as a live strategic brief rather than a period piece. It proposes that the “swing to the Right” is a long‑term restructuring of common sense, not a temporary electoral shift, and that the Left has so far (bar the recent progress of the Green Party of England and Wales) failed to mobilise deep, durable social forces capable of turning its flank. The blog emphasises Hall’s move from tracking political “fortunes” to interrogating new “parameters” of what seems realistic and sayable, and suggests that serious strategy today must prioritise depth over reach, flank‑turning narratives over reactive messaging, and honest, non‑complacent debate about power and current lived realities.
From “political fortunes” to “parameters”
Hall is telling us that if we only count wins and losses—elections, polls, policy swings—we miss how the Right is resetting the basic coordinates of what looks realistic, desirable and even sayable.
For those working on brand, movement or organisational strategy, this means:
Stop treating rightward drift as cyclical weather and start reading it as climate.
Focus less on isolated “issues” and more on the underlying story about nation, work, security, and freedom that is being normalised.
Recognise that today’s “centre” has been pulled into a landscape the Right spent decades constructing.
Reality, not nostalgia
Hall points us to look at “authoritarian populism”: a specific way the Right responds to crisis by stitching together economic restructuring with moral panics, law‑and‑order politics, and a reworked sense of common sense. We are in something structurally new, yet built out of familiar elements.
For today’s progressive projects, there are at least three implications:
Diagnose the reality you are actually in, rather than the one you wish you were in. This means mapping the concrete alliances, media ecologies and affective investments that sustain the present “moving right show,” not assuming a return to post‑war social democracy.
Treat ideology as material. The stories people live inside—about borders, meritocracy, crime, responsibility—are not epiphenomena of “real” economics; they are part of how the economic order is reproduced.
Refuse the comfort of repetition. Hall is clear that simply replaying older left scripts—whether social democratic or revolutionary—no longer works on a transformed terrain.
What this asks of strategy now
Hall’s insights allow us to support movements and organisations:
Build depth, not just reach: shifting common sense over time, not just spiking engagement.
Create “flank‑turning” strategies: alliances, narratives and organising forms that can outflank the Right’s hegemonic story rather than mirror its logics in progressive colours.
Hold open spaces of honest, uninhibited debate on the Left—about power, state, class, race, and ecology—without the “built‑in guarantees” that our side must always already be right.
At strat4 we bring these insights into the work and campaigns we run with clients, resisting both fatalism (“nothing can be done”) and complacency (“history is on our side”), and instead to do the harder work of designing strategies adequate to the terrain we actually face. If your organisation is grappling with these questions—how to act in the long restructuring we are currently experiencing without reproducing its terms—we’d be interested in that conversation.