The reason the English government’s new slogan for tackling the coronavirus, “stay alert, control the virus, save lives”, is so confusing is because it is trying to do a minimum of six things, the New Statesman‘s political editor Stephen Bush writes today.
In his piece, he goes through each of those six messages that the government has tried, and failed, to roll into one, and argues that “a single slogan is not a load-bearing object for so many messages of varying complexity, some of which ought to be contradicted in different parts of the UK for different reasons”.
“The only way to have a clearer message is to deprioritise some of those things the government is trying to communicate,” he writes.
