The Hard Right Understands Symbols. The Climate Movement Doesn’t.

My elderly mother has dementia. Eventually, we agreed that it was time to give her car to one of her grandchildren. She was no longer safe to drive, and keeping the car was becoming a risk rather than a source of independence.

We thought we were making a practical decision.

We were wrong.

The disappearance of the car provoked outrage. I received numerous calls telling me that I had ruined her life. The reaction seemed wildly disproportionate to what had happened.

After all, it was only a car.

Except it wasn't.

The car was a symbol of something much larger: independence, freedom and the ability to make your own decisions. Its disappearance represented, in a way that no explanation of her dementia could, the unwelcome reality that her life was changing. To us, it was a safety decision. To her, it was evidence that another piece of her old life had been taken away.

That is the extraordinary power of symbols.

A symbol allows one object, image, phrase or gesture to carry a much larger emotional message. It is political shorthand: a way of compressing a complicated argument into something that can be seen, felt and understood almost instantly.

A symbol doesn't need to explain the argument. Indeed, its power often comes from the fact that it doesn't. It simply needs to trigger an argument that is already lodged in people's minds.

This is something the political hard right has understood remarkably well.

“Small boats” is not a policy. It is a physical object that has been made to represent a much wider set of anxieties about immigration, borders, control and national identity.

“Raise the flags” is an attempt to turn the Union flag into a test of patriotism: support the flag and you are patriotic; question its political use and you risk being portrayed as somehow anti-British.

Even “Net Zero”, originally nothing more than a piece of technical policy terminology, has acquired a symbolic life of its own. For some voters, it now represents not simply the attempt to reduce carbon emissions, but higher taxes, restrictions on everyday choices, government interference and bureaucratic targets.

Whether those associations are fair is almost beside the point.

They work.

And this is where the progressive movement, particularly on climate change, has struggled.

It has not been short of symbols. Green is instantly recognisable. So is the image of the planet. Extinction Rebellion has its hourglass; Just Stop Oil has its slogan.

But recognition is not the same as emotional ownership.

The problem is that the progressive movement has too often treated symbols as decoration rather than as political tools. It has talked about decarbonisation, emissions targets, carbon budgets and Net Zero when it needed to make people feel something much more immediate.

What are we protecting?

What are we fighting for?

And what kind of country do we want to leave behind?

Climate politics is often presented as an argument about tonnes of carbon, gigawatts of electricity and percentages of emissions.

But people don't experience their lives in tonnes, gigawatts and percentages.

They experience them through things they can see and touch: their homes, their bills, their rivers, their countryside, their children's futures.

The climate movement needs symbols that can make an enormous and frightening global problem feel tangible. It needs symbols that don't merely communicate what is happening, but communicate what it means.

Perhaps this is beginning to happen with the backlash against data centres.

On the surface, a data centre is simply a building full of highly technical infrastructure that most of us rarely see or understand. Yet these enormous buildings are increasingly becoming a focus of environmental opposition. Part of that opposition is undoubtedly about their real physical consequences: energy consumption, water use, land, and pressure on the electricity grid. But I suspect something else is happening too.

The data centre is beginning to become a symbol of a much wider unease about the extraordinary power now concentrated in the hands of a small number of extraordinarily wealthy technology entrepreneurs. The building becomes a proxy for something much bigger.

It can represent the feeling that decisions affecting all our lives are increasingly being made by people we neither elected nor control; that a handful of technology companies have acquired enormous economic, political and cultural influence; and that the benefits of the technological revolution are not necessarily being shared equally.

Attacking a data centre can become a way of expressing opposition to something much harder to confront directly: the concentration of corporate and technological power.

The concrete building is visible and vulnerable in a way that an abstract concentration of power is not. That is precisely what makes symbolism politically powerful.

You don't need to articulate a fully developed critique of artificial intelligence, corporate power, inequality or Silicon Valley. You can simply point at the enormous building on the edge of your town and say:

This is what is wrong.

The building becomes the physical embodiment of a much larger anxiety.

That is the opportunity for the progressive movement.

There is no shortage of legitimate anger: at devastating wildfires, at the degradation of our rivers, at the failures of our water companies, at the continued profits of fossil-fuel companies and at a political and economic system that often appears better at protecting wealth than protecting the natural world.

But anger on its own is not enough.

The political challenge is to find the objects, images and ideas that can give that anger a physical form.

The hard right has understood that politics is not won through facts alone. People need something they can see, something they can point to, something that makes a complicated argument suddenly feel obvious.

The climate movement needs to understand the same thing.

Because sometimes the most powerful political argument isn't an argument at all.

Sometimes it is a car.