SUGGESTED
Economic Affairs
27 February 2025
Lifestyle Economics
17 March 2025
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The theoretical advantage of single-issue pressure groups is that they can form broad coalitions, gathering people from across the political spectrum who need not agree on anything other than the group’s single issue. For example, Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) is a group that campaigns for financial compensation for women affected by the increase in the state pension age. That is all they do. WASPI do not express a view on whether or not Britain should rejoin the EU, abolish the monarchy, convert the House of Lords into an elected upper chamber, or replace the First Past The Post electoral system with Proportional Representation. With that strategy, they have managed to attract support from many different corners of the political spectrum without attaching themselves to any of those.
Curiously, though, many high-profile single-issue pressure groups are not like that at all. Black Lives Matter (BLM), Extinction Rebellion (XR), Just Stop Oil (JSO), Mermaids, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) are very much not cross-ideological broadchurch coalitions. They are remarkably politically homogenous, including on issues that have nothing to do with their stated cause. They draw almost all of their support from one specific corner of the political spectrum.
This is because groups that present themselves as single-issue campaigns often pursue unstated companion causes, the most common one of which is anti-capitalism. The most clear-cut example of this is BLM UK, where the companion cause is not ‘unstated’ at all, but prominently stated on their FAQ page (‘We are […] all anti-capitalists’1 ) and on their GoFundMe page (‘Black Lives Matter UK (BLMUK) is […] guided by a commitment to dismantle […] capitalism’2 ). Similarly, XR also regularly tweet about their anti-capitalist orientation.
Why would a pressure group do that? Why would they deliberately limit their appeal to one corner of the political spectrum, thus foregoing the main advantage of being a single-issue group? And why would a movement distract from its primary cause by adding an unrelated secondary one?
The answer is that for such movements, the primary and the secondary causes are not unrelated at all. For an anti-capitalist, every social problem is really just downstream from capitalism. From that perspective, an ‘ally’ who is not committed to dismantling capitalism is not a useful ally at all, and there is no harm in losing them. The useful allies are those who would not bother joining the group if it did not have a distinct anticapitalist vibe.
So, we need to draw a distinction between genuine single-issue pressure groups such as WASPI, which pursue one cause and one cause only, and groups where a visible, explicit primary purpose is complemented by a less visible, less explicit secondary one. Groups of the latter variety are, in fact, more common than groups of the former, although the unstated secondary cause does not always have to be out-and-out anti-capitalism. It can also be a narrower aversion to specific industries, business models, technologies or lifestyle choices.
But what happens when the stated primary cause and the unstated secondary cause collide? What happens when a group exists to campaign against problem X, assumes that the fight against X is synonymous with the fight against capitalism – and then all of a sudden, a viable solution to problem X emerges out of capitalism itself? This is the question that Dr Christopher Snowdon, Zion Lights and I explore in this paper because it is not some rare exception. It happens regularly.
The details differ, but the common theme we have found is that in such cases, the unstated secondary cause often trumps the stated primary cause (which, of course, then raises the question of whether it might not make sense to swap those labels). When a solution emerges outside of the preferred framework, pressure groups tend to react defensively, retreating into a ‘Not Invented Here’ mindset. They end up attacking perfectly workable solutions when they solve the problem in the wrong way.
We are not in the business of picking winners. We are not advocating for any particular product, technology or industry, and we are certainly not suggesting that any product/technology/ industry should be eligible for government favouritism. Where a market exists, any product/technology/industry should have to pass the market test, and if consumers choose to reject them, so be it. But it is consumers who should make that choice, not politicians or activist pressure groups.
It is not really the point of this publication to advocate for specific policies either. Where we describe something or other as ‘a solution,’ we usually mean that in the narrow sense that it works on its own terms: it does what it is supposed to do. Whether what it does is actually desirable, or worth doing, or how important it is compared to other objectives, is a separate question. The Victoria Line is ‘a solution,’ if your objective is to get from Victoria to King’s Cross in a relatively short time. Whether you actually want to get from Victoria to King’s Cross, or whether you prioritise speed over other aspects such as comfort or sightseeing, is not our business. But if an influential pressure group claimed that its purpose was to facilitate quick travel between Victoria and King’s Cross, and if they also vigorously campaigned for the closure of the Victoria Line, we would call out that inconsistency.
The views expressed in this Discussion Paper are, as in all IEA publications, those of the authors alone and not those of the Institute (which has no corporate view), its managing trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff. With some exceptions, such as with the publication of lectures, all IEA monographs and Discussion Papers are blind peer-reviewed by at least two academics or researchers who are experts in the field.
Kristian Niemietz
Editorial Director
Institute of Economic Affairs
IEA_Not Invented Here_Digital_v2 (1)
Contents
Foreword
The theoretical advantage of single-issue pressure groups is that they can form broad coalitions, gathering people from across the political spectrum who need not agree on anything other than the group’s single issue. For example, Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) is a group that campaigns for financial compensation for women affected by the increase in the state pension age. That is all they do. WASPI do not express a view on whether or not Britain should rejoin the EU, abolish the monarchy, convert the House of Lords into an elected upper chamber, or replace the First Past The Post electoral system with Proportional Representation. With that strategy, they have managed to attract support from many different corners of the political spectrum without attaching themselves to any of those.
Curiously, though, many high-profile single-issue pressure groups are not like that at all. Black Lives Matter (BLM), Extinction Rebellion (XR), Just Stop Oil (JSO), Mermaids, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) are very much not cross-ideological broadchurch coalitions. They are remarkably politically homogenous, including on issues that have nothing to do with their stated cause. They draw almost all of their support from one specific corner of the political spectrum.
This is because groups that present themselves as single-issue campaigns often pursue unstated companion causes, the most common one of which is anti-capitalism. The most clear-cut example of this is BLM UK, where the companion cause is not ‘unstated’ at all, but prominently stated on their FAQ page (‘We are […] all anti-capitalists’1 ) and on their GoFundMe page (‘Black Lives Matter UK (BLMUK) is […] guided by a commitment to dismantle […] capitalism’2 ). Similarly, XR also regularly tweet about their anti-capitalist orientation.
Why would a pressure group do that? Why would they deliberately limit their appeal to one corner of the political spectrum, thus foregoing the main advantage of being a single-issue group? And why would a movement distract from its primary cause by adding an unrelated secondary one?
The answer is that for such movements, the primary and the secondary causes are not unrelated at all. For an anti-capitalist, every social problem is really just downstream from capitalism. From that perspective, an ‘ally’ who is not committed to dismantling capitalism is not a useful ally at all, and there is no harm in losing them. The useful allies are those who would not bother joining the group if it did not have a distinct anticapitalist vibe.
So, we need to draw a distinction between genuine single-issue pressure groups such as WASPI, which pursue one cause and one cause only, and groups where a visible, explicit primary purpose is complemented by a less visible, less explicit secondary one. Groups of the latter variety are, in fact, more common than groups of the former, although the unstated secondary cause does not always have to be out-and-out anti-capitalism. It can also be a narrower aversion to specific industries, business models, technologies or lifestyle choices.
But what happens when the stated primary cause and the unstated secondary cause collide? What happens when a group exists to campaign against problem X, assumes that the fight against X is synonymous with the fight against capitalism – and then all of a sudden, a viable solution to problem X emerges out of capitalism itself? This is the question that Dr Christopher Snowdon, Zion Lights and I explore in this paper because it is not some rare exception. It happens regularly.
The details differ, but the common theme we have found is that in such cases, the unstated secondary cause often trumps the stated primary cause (which, of course, then raises the question of whether it might not make sense to swap those labels). When a solution emerges outside of the preferred framework, pressure groups tend to react defensively, retreating into a ‘Not Invented Here’ mindset. They end up attacking perfectly workable solutions when they solve the problem in the wrong way.
We are not in the business of picking winners. We are not advocating for any particular product, technology or industry, and we are certainly not suggesting that any product/technology/ industry should be eligible for government favouritism. Where a market exists, any product/technology/industry should have to pass the market test, and if consumers choose to reject them, so be it. But it is consumers who should make that choice, not politicians or activist pressure groups.
It is not really the point of this publication to advocate for specific policies either. Where we describe something or other as ‘a solution,’ we usually mean that in the narrow sense that it works on its own terms: it does what it is supposed to do. Whether what it does is actually desirable, or worth doing, or how important it is compared to other objectives, is a separate question. The Victoria Line is ‘a solution,’ if your objective is to get from Victoria to King’s Cross in a relatively short time. Whether you actually want to get from Victoria to King’s Cross, or whether you prioritise speed over other aspects such as comfort or sightseeing, is not our business. But if an influential pressure group claimed that its purpose was to facilitate quick travel between Victoria and King’s Cross, and if they also vigorously campaigned for the closure of the Victoria Line, we would call out that inconsistency.
The views expressed in this Discussion Paper are, as in all IEA publications, those of the authors alone and not those of the Institute (which has no corporate view), its managing trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff. With some exceptions, such as with the publication of lectures, all IEA monographs and Discussion Papers are blind peer-reviewed by at least two academics or researchers who are experts in the field.
Kristian Niemietz
Editorial Director
Institute of Economic Affairs
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