How British political parties got their colours

CNN
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With the UK general election just days away, British voters have seen their television screens, letterboxes and news feeds lit up with the election results.

Like commercial brands, political parties know that using a single bold colour makes them more recognisable, whether during an election campaign or the latest polls.

On July 4th, the ruling Conservative Party’s blue and Labour’s red will clash. These are the only two parties with a realistic chance of winning the election, but other smaller parties across the UK political system come in a kaleidoscope of different (and sometimes overlapping) colours. The Liberal Democrats (orange), Reform UK (turquoise) and the Green Party (you guessed it) are all vying for votes.

The Scottish National Party uses yellow, while Northern Ireland’s Sinn Féin and Wales’ Plaid Cymru party are represented in a similar shade of green.

Dominic Ring, professor of political communication at Britain’s Loughborough University, explained that while older parties can trace these associations back to their founding, the importance of colour in campaigning flourished with the advent of new technology and advertising between the 1950s and 1970s.

“The advertising industry itself changed with the introduction of color television, and color and more aspirational or innovative design became increasingly important,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that during this time “parties began to simplify their messaging.”

Certain colours have long been associated with different values ​​and ideologies beyond mere brand recognition. For example, yellow is often associated with liberalism, while black has traditionally represented anarchism and fascism. In the UK in particular, supporters of the British Union of Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s were known as “Blackshirts”.

For the Labour Party, using red was a natural choice for a group allied with trade unions, social democrats and democratic socialists. Since the French Revolution, the colour has been widely associated with left-wing politics and symbolised the blood of workers who lost their lives in the fight against their oppressors.

When the Labour Party was founded in the early 20th century, it used the red flag as its official logo. “The colour is central and iconic to the labour movement, and always has been,” Ring said, noting that the party’s logo has since been changed to a red rose.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has historically adopted all the colours of the British flag – red, white and blue – presumably to promote itself as the defender of British values. Of these three colours, ultramarine has become the party’s predominant colour (although the party’s current tree logo is a lighter colour than its predecessor). Blue has traditionally been the most expensive colour to produce, and has long been associated with wealth and conservatism.

Among smaller parties, colour choices can be relatively straightforward; the Green Party uses green, unsurprisingly, for its obvious association with environmental protection; others are more pragmatic; for example, the Liberal Democrats’ orange colour resulted from the merger of two parties, the Liberal Party (yellow) and the Social Democrats (then associated with Labour’s red, having broken away from Labour in the early 1980s).

But for the Liberal Democrats, who were the third largest party in the UK until the 2019 general election, orange had another advantage: No one else had a claim to it. With the rise of the Scottish National Party in the 1970s, switching from a contrasting yellow to orange helped the Liberal Democrats to differentiate themselves.

In fact, for more recent entrants like the short-lived 1990s Referendum Party (pink) and the UK Independence Party (purple), a distinct colour palette may simply help them stand out in a competitive political marketplace.

While some colors have historical connections, none are inextricably linked to ideology. In other parts of Europe, orange is associated with both Christian Democrats and, in the East, with the post-Soviet uprisings (see Ukraine’s so-called “Orange Revolution”). In other countries, green may represent Islamic parties rather than environmental groups. Brown has long been associated with Nazi groups, but it also features prominently in the logo of the Canadian Marijuana Party.

Even the simple idea that blue and red represent political parties of the right and left, respectively, is inconsistent: in the United States, Democrats are blue and the more conservative Republicans are red (though prior to the 1988 presidential election, television networks often did it the other way around, and the modern concept of “red states” and “blue states” did not become common parlance until the 2000 presidential runoff elections).

The irony, of course, is that despite color-coded election campaigns in both the US and the UK, when people get to the polling station on election day they don’t see the different shades for their final crucial decision – that’s because the ballots are printed in black and white.