"Nothing works anymore" could be the "words that work" for a new UK government.

It's a phrase that's on everyone's lips and could be the words that work for a new Labour government as it transitions into power in the UK.

Sewage has become symbolic of how the Conservative Party mismanaged the UK

As a messaging guy and watching Labour transition into government, my mind keeps reaching back to 2010 and that infamous note left by the Labour minster, Liam Byrne.

"There's no money left"

For years the Conservative Party dined off that four word soundbite. It evoked everything they wanted to say about Labour's time in power. Today in Britain, the consequences of 14 years of austerity is writ large: a dysfunctional rail system, a failed health and social care system, councils bankrupted and prisons overflowing. Our rivers and seas literally full of raw sewage.

Labour's messaging challenge today, is to find a powerful, top line way of framing the multitude of ways that the previous government wrecked things, in one pithy line.

"Get Brexit Done"

As the interminable debates about Brexit wore on between 2016 and 2019, Brits became tired of hearing about Europe, they wanted the whole thing over and done with. It's in this period that the "Get Brexit Done" aphorism at the core of Boris Johnson's 2019 general election campaign originated.

"Get Brexit Done" wasn't a genius advertising slogan, it was a variation on what real people were saying in real life. Its genius lay in the likes of Dominic Cummings and others around Boris Johnson hearing it in focus groups and playing back a variation of it to a restive and fed up public.

Today, one thing I hear constantly from Brits is the phrase: "nothing works anymore." A phrase like that, or some variation on it, could be Labour's equivalent of the "there's no money left" note: a stick to keep beating up on the legacy of the previous government.

Politicians are often terrible at messaging

The biggest mistake you see many people in politics make is to believe they are expert at messaging, when they're not. The political aphorisms and framings that really grab people's attention are usually a reflection of the language ordinary people are already using to describe their feelings about the world around them.

Labour needs an equivalent of the "there's no money left" slogan. They need a phrase that pays like "Get Brexit Done", one they can use to frame every policy, catastrophe or problem they encounter for at least the next 18 months or so.

Labour should be - and doubtless are - focus grouping the hell out of this at the moment to find ways to frame the mess they've inherited. They'll then need to embed the phrases that come out of those groups in every minister's lines to take, every day, with message discipline for the foreseeable future.

Properly ram it home, just as the Conservatives did, with "that note."