Demos - bmwelby's blog

In the past week speeches from Keir Starmer, Pat Mcfadden and Georgia Gould¹ have painted a bold vision for the work of government. The Plan for Change is ambitious, rooted in missions designed to tackle the nation’s most pressing issues—from housing and NHS waiting lists to economic inactivity.

It is really good to hear our government talk up a positive, attractive narrative about the future they want for our country. Show me someone dismissing the combined story they’re telling and I suspect you’ve found someone choosing partisan tribalism over good faith engagement although, and perhaps more likely, they may just be someone understandably browbeaten by years of disappointment, frustration and hypocrisy.

Speaking personally I want to be optimistic. I really want to believe that mission-led government can make a dent in these seemingly intractable problems. And because I’m now working in a team directly tied to this one of the missions I’m closer than most people to what it means to translate these ideas into practice. But that means I can see a stark challenge: acknowledging the extent of the gulf between rhetoric and reality.

I started writing a comment in response to today’s essay by James O’Malley but it quickly became outsized so I’ve turned it into a blog post instead.

The source for that essay is a new whitepaper from Demos that offers up a roadmap for embedding greater public participation in national policy making. James isn’t a great fan of it and in making the URL for his essay “James vs Demos” he’s clearly writing from a place of provocation. But he’s not alone. It also drew the ire of several commentators on Twitter. What’s strange is that I think in different times all of them would have probably been at the vanguard of enthusiasm for greater openness and engagement from government, not less.

But I can sympathise with their point of view. Some of that is concern that such efforts simply create an open buffet for cranks and extremists to push their agendas because they’re the ones who show up. But overall I sense a tired frustration that the country is just really bad at delivering the things we need. And that the feeling is that the sclerosis in this aspect of modern Britain comes from inviting external voices into the process which delay and obfuscate from what needs to be done because they hold too much sway.

A good example of that could be that some of the ballooning costs of HS2 that ultimately led to its cancellation for the country as a whole coming from efforts to satisfy the concerns of certain local communities and residents. While on the flip side to that, the new government has rapidly pressed ahead with a number of energy initiatives with national (if not international) outcomes in mind that had been being held up by local objections.

But focusing on these issues is to absolve those who govern for their deficiency in leadership. We can say that in either case it’s been a face off between individuals and communities (bad) and government decisiveness (good). But that’s such a bad place for us to end up when it comes to thinking about the sort of society we want to live in and the sort of public discourse we want to engage with.

Tag: Demos

Thinking about the foundations of mission-led government

We need more participation in policymaking, we certainly don’t need less

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Thinking about the foundations of mission-led government

We need more participation in policymaking, we certainly don’t need less

Never miss a new post

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