Somewhere between wondering whether Christians might pray more deliberately for the work of government and trying to make a year’s worth of devotionals readable on Instagram, I’ve found myself down a bit of a rabbit hole.
I’ve written before about an idea about praying for elected representatives, but that’s also led into a set of ideas beyond the people who hold office to the much wider work of government. Common Good wonders how might we pay more attention to the extraordinary variety of work involved in governing and serving the public? Not just politicians and headlines, but all those other things that keep our shared lives going, often without us giving them much thought.
I had in mind almanacs and whether there was a rhythm in the year. As the son of an Anglican vicar I had a good awareness of liturgical calendars. Though as we now hang out with non-denominational Vineyard types we don’t have much call for liturgy. And I hadn’t actually appreciated just how varied the world’s liturgical calendars are.
Anyway, I explored along those lines and settled on 52 weekly themes, which grew into 364 daily subjects, each with Scripture, a short reflection and five points for prayer.
With Advent approaching, and the start of a new devotional year on the horizon, I’ve been trying to get everything into shape for 2026/27. I’ll write a bit more about the hope behind this idea then but simply it’s to open up something of the wonder, love and appreciation God has for this enormous variety of people and work. And to allow something of that variety to breathe.
364 days of me and AI
There is no way that I could have made this on my own. Not remotely.
AI and I spent a great deal of time designing themes, choosing daily subjects and looking for suitable Bible passages. The Bible is so rich and varied on topics of governance and government that it was important to surface that variety, rather than lean on the same handful of verses about justice and leadership.
I was particularly excited to come across the Open Study Bible MCP, and then to meet David, its curator, at the London Missional.AI conference. The MCP gives AI tools access to biblical lexicons, study notes and cross-references, helping interrogate the words rather than simply accepting the first plausible-sounding connection.
Does that passage actually say what we’re claiming? Is there something better? Are we trying a bit too hard to make an ancient text address a modern government department? And, after all that, can we say something worthwhile in a short reflection and end with five things people might actually pray?
That represents an awful lot of prompting, questioning and iterating. These aren’t 364 reflections I wrote single-handedly, nor 364 responses to a one-line prompt. Those 364 days of material are the product of work supported by AI, with all the opportunities and limitations that implies. I don’t think using AI relieves me of responsibility for the passages we choose or what we say about them. Quite the opposite.
I didn’t think I would have anything more to write about GOV.UK on the High Street.
Then I wrote about A-level results day and why the interesting future for the GOV.UK app isn’t putting web search inside something you have to download but joining up what government knows and can do around the person whose results have just arrived.
Though as I thought about it, I wasn’t actually sure I wanted the result itself to arrive through the app. There’s something very tactile about going back into school and something very communal about receiving the results, and the mixture of support, solidarity and celebration that follows.
The administrative task is getting a result. The experience is something else.
I called the envelopes a feature, not a bug. Jeni Tennison picked up on that and started a conversation on Bluesky about ‘ritual and occasion-making’ in public services, and what we can lose. Seeing teenagers with envelopes made her think about community, peer support and shared experience. Other people in the thread talked about PhD submissions, health results, weddings, passports and driving licences. Peter Wells observed that apps have a tendency to smoosh profoundly different moments into the same notification-shaped container. And I liked Steve Messer’s suggestion that public services should honour the moment.
That returned me to this post, which I’d started after the local elections and then left sitting (and apparently then left sitting for some further months again!). If you previously read my exhaustingive series of posts you’re probably wondering how I could find anything more to say having already tried to worry away at the relationship between pockets, pavements and platforms. But two visits towards the end of my time at DWP, and something David Higham wrote after the local elections, had set me off on the same question.
David wrote about “the decline of the public realm and the retreat of the state as a visible force for good”. It resonated with me because it felt closer to a deeper problem than much of the post-election commentary earlier in the year.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record a lot of this is related to the decline of the public realm and the retreat of the state as a visible force for good. Tony Judt pointed out this danger in Ill Fares The Land. See also this piece I always come back to www.theguardian.com/commentisfre…
It is inevitable that there were post-election arguments about the policy platform and its associated messaging. It also seems like there’s an almost identical narrative following any election: everything is rubbish, everyone knows everything is rubbish, and the only question is who gets to say “everything is rubbish” sufficiently well that they persuade people that their diagnosis of what’s rubbish is the one that matters (maybe this is how it has always been rather than any sort of modern malaise).
None of that is irrelevant. But I do think all of that sits above something more fundamental: what do people experience the state as? Is it present in their lives as anything tangible, useful and good? Can they meet it? Can they trust it? Can they ever, without irony, sing of its goodness?
Since then we’ve had a new Prime Minister and that former Mayor of Greater Manchester has given added energy to devolution with a promise of “good growth in every postcode“. There’s a lot of good in that. After all, as some wise people once concluded about leading digital government – don’t do everything yourself (you can’t).
But I do wonder whether devolution could repeat one of digital’s unintended and maybe unrealised consequences. Digital has made many services easier to use, and spared people from having to understand quite so much of the maze of government. But I wonder whether it has sometimes divorced the experience of a service from any sense of the government behind it. What if a more capable local state improves what happens in the place where you live while leaving Westminster, the Prime Minister and the national state still more distant, more abstract, and still struggling to recover public trust?
That’s not an argument against devolution. We live in spheres within spheres. Local labour markets are local, councils piece together things which Whitehall often separates, and neighbourhoods understand things the centre can’t possibly get close to. But I believe strongly (and have spent too much of my career working on that premise to conclude it’s no more than belief) that there are things the centre can guarantee and make common.
What we found when it came to reimagining a jobs and careers service wasn’t that different local labour markets need a fragmented local offer. It was that we could aspire to a national service capable of being more local and more personal, without ceasing to be something that everyone can expect. So I’m personally not sure devolution, for all its potential, is by itself an answer to a state-level trust gap. Better local delivery is good. So is designing for everyone to have a transformed experience.
I don’t want to go off on a tangent about devolution. But what follows is about the local, and the national, and about what happens in the space between them. And it concerns how we have lived through an enormous, worthwhile transformation in the arrival of digital but we haven’t always noticed what else was changing alongside it.
So David’s observation played to one of my priors – that in the UK, the internet era has accompanied the steady disappearance of our visible state. I quote-tweeted to say: I think “digital by default” has had wider negative consequences than the obvious issues of digital exclusion. Losing the footprint and tangible touch points of the state makes it more abstract, less available, less good. It is a mistake to focus on GOV.UK as an app and not on the High Street as well. I also included a link to the fifth part in my series about Pockets, Pavements and Platforms.
The preview card beneath that post pulled through a line from that earlier piece: trust is built in person, not just pixels. I had meant it as an argument for a physical future for GOV.UK: shared spaces, storefronts and platforms for place – somewhere to turn when the website was not enough.
And so that’s where this post starts, but where it’s going is to a pair of visits, one in London and one in Glasgow, I had the fortune to make shortly before I left DWP that left me thinking a physical future for GOV.UK is too small an idea.
The question is not only whether people have somewhere to go when the website fails. It’s whether there is somewhere to be: somewhere people can belong, and somewhere they can begin.
A note before you go further: I’m conscious that this piece plays deliberately with a word that describes something devastatingly real.
Suicide is not a metaphor: around 125 people die by suicide each week in the UK, and around three quarters of them are men. Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 50 in the UK.
Robert Jenrick thinks Britain has a problem with “suicidal empathy”
He means something more than empathy being partial, or governments having to think about incentives and finite resources. His accusation is that we become so preoccupied with somebody else’s circumstances, so willing to prioritise their needs, that eventually we imperil ourselves.
And the trouble is, looked at from a certain angle, that sounds rather a lot like Jesus.
I’ve wondered before what would happen if Robert Jenrick hung out with Jesus for a bit1. Not because I imagine Jesus quietly handing him an upgraded policy platform, but because spending time with Jesus has an awkward habit of giving us perspective when we’re adamant that we’ve got all the answers.
And now he’s made a claim that brings me back to that question.
As Reform launched proposals it claims would cut around £50 billion a year from welfare spending, including large reductions in disability benefits2, Jenrick described current disability spending as “not generosity … it is suicidal empathy”.
Try it on Jesus
So what has that got to do with Jesus?
Jesus has an almost reckless tendency to come too close.
People interrupt him and he stops. He touches people everyone else has decided not to touch. He eats with the wrong people. He lets another person’s grief become his grief. He weeps. He tells stories in which the respectable people walk past and the foreigner is the one who comes near. He tells us to love enemies, to give without always expecting something back, to forgive again and then again and then again after that.
If “suicidal empathy” means allowing someone else’s predicament to become so thoroughly your concern that you willingly accept a cost you didn’t have to bear, then the accusation against Jesus is a strong one.
I didn’t rush it. I did use ChatGPT though, not because I didn’t know what I thought, but because the free-text boxes are capped at 200 words, and I needed help saying the thing plainly, without my usual meandering. Whether you get to the end of this post or not probably determines whether you think I should be capped at 200 words more often.
Because, I’m afraid this is a long one. But it’s about something that more than likely will, in my eyes, come to define the 2024 Labour government and its oversight of our nation.
What unsettled me most wasn’t really any single proposal (many have been trailed since the new Home Secretary took up her position), but what the exercise has to say about the UK’s default setting – what we’re becoming comfortable with, what we stand for and believe in. What exactly are those “British values” some people are getting so angry about defending and proud about conveying with a flag?
Because this wasn’t a consultation that began by asking what it might mean for people to feel at home here. It didn’t start from the simple, obvious good news: that of all the countries in the world, some people choose this one to build their lives – to work, to raise children, to contribute, to belong.
No, it began somewhere else entirely.
From the very start, settlement is framed less as recognition that the UK is going to gain because someone is making their life here, and more that our welcome must be earned through a sustained demonstration of worthiness.
Character: a decade long trial dressed up as suitability
It opens with character. Not character as formation, repair, or the slow work of becoming dependable. Character as a filter of suitability. Something you can fail; something that can add years; something that cannot be weighed against time, contribution, or changed behaviour.
And it’s worth naming the irony: character is something we are all either developing or degrading in ourselves. We’re all on a journey. We all have chapters we wish didn’t define us. So when the state chooses to make “character” into a decade-long review, it isn’t just shaping their behaviour — it is training ours. It is teaching us what we are allowed to believe about people, and how long we are allowed to withhold trust.
The test for me is quite simple: would I accept this logic if it were applied to someone I know and love, someone I’d invite to my Christmas dinner table? Not because they’re exceptional, but because they are ordinary. They’re capable of mistakes, misunderstandings, instability, bad seasons, and regret.
The system the government is imagining has little room for ordinary lives. Failure is sticky. Redemption is slow, if not forever out of reach. “Earned settlement” is less like a destination you’re looking forward to celebrating and more like the relief-filled end of a very long and exhausting trial.
This image isn’t neighbours and good friends, it’s guests and strangers. Allowed to stay but never invited to belong.
And that matters, not just morally, but socially. A society that keeps people permanently on the edge makes its own fabric brittle. If you never quite belong, how do you feel at home? And if you never feel at home, why would you invest in the place you live — emotionally, relationally, civically? The proposals fear a lack of integration, but aren’t they a recipe for exactly the detachment they claim to be preventing?
Andy and I tried to write our take on what it looks like to think Christianly about asylum under the phrase Welcoming Well. And our conclusion is that welcome is the gospel-shaped starting point; that our approach to asylum can be firm without being cruel; that borders can exist without contempt. That got written in the lead up to 2024’s general election where the previous government’s time in office had had many immigration related low points: Windrush, the hostile environment, distorted statements about migration in pursuit of Brexit, “citizens of nowhere”, the immigration health surcharge, and so on.
I had hoped a change of government might bring a change in moral imagination too. That we might step back from where we seemed to be heading.
So much of the current public discourse leaves me with a heavy heart, and Robert Jenrick’s recent interview with The Spectator is another depressing contribution. It might be worth reading the full thing because it provides important context for what follows but in short it tells a harsh story about deportations, “rudimentary prison” camps for asylum seekers, net emigration, and suspending both visas and foreign aid. It is a story of scarcity, suspicion and punishment. It doesn’t sound like justice, mercy, humility, love for neighbour, or hope for renewal. It doesn’t sound like good news.
And yet Jenrick makes a point of mentioning faith: “I do believe in God. But I’m not at church every Sunday. I take my children to church, my wife sometimes takes them to synagogue.” Faith here is less like the pearl of great price that Jesus spoke of, and more like a virtue signalling badge of pseudo-respectability.
What I don’t hear is a man who abides in the love of Christ.
But it left me thinking how extraordinary it might be if he did abide. If he found the treasure hidden in the field, if his politics and his life left people thinking about good news? Not out of some misguided Christian Nationalism and delight at the theocratic imposition of the ‘correct’ policies. No, because it would mean his own personal story would be of life lived to the full.
And why not have some better policy to go with it?
So I was minded to reimagine Jenrick’s words in the spirit of kingdœmocracy. You don’t need to have read the interview first but it might give you a frame of reference for the alternative. What would it sound like if a senior politician spoke not from fear but from faith? If his words reflected the overflow of love from his heart and were humbly shaped by joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (which is what we mean when we talk about being ‘guided by the Spirit’)?
Perhaps his interview might have sounded more like this:
At church this weekend we sang the worship song Goodness of God
All my life You have been faithful, All my life You have been so, so good… With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God
And in the middle of worship I found myself wondering whether anyone could ever sing the same about public institutions.
All my life, the state has been faithful All my life, public administration has been good to me
It may have surfaced because I’d been able to make some progress with PrayReps this week. Or perhaps because of my day job helping the Department for Work and Pensions to design a new approach to providing jobs and careers support for the country. A life-long companion to help people navigate work, whether they’re seeking their first job, having a mid-career reinvention, or easing into a well-earned retirement.
What would it take for one of our future users to say: “All my life, it’s been good to me. It didn’t fail me. It was there”.
Over the last year Dave and I have been kicking around the idea of “Kingdom Democracy” (or maybe kingdœmocracy) as we try to encourage our fellow Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed. We haven’t quite managed to write the book yet, but it has been brilliant to take things that we know in our bones and put them into words.
I was hoping PrayReps would be online by now. It’s not there yet, although good progress made with the underlying data. Going back to work has definitely slowed progress. So, no product on the internet but I did repurpose my old locally hosted ChatGPT-assisted code for the US Presidential, Congressional and Gubernatorial elections. Now, with the final result finally being confirmed at the end of last week I can finally publish this blog post.
When I left the OECD last summer, it was for several reasons (some of them implicit in this blog post). And I’m pleased that I decided to do so. This has been such a valuable slice of time – a luxury I recognise few people are able to enjoy.
I’m so lucky to have had the career I’ve had to this point and the breadth and depth of what I’ve done. But it has given me a bit of a dilemma about the shape of who I am and the role that best fits, especially in this new, post-OECD phase.
In terms of substance, the OECD was a good match and I was fortunate to have been adept at what the job required. I’m really proud of all the work I contributed to there. But it’s also true that I missed the “gnarliness” of delivery – the practical, hands-on experience without which I wouldn’t have been as good at the job. So I always knew my time focusing on the conceptual and advisory wasn’t forever – it’s testament to the team and the content that I surprised myself and ended up staying for five years.
Recently God changed my plans for election night and inspired me to spend my night praying for each constituency and every MP. So we opened up Boon Café and Zoom for a watch party focused on prayer over punditry.
After the polls closed and before the results started to come in we prayed and worshipped. I had planned to bring Post Its and give space to lament over policies and poor governance. But I forgot them. And that was a blessing. There was still space to mentally and emotionally clear our prayer decks without spending too long on the shortcomings of the past. Fixing our eyes on Jesus was a much better way to spend our time before the first result popped up.
When it did I was grateful to Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae at Automatic Knowledge for sharing the hex map in a number of formats. Every time we prayed for an MP we could add a heart to our A0 poster, as well as automatically to the web app I’d built with the help of ChatGPT and data from Democracy Club1.
I don’t know what you’re thinking about #GE2024, or elections in general.
A lot of us are cynical and disdainful, perhaps to the point where politics is an active sore in our lives, and the lives of those around us. There’s plenty of reason why our feelings about government and governing should provoke our grief, rage and distrust.
A lot of us are apathetic. We’ve been disappointed too many times to keep seeing any merit or relevance to the whole exercise. Maybe it was a struggle to even read beyond the word “election” . If that’s us then we probably won’t vote. And nobody could lay any of the blame for that decision on us.
A lot of us still have some optimism about politics and policy, or at the very least recognise its potential for achieving particular goals. Some of us have active roles in a party. For others we might stick a poster in the window or an emoji on our socials. It could be that our commitment to our party or policies means overlooking the means so long as we achieve ‘our’ ends in battling an injustice and delivering an important cause.
I’ve worked in and around government for 15 years. That limits what’s possible in party political terms1. But if you spend enough time with me then I will more than likely have tried to persuade you that it’s important for Christians to care about the quality of how government goes about its business.
It’s a core part of who I am. I have a recurring prayer that “those who govern the world would fall in love with the values of the King and His Kingdom”. I’m even writing a book with my friend Dave that’s intended to be an encouragement to Christians by offering a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed.
So that means I’ve been anticipating this election for a long time, and frankly growing ever more restless at the need for change. I can’t say I’m impressed with these last 5 years (or with much of several previous electoral cycles to be honest). Once the election was announced I was looking forward to the night of July 4th into July 5th as being one of enjoyable schadenfreude2.
But then a couple of Sundays ago God challenged me in a moment when I was supposed to be listening to a sermon but was in fact being distracted by an email.
Common Good began with a question about praying for the ordinary work of government. A couple of years and a lot of AI-assisted tinkering later, I'm trying to share 364 days of reflection across social media, and wondering what might happen if more people brought their own experience into the mix.
Digital government made services easier to use. But what happened as the state disappeared from streets, counters and shared places? Two visits to Glasgow and Grahame Park left me thinking about advisers, regeneration, the affordable mess of civic life, and the places where people might belong and begin.
Some recent AI headlines are genuinely frightening. But the questions AI raises go much further than whether one extinction forecast is right. What does Christianity give us for thinking about human dignity, embodiment, relationships, power, responsibility, formation and hope in an age of increasingly capable machines?
Britain still has a serious trust problem. But the OECD’s 2026 survey makes it much harder to treat public trust as one national score: institutions, experiences and demographic groups are moving in different directions.
Robert Jenrick calls excessive compassion “suicidal empathy”. But what happens if we turn the accusation towards Jesus: his costly nearness, outrageous grace, Cross and resurrection?
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