Why do governments commission reviews? Let’s count the ways….

The first reason might be to kick a difficult issue into the long grass while still appearing to be seen to do something about it. A review is powerfully suggestive of action, sometimes without the pain of having to react–at least in the short term.

The second reason might be to satisfy a client class in politics. Look at the work being done with the now-ditched definition of Islamophobia. That’s an example of reacting to tribal pressure from inside a party.

Another is to react to public anger and opinion beyond a certain point of momentum. Yes, social media has accelerated that process and often you see people piling in after something awful happens. But a lot of the time people are just baffled and bewildered about how on earth the things we see unfolding on our TV screens are allowed to happen. They want to know what’s going on.

And the last reason is to do the right thing. When he commissioned our review into Islamist extremism in British prisons, Michael Gove had just left the Department for Education, where he was concerned about infiltration and subversion by Islamist extremists (you’ll remember the Trojan Horse affair). When he went to the Department of Justice he wanted to ensure Islamist extremism didn’t have any purchase within the criminal justice system he was now in charge of.

Integrity beats telling people what they want to hear

Whether you are conducting a review for the government or the opposition, the approach needs to be the same: your personal integrity about the task you’re given, your independence, and an analytical rather than emotional or partisan approach, are going to deliver far better value for any political party than just giving people the answers they want.

I am philosophically conservative—two minutes on my timeline on X would tell you that—but I’m not a member of any political party. I would always want to write something whose conclusions and recommendations are evidence-backed and tell a compelling story, so that any political party that wanted to could adopt them, because they are common-sense, honest and represent a straightforward approach.

Lived experience matters—but don’t fetishise it

Many people who work in policy have no real experience of the thing that they’re talking about. But at the same time, we can take ourselves down a rabbit hole by saying it’s only people with lived experience who are qualified to talk about and think about how we might change things. That is not the case: academia and rigorous study holds a lot of value.

📣 The interlude

1. Do you know anyone who could lead our digital practice? We’re looking for someone who cares about using digital to achieve real-world outcomes (not just engagement stats). Job advert here.
   

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Do you understand the frontline challenges of your policy domain?

When ministers think about changing things, there’s an obvious attraction to getting all the senior people into the room. If it’s the prison service, you get all the bureaucrats and suits—the 5,000 of them who work in prison service headquarters, completely detached from the front line—and they’ll give you very sophisticated answers.

But if you really want to understand how to change things, you must talk to the people who make the culture you’re trying to change. Those are the people on the front line. They don’t have the status of all the people with the eggs and bacon on their shoulders, yet they are the people driving the business you are trying to change.

If you don’t have the unmediated views of the front line, your policy diagnosis is going to be fatally undermined. 

Supervisors make or break a culture: who are yours?

One of the things I’m incredibly passionate about is the importance of supervisors on the front line in making and changing cultures, either for good or for ill. Take Charing Cross police station, where the whole culture had become toxified with racism, misogyny, and homophobia. It had been allowed to fester because either nobody was paying attention to the good supervisors, or the supervisors weren’t good enough to model the behaviour the organisation expects.

There is no point in producing endless amounts of paper at the top of an organisation if it has no impact on how things are actually being done. If you as the leader can’t be visible because there’s only one of you and the organisation is hundreds or thousands strong, who are you relying on to make your moral authority stick? You’re relying on your supervisors.

“They are Satanists. We will kill them wherever we find them”

I was in Jordan around 2017, doing some work with their equivalent of the Home Office. I was explaining our review into Islamist extremism and its conclusions to a senior official–he was a huge guy wearing a t-shirt with King Hussein’s face on the front, so you knew where he was coming from. 

I was talking about the problems of Islamist extremism in a very roundabout, British-Irish sort of way, and eventually I stopped bloviating and said, “Do you have a problem with these sorts of people?” He just looked at me directly and said, “They are Satanists. We will kill them wherever we find them.” 

Now, I’m not advocating for that position, but it speaks to a wider issue about our whole approach to risk in the UK. We have a slavish devotion to process and a lack of institutional curiosity, rather than a focus on outcomes. 

The question is: have we got the balance right?

Thank you to the 122 of you (+4 on last week) who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

Politicise everything.

Leasehold reform is a car crash on the motorway. People look at it, think ‘thank God I’m not in that car’, wipe the sweat off their brow and drive on. If you’re not a leaseholder, or in a family connected to one, you’re instinctively not going to be interested. So how do you make an issue that affects up to 10 million people get political and media cut-through? 

Our approach is to politicise everything. That means being inescapable, being provocative, and gleaning as much media coverage as you can, all of the time.

When salience goes up, business power goes down

A good friend said to me some years ago when I was setting up this campaign: ‘When salience goes up, business power goes down.’ That has really been key for us. 

The vested interests in this area are hugely powerful. It’s a multi-billion pound industry. We will never get anywhere near to outspending them. But we can politicise the issue. They don’t want it politicised because it means they start to lose control over the politicians and the civil servants, over the policymaking. 

In the worst case for them, certain areas of the policy agenda get escalated to Number 10, and Number 10 may even have to overrule a resistant Treasury because it’s become such a political hot potato.

Westminster should not be your primary audience

The best thing to do as a political campaigner is not have Westminster as your audience. Find a constituency out in the country. They are more powerful than any MP, any minister, any special adviser, or any civil servant. Find them and mobilise them.

You need to build a connection with that cohort of people affected by your issue, and then MPs and civil servants will be running to speak to you.

Where campaigns fail is when they think it’s all about being in the room, getting face time with politicians, knowing the special adviser. But that minister could be gone tomorrow or is not keen on your agenda and just stringing you along. You want your campaign to be strong enough to weather whoever is in today and gone tomorrow. 

Is the system controlling you?

Do not be a stakeholder. As soon as you do, you’re going to be played, or you’re going to be co-opted or bought, and your campaign will be all the poorer for it. 

I find a lot of groups become stakeholders, and that kills the campaign because it means you lose touch with your own supporters; you’re fixated on playing the insider game. You’re trying to second-guess what policymakers are going to think of you if you say one thing or do another. As soon as you do that, you’ve lost and the system is winning—it’s controlling your campaign.

Meetings that don’t matter

You asked, ‘doesn’t the confrontational approach mean you’re excluded from some meetings?’ Those are meetings we don’t want to be part of, because that’s not where the power is. The power is outside those meetings. The power is with the voters.

The Ratatouille Imperative

It’s that scene from Ratatouille where he brings in the cheese and the strawberry to create an unexpected explosion of flavour. It’s a blending of emotion, and being rational and policy-detailed. That’s the killer, and I don’t see enough campaigns doing it. 

There are brilliant campaigns that do a lot on emotion and are incredible at getting attention, but then they’re weaker on the policy side, or not open about their policy asks—which lets politicians, advisers, civil servants and lobbyists stitch up the policy against the interests of those campaigns’ supporters.

And there are others that just do policy and think making the agenda salient is beneath them. By not making a scene around your issue, you are aiding the other side and allowing reforms not to make it into a King’s Speech. Endless meetings with civil servants and all-party groups won’t get reforms done.

Use existing linguistic memes

I’m a magpie. The words and phrases we use often come from reading books or watching films and thinking ‘I like the sound of that.’ 

It’s about echoing language that’s already been used—‘cartels’, ‘will of the people’, a ‘Brexit rerun’, ‘take back control’, ‘property mafia’, ‘milking parlours’, ‘woke feudalism’—because that’s what resonates. You don’t want to create whole new vocabulary to push your issue. You want to lean into things people have already heard before and will find amusing. 

Ministerial action in a week

We learned how to blow up an issue with viral video. There’s no secret sauce, no magic recipe; the key thing is you’ve got to be authentic. It won’t work if you’re not. You also have to keep finding fresh ways to tell the same story to maintain interest and momentum, especially when Westminster and Whitehall don’t want to talk about your issue.

A year ago we did a video outside the Royal Courts of Justice attacking the government’s woeful defence against a judicial review, where freeholders claimed their human rights would be breached by reforms Labour supported. 

Lewis Goodall saw it on X and expressed interest. We did an interview with him off the back of it, and within a week the housing minister was on the same programme announcing they were speeding up a key Right-to-Manage reform—months ahead of schedule—that would help millions of leaseholders take back control of their service charges.

And a book recommendation…

I’d urge everyone to read A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain. It’s over ten years old, a bit dated in places, but really important, because if you’re a campaigner you need to understand how business lobbying works in Britain—that’s what you’re up against. It’s not just cutting through with voters; it’s knowing the dirty tricks these business interests are playing that you’ve not got a Scooby about.

Thank you to the 118 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

It’s rare to find captivating books in the policy domain. Most you struggle through, glad when you reach the end; the knowledge in them is useful, even if the form is not.

Lord Ricketts’ latest book, Peace Makers, bucks the trend: both insightful and well-written. It tells the stories of women and men in the Foreign Office during the Second World War, and how their work influenced the set of international institutions that emerged out of that war. I enjoyed the colour (from Stalin’s drinking habits and negotiating prowess, to the origin of the name ‘United Nations’), but what interested me more were the lessons on influence, how it is earned and lost, and the innately human nature of decision-making.

In today’s interview, we explore some of the people featured in the book—like Sir Alec Cadogan, who could take a lengthy policy submission and reduce it to the single recommendation a minister needed—and draw on Lord Ricketts’ reflections over a career of public service, from what makes a good inquiry submission, to why civil service communications teams are susceptible to jargon.

Tom

Policy Unstuck with Lord Peter Ricketts GCMG GCVO, who has variously been the British Ambassador to France, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, and Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The preciousness of practical solutions

Sir Alec Cadogan (Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1938 to 1946) is one of my great heroes. I admire his ability to simplify, to cut to the essential.

The wartime Foreign Office, though very hierarchical, was also quite democratic. A policy submission on, say, ‘what are we going to do about Italy?’ would start with the young Italy desk officer, and on its way up the chain, it might attract six or eight different views, comments, proposals… the problem was that, by the time it got to Cadogan it would be, as he would describe it, a complete mess. 

He would take the pile home and, working late into the night, find a way through all the discursive minutes to come up with a lucid, policy-sensitive argument: ‘this is the essential issue and this is what we should do about it’ while taking full account of the limitations that ministers faced.

It’s a precious skill, because you need to master all the complexity and then reduce it down to compelling recommendations on what to do next. The number of people who can do that while keeping all the other balls in the air is limited. That’s why Cadogan was so appreciated by three foreign secretaries as different as Halifax, Eden and Bevin, 

The lesson is that it’s not enough to rehearse the problems and uncertainties and produce three or four options. Ministers need a practical proposal about what to do, even if it’s not the one they preferred. Speaking truth to power is important. 

→ Our ‘What ministers want’ training, run by former civil service deputy director Andy Ormerod-Cloke, next runs in June.

A good  submission makes one or two strong points

We probably had a hundred written submissions to Inquiries held by the Lords European Affairs Committee which I chaired.  The most effective submissions make one or two really strong points and back them up with evidence and data. If you do a long, discursive submission covering the whole waterfront of the committee’s work, rehashing the familiar facts, then you’re not going to get your points into the report. One or two strong ideas, set out clearly and briefly, backed up with the evidence, will cut through.

Persuasion is best done by trusted voices

One of the remarkable women in my book, the Middle East expert Freya Stark, was one of the earliest thinkers about propaganda. She was promoting Britain around the Middle East, and she had this intuition that the message is much more powerful coming from local people than from official British government press releases. So she recruited  thousands of Egyptians, and then Iraqis, who became the relays  of the British message, with the added credibility of being trusted in their own networks. She foreshadowed today’s firms’ use of influencers: other people passing on your message. Our  government could get smarter at that.

Does your communications team live in a bubble?

Often the people writing government press releases are in their bubble. To them it’s absolutely obvious what they mean by the acronyms and technical terms. They are not meeting members of the wider public and trying to explain the issues to them. 

You could do a whole podcast–you probably should–on government jargon*. In the House of Lords, when a minister stands up and says ‘we are moving at pace,’ everybody laughs. It has become such a meaningless cliché! Another example is ministers intoning that ‘it’s the right thing to do’. I’m waiting for the day a politician says ‘it’s the wrong thing to do, but I’m going to do it anyway’. That probably would cut through.

Having said that, the people who are quite good at this are normally the politicians, because they do go around on the doorsteps and talk to people. I suspect they don’t have the time to focus on these press releases, but they do talk the language of ordinary people, whereas civil servants in their bubble do not.

* I built an app instead. Coming soon…

Are we thinking enough about the future?

In World War Two, the politicians were totally focused on victory. It was left to a small group of Foreign Office diplomats to think strategically about the future peace and how to secure a leading role for Britain.  Churchill was very dismissive; his reaction was ‘don’t bother me with all this stuff about the future, let’s win the war first.’ 

The diplomats knew that if you win the war and have no plan for the peace, you can find yourself sliding back into conflict. The lesson is that you need a group of people thinking about what the future holds even while the political leaders are submerged in the immediate crisis. 

To take an immediate issue, NATO is broken. The trust it was built on has gone. The shell is still there, but the lifeblood is draining away from it. We can’t totally depend on the Americans, and therefore we’ve got to start thinking about what we do to either put something in its place or make NATO more European. That is what the Foreign Office would have done during the Second World War.

In these circumstances, it is vital that the middle powers get together in a world fracturing into superpower-dominated zones–the sort of thing Mark Carney was talking about at Davos. We’re going to need different ways of working together among the like-minded countries who want to respect rules and have open markets. We need to be strategically planning for the future.

People are more sensible than politicians fear

I was in Denmark recently, and the Danes said they’d been having an anxious debate in government about whether to open up and refurbish the Second World War air-raid shelters in case the worst happened. They were worried about the public reaction, but in the end they screwed up their courage and announced it. 

The reaction of public opinion was: ‘what took you so long?’ People are sensible. We need to get politicians to lead public opinion in the direction of spending more on defence, not just comfort people in their complacency.

Politicians follow public opinion these days. They should take a leaf out of their wartime predecessors, and occasionally have the guts to lead it.

Peace Makers is available to purchase at Waterstones, Amazon.

As ever, thank you to the 117 of you who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

Good campaigning is all about momentum

Campaigning is always about building and sustaining momentum. It’s a thing people often forget about; you get excited about the launch and you forget about the next step and the next step and the next step after that. If you think about the media, how do you come back again? What is your second, third, and fourth story for the press? 

Esther Ghey has been campaigning this year on getting smartphones banned in schools. She launched the campaign in September, received loads of coverage, and ended up meeting the education secretary who basically said no. 

So she came back around again and got teachers on board, got more parents. There were lots of other groups in that space that just kept coming back around with more stories, and then you saw last month the government’s changed their mind on it. You’ve always got to think about how you sustain the work.

→ Explore what ministers want, and how to get secretaries of state to say yes

The components of a successful campaign

We talk about a five P pathway at Breakthrough:

1. Catalyse, so find people that have a similar problem to you.

2. Then Launch something; you get clarity on your ask and you launch.

3. Then there’s the Surge, that first breakthrough moment when you maybe get into the media for the first time.

4. Then Sustain; how you stay on the agenda.

5. And finally transform, where maybe you’ve got a commitment from your target audience and you’re negotiating to make sure it happens—which is often a much longer stage than people think.

Have you got a little big thing?

What we’re trying to find when we start working with someone is that small and tangible thing that speaks to the bigger problem at hand. That little big thing is the thing to focus on in the campaign: you build momentum by winning something small and doable.

Take Delivering Better. They were talking about how post-giving birth, mothers didn’t really have any check-ups: everyone asked them about their baby, but no one asked them about how they were. It’s that tiny bit of detail that then can become a policy ask that gets the ball rolling on wider maternity health policy change. So in this case, the first ask is a health check in for mums after birth.

Petitions only work if you don’t treat them as petitions

Unless it’s in the millions, the number on a petition can be quite meaningless. The power is in how you use the petition to build public support. 

Everyone that signed your petition is someone that’s saying, ‘I agree with you about this issue.’ And rather than just seeing their name on a list, you’ve got to think, ‘Well, there’s a group of people that I can ask to do more.’ So then you can go back to them with whatever that ask is, and it starts to become a powerful tool rather than just a list of names.

Save the Children’s approach is worth emulating

There are lots of ways that organisations could experiment a bit more. One way to experiment is for organisations to bring people with experience of injustice into the conversation early, and give up a little bit of power and control. Instead of holding the pen on a specific ask, think: ‘if we collaborate, we might get to something that’s more powerful.’

A great example of this is Save the Children’s campaign called ‘Mums on a Mission’ around people on Universal Credit having to pay upfront for childcare costs. I think there was a mum that had started a petition about it herself, and then Save the Children collaborated with her. 

It was a really powerful campaign, and the mums went to a parliamentary select committee to speak. When you looked at it, the mums felt very much like it was their campaign, and that Save the Children’s role was to give that campaign legitimacy, heft, and policy clout. 

→ Read Save the Children’s Meg Briody and Tom Baker’s Policy Unstuck on ‘How to engage disadvantaged groups in policy’

Stunts do not have to be expensive

We did a campaign some years ago with Caroline Criado Perez to put a woman on a bank note. The best thing she did was to get a bunch of her supporters to come down dressed up as women from history outside the Bank of England. 

It led to fantastic pictures for the media, with some women dressed as Boudicca and Amelia Earhart, and the Bank sent someone out to collect the petition and responded a week or so later agreeing to change. The best bit was that it didn’t really cost any money. Sometimes simple is better.

Be wary of coalitions

I have a slight aversion to coalitions. They can be brilliant and they can be important. I started at ONE Campaign, and they were part of Make Poverty History, so you can see in the past how coalitions have achieved change. But often coalition conversations get too much into negotiating who’s doing what, what the sign-off process is, all of that.

I like thinking with a more movement mindset, an organisation or a few organisations being like, ‘We’ve got this idea, we’ve got these values, we’re heading in this direction. We’re going to share it really widely. If you want to be on board with us, you’re invited to be on board. We’re going to share everything we’re up to. Join us.’

A group that’s doing that right now is A Million Acts of Hope. They’ve said to people, ‘These are our values, this is what we’re trying to do for this week. If you want to be a part of it, here’s everything you need.’ They didn’t try and get all the people that have signed up to them to agree in a coalition meeting what the rules were. And that means they can move fast, and get stuff done.

Thank you to the 115 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

In today’s interview, Erica discusses the use of LLMs in the policy world, specifically digital twins. A digital twin “is a virtual representation of a physical object or system” (IBM), and in the context of Erica’s comments, we’re talking about virtual representations of people.

I’ve often wondered whether anyone has ever asked their LLM how Cast from Clay would think about a specific communications challenge, not least because I do it with reference to other people all the time.

Over the past months, I’ve been writing Cast from Clay’s commercial strategy, positioning, and everything that goes with it, including the role and function of values in the company, and whether we should talk about values or behaviours (or virtues). It was hugely useful to explore with an LLM how Rawls vs Nietzsche vs Aristotle would reflect on that.

It’s not just dead people. There are a wealth of current thinkers on strategy that you can ask an LLM to emulate. But plain sailing it is not. Erica points to the lack of consequences for LLMs as a fundamental challenge in using them: we all know the difference when working with an entity that has skin in the game, compared to one that does not.

My problem was that the LLM’s critiques ended up being a caricature of the thinker in question. For the people whose work I am familiar with, it was clear that the LLM had a solid understanding of what their arguments were—it was all technically correct, but it was contextually wrong.

There is still room for humans yet…

Tom

Policy Unstuck with Erica Schoder, Executive Director at R Street.

Values are revealed in behaviour, not in what you say

What are the signs that an organisation actually has values? It’s how its people behave and the decisions that it makes. Full stop. It is all in the behaviour. Not what you say you believe in, or what you say about how you do things. When a hard moment arrives, what is that decision that you make?

A good example of that for us is our decision on January 6th to make a statement condemning the attack on the Capitol. We were one of the only right-of-centre organisations to do so. In that moment, we weighed our mission and our values, our commitment to the Constitution, to the rule of law and to the democratic process–not what our funders or stakeholders thought or would say about it. 

We knew that it would cost us something, but we also knew that we had to stand up for our principles. It was a time when people were making lists of who they would partner with and be in coalition with. There were blacklists going on, and absolutely we were blacklisted. But it was a price we were willing to pay.

Long term, the relationships that mattered became stronger. It was a signal that we are who we say we are, and that we’re going to stand up for our principles. That gave us more credibility in the end.

The role of organisational structure in organisational values

One of our values is ‘one team’. You can say that all day long, but if you don’t create the structures to enable coordination between teams, it’s just a platitude.

We developed a model called ‘programme teams’ to address this. Take our Energy and Environment policy area. All the different functions–research, communications, etc.–are represented on that programme team. That team is the one making the decisions about what we do and what our impact strategy is.

That means that communications knows the resources they’re coming in with, and can make decisions about their realm, but they’ve listened to everyone else about the trade-offs and what others can live with. So when they make decisions, they know the limits; it’s a mechanism to get coordination. 

LLMs are a blurry JPEG of human encounter

Humans have tacit, inarticulate knowledge; our practitioner, contextual experience of being in the world. It is completely unique to every individual. LLMs are amazing, but they strip all the context out of knowledge, out of ideas, out of information. There’s no context in them. 

There’s that idea from Ted Chiang comparing LLMs to a blurry JPEG of an idea or of some things that humans did in the world. It’s decontextualised. 

AI is super powerful, and helps us see patterns and do all kinds of crazy things with that decontextualised information. But what it cannot do is reproduce the actual encounter, the actual moment of decision or imagination in a human brain.

The challenges of AI adoption

Anybody who is implementing AI in an organisation will understand the challenges. At R Street, we have so much diversity of disposition towards the tool, all the way from doomers to evangelists. You also have the ability, or capability, of people who are using it and are just stellar at it, and others who don’t want to ever start using it.

We’ve had a lot of pushback from junior staff who do not use AI, who do not want to, and who are fearful of it replacing them. And that is fair: I can totally see how the ladder is being pulled up. Some organisations are not hiring at the most junior level because they think AI can essentially be a research assistant. 

But you’re also going to see an AI-native generation who just naturally use it. The challenge for them is how they form an ability to exercise judgment. And that comes back to us as managers: how do we train them in this area? If junior staff don’t understand what good looks like, there is no way for them to evaluate the output of an LLM.

Some organisations have addressed that by saying, ‘Look, you can’t use AI as a junior staffer. You need to learn it by doing.’

The augmented intern: a paradox

I’m developing a framework called ‘the augmented intern’. Let’s say I want to create a digital twin of you, Tom. I want to quantify all of your practitioner knowledge and everything you’ve written about, and I create this digital twin based on your thinking that can help a junior staffer understand what good looks like.

But then what happens to your role? What about the Tom whose knowledge has now created a digital twin? What is your value?

→ If you want to explore digital twins, RAG databases, and how to use AI to increase the efficiency of your work, take our instructor-led online training. Starts 29th April.

I think there are two elements here. Firstly, contexts will change, so judgment will change, and digital twins will need to change as well. At the moment you build it, a digital twin encodes only some of you, the part that is accessible at that point in time. That means that a human has to keep creating that knowledge and articulating it: LLMs are the exhaust of human knowledge, not its creator.

The second is consequences. I love using AI for creating digital twins—although it can be kind of creepy. But it is not the same as Tom, who has stakes in the outcome, actually telling me what he would do in this situation. That conversation is totally different compared to chatbot digital-twin Tom. The real Tom has a reputation, and relationships and is continually discovering what kinds of consequences he can live with. There are no stakes with a digital twin, it’s a representation of you, it has no consequences.

I think AI is going to augment a lot of what we do. The question is what we keep doing ourselves and what we hand off. And whether we’re strengthening human agency and judgement along the way. That’s our job to figure out.

Thank you to the 114 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

Paul Scully was Minister for Small Business, Consumers and Labour Markets from 2020-2022, a role that included responsibility for the Post Office and dealing with the Horizon scandal. For those not familiar, Horizon was an accounting software system developed for the UK Post Office by Fujitsu. It didn’t work properly, and the false shortfalls it produced were used by the Post Office to prosecute thousands of innocent subpostmasters. Hundreds were sent to jail. Many hundreds more had their reputations destroyed.

It took a decade of campaigning from the likes of Sir Alan Bates and Jo Hamilton for the prosecutions to be struck down and compensation issued. In today’s interview, Paul argues that the real scandal wasn’t the software bug, but the human and institutional failure that followed it: some inside both the Post Office and the Civil Service doubled down and defended the system, rather than addressing the damage that the system had done.

It’s a reminder that institutions institutionalise, through incentive structures that prioritise outputs over outcomes, through groupthink, through a focus on the institution’s survival over its purpose.

That pattern exists in much less high stakes contexts too. Take the one-month media campaign intended to shift a deeply entrenched public attitude. It won’t work. But media campaigns are part of what the campaigning organisation understands itself to be, so a media campaign is what gets run. The institution’s sense of self overrides the question of whether it’s the right work to do.

Tom

Recent feedback on our training:

What ministers want (next starts 27th May): “I really enjoyed the course and thought it was very worthwhile. For someone with limited experience in MP engagement so far, the course served as a great introduction to this work - particularly with the modules and tasks we were set.”

How to write effectively (next starts 14th May): “I found the session on when to have rules and when to break them really helpful. Most useful practical takeaways were on editing skills (ensuring consistency of language, avoiding repetition) and how to use LLMs in your editing (the live session on this in particular was fun and helpful).”

Policy Unstuck with Paul Scully, who has variously been Minister for London, Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy, and Minister for Local Government and Building Safety.

Institutions institutionalise 

The problem with the Horizon scandal was that it wasn’t a software issue. It was a human issue. It was the way institutions responded to the software problem that really caused such outrage: they weren’t looking at the human cost.

I remember when I had to do a value-for-money approach to the Treasury asking for around three quarters of a billion pounds to underwrite the compensation to the victims. I said, ‘we as a state-owned organisation have put people in prison, have caused people to commit suicide, have caused family breakdown, health breakdown. Just get your head out of the paperwork and think about what we have actually done. You just need to throw money at these people. Their trust in institutions is absolutely shot.’

Recognise the context you are operating in

There’s a really pertinent Mitchell and Webb sketch, where Robert Webb is playing the part of a husband whose wife has died in a train accident, and David Mitchell is a journalist saying “we’ve got you on the show today because your wife died, so you must have an interesting insight into trains, and government investment in the train network”.  Webb says “no, I'm the last person you want to speak to because I've got an interest in this”.

Mitchell carries on and asks Webb what he’d say to a minister, and Webb says “good luck in deciding how you're going to apportion your budget to what I’m after versus what other people are after”.

That is the reality of government: it really is whack-a-mole. There is always something else to spend money on, and so if you’re giving compensation to one group, you are taking money away from another. There’s only a finite amount in the pot from taxpayers’ contributions.

Don't just moralise to ministers and wring your hands of that tension. There is nothing wrong with wearing your principles on your sleeve, but don’t moralise for the sake of it. It doesn’t help anyone make progress.

→ Read Kirsty McNeill’s Policy Unstuck for more on why moralising is a bad idea.

What opportunities has the context created?

A really good case study was how we looked at homelessness coming out of COVID. Because we had the ‘everyone inside’ policy during COVID when the hotels were taking people in, what that meant was that you were able to curate a solution because all the homeless people were in one of a few places at any given time.

That meant you could address multiple issues: you could see what was going through their mind, where their mental health issues were, or problems with addiction or employment.

Who else holds the relationships you need?

In COVID, we were giving out grants to pubs and small businesses to support them. The problem local authorities found was that when councils wanted money from businesses they knew how to get it, but they had no idea how to give businesses money. And so we were giving grants based on the way we could, which was via business rates. 

But business rates are actually called non-domestic rates, which meant that councils were handing out cheques to any non-domestic ratepayers, and that includes things like beach huts. Imagine coming back to your beach hut in the summer to find a cheque for £10,000 shoved under the door. No one was doing the checking.

I was doing ring-arounds of about 115 local authorities asking ‘how are you getting this money out quickly?’ One of them said, ‘We are ringing up their accountants. We can’t get hold of businesses, but every business has got an accountant.’ That was a great idea, so I was sharing this with other local authorities. I was getting lots of information from Sage and QuickBooks and Intuit—these companies that do the accounting software. These are outside organisations that government speaks to in some ways, but government doesn’t ask them ‘actually, you have an in on a group of businesses that we could really use, can you help us please?’

Minister for Unintended Consequences

The 10pm curfew still bugs the hell out of me. As Minister for London and hospitality minister, I saw it from both sides. But it felt obvious that if you have a load of restaurants in a big city and you chuck them all out at the same time and pump people underground into a metal tube, while there is an airborne disease going around… That was absolutely crazy. 

Afterwards the mobility data showed that between 10pm and 10:15pm, tube ridership went up by 40%. Forget the posturing, take a look at the real world consequences of policy decisions.

Go to where people are, and ease them in

When I did sales in my early 20s, I was always taught that it’s my fault for not explaining the question or my point clearly enough. So how can you cut the question in a different way if they’re not understanding it and they’re just clamming up? It doesn’t work to lecture people from an ivory tower, you’re never going to get anywhere.

You don’t sit in the deep end of a swimming pool waving and saying ‘come in, the water's lovely’. You go where people are. You go in the shallow end. You put your arm around them and you take them to the deep end together. 

Whether that’s a particular solution to Horizon, whether it’s co-creating solutions with the hospitality sector, or AI safety or digital skills, it’s how you bring people together, making them feel they’re part of a solution. You’ve not just listened to them and then gone off and done something. You’re literally creating policy alongside them, creating a solution with them. Then they feel they’ve been listened to, and it’s a constructive relationship.

Thank you to the 114 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

It’s not often that someone coins an acronym about a group of countries, and a few years later those those countries start politically organising behind that acronym.

Today’s guest, Lord O’Neill, did just that. In the interview he:

1. Explains why acronyms catch (he is also a leading figure in the ‘Northern Powerhouse’)

2. Calls for special advisers to be legally constrained

3. Argues that if you want a public voice, you need to say ‘I don’t know’ (a rule he very much follows himself)

For the geopolitically interested among you, Lord O’Neill will be launching BRICS+ Thinking in the coming weeks. BRICS+ Thinking will be a strategy platform that wants the Political West to engage more seriously and pragmatically with the BRICS+ bloc. The organisation is tasked with developing policy recommendations that will solve “big global issues… as opposed to endless new papers talking about them”.

Something we can all agree with.

Tom

We are hosting a dinner tonight on the role of brand in policy influencing, and we have a spare seat. Would you like to join us? 5:45pm-8:30pm at our offices near Vauxhall station. We’ll confirm with you by 10am if you’ve secured the place.

Policy Unstuck with crossbench peer Lord Jim O’Neill, who has variously been Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs, Chairman of Chatham House, and Commercial Secretary to the Treasury.

Think tanks as sophisticated entertainment

The more defined an organisation’s purpose, where you really set out why you exist and what your edge is, the better the chance an organisation has to justify itself. The problem is that so many think tanks don’t do that, and just end up being very sophisticated forms of entertainment and information provision. They don't really have a purpose in terms of actually influencing things.

Look at the issues we are facing. It’s not great is it? If think tanks were startups, and their business went as awry as the world has, they’d go out of business. So many think tanks should cease to exist because they haven’t stopped what’s gone wrong.

We need a law to constrain special advisers

We need some kind of law that constrains special advisers from thinking they can just do whatever they want, bully people around, and face no real consequence other than to be fired. Look at the issues surrounding the Peter Mandelson affair and the fallout that’s going on for the Prime Minister and the Civil Service. Having read a bit of the coverage of the testimony of Sir Olly Robbins and what the Prime Minister has said, it oozes that the special advisers just ramrodded through whatever they wanted. 

We’ve seen this with Boris Johnson, we’ve seen it with Theresa May: prime ministers don’t often actually know the scale of what their advisers are doing to achieve what the advisers think is right for the PM, and they just completely ignore all the processes that everybody else is subject to. It’s outrageous.

Most of the people at the core of these colossal tactical mistakes—and sometimes they become strategic ones—are the special advisers, these really self-important people sitting inside typically Number 10, and if not that, the Cabinet Office or the Treasury.

The role of a special adviser is legitimate—the absence of constraint is not

I’m not arguing against the need for a special adviser, because of course they are there to give policy advice that’s right from a political perspective, where civil servants are giving impartial advice as to the best that they think can be done given the political ambition. 

So there is a role, but they need to have some kind of awareness or some kind of constraint put on them that they can’t just run straight through civil service protocol, and in crucial strategic or major issues not do these things without the prime minister or secretary of state knowing what they’re doing.

Why acronyms stick: look and timing

What makes an acronym resonate is a combination of look and timing. Before The Northern Powerhouse was called that, I used to describe it as ManSheffLeedsPool, because it’s all about the closeness of those four cities and all the towns and villages between them. The initiative came at a perfect time to do with the scale of disappointment about the geographical issues in the country. It was impossible for policymakers to not want to play with the idea.

George Osborne had been beavering away thinking, well hang on a minute, this is an interesting thing that I could build on. He approached me about it. I believe it was one of George’s special advisers that actually came up with the name ‘Northern Powerhouse’.

→ Read Ben Guerin (of Get Brexit Done fame) on the need to distill your ideas down to a slogan.

BRICs caught the moment of a shifting world

At the turn of the millennium, and crystallised by the shocking events of 9/11, we were still thinking hugely in a western-focused world. This is despite the fact Russia had been invited in those days to be part of the G8, China had played this massive role in stopping the Asian financial crisis, and India was becoming this huge thing in terms of outsourcing. I thought, this is crazy. I was doing it with my Goldman Sachs hat on, because I was becoming the chief economist. 

I thought I need to give a vision to the firm that if we want to be truly global, we need to think truly global and not with this narrow western lens. My timing was very fortunate because the first decade in particular, all four of those economies just had an incredibly strong decade. Business and policymakers—including countries that were left out—were just in love with the whole notion. And then it became this political club.

Don’t hire insiders to fix what insiders broke

I was asked to lead the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, but I have zero scientific background. I was encouraged strongly by the powers that be and the leading scientists that I should put together this advisory board of the great and the good. I said, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to know what all the insiders that have been in this space for the past 50 years think, because if they had really effective implementable ideas, you wouldn’t be needing this review. They were quite irritated by that.

If you want to develop a public voice, say ‘I don’t know’

In my Goldman Sachs days, I was surrounded for nearly 20 years by people that probably had the best IQs you’d ever come across in life. It was a highly pressurised place, and especially the younger ones, they thought they had a need to prove and please all the time. I said, ‘Look, if you don’t know, just say you don’t know, because that means when you do want to have an opinion, it’s going to carry more weight.’ 

Far too many people kid themselves that they know. If it’s a social science, you usually don't know—you're making an educated guess. Be honest.

Thank you to the 113 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.

Back in 2018, we ran a survey asking people in the US and the UK if they knew what a think tank was. Roughly half said yes. We were sceptical, so we ran another survey—this time asking them to actually name one.

The numbers plummeted. Only 9% of Americans and less than 4% of Brits could correctly name a think tank. Topping the ranking in the US was the Heritage Foundation, named by just shy of 6% of Americans.

There is a long-standing debate about whether a think tank’s function is to merely inform policy or to actively influence it. Todd Moss, today’s guest, has a clear view, and given that he’s written pieces like “Death to the policy report” and “How to get sh*t done in Washington”, you can perhaps guess what that view is.

Todd cites Heritage as the poster child of the influencing think tank. In the late 2010s, Heritage was on our list of organisations to visit every year in Washington. On one of those trips, I toured their communications department.

The department had a clear raison d'être, backed by the explicit support of senior management (‘superb communications’ was the second of the organisation’s three goals). They invested in the physical infrastructure needed to influence—like an on-site studio so analysts could go live on TV in minutes—as well as in message testing for their core audiences and persuadables. It was a real-world example of what Todd argues in today’s interview: communications cannot be a sales department bolted onto the end of a research project.

This is where the ‘informers’ lose out to the ‘influencers’. If you aren’t going to invest in persuading people of a specific point of view, well, someone else probably will.

Tom

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Policy Unstuck with Todd Moss, Founder and Executive Director of the Energy for Growth Hub.

The difference between insights, and useful insights

In the early 2000s I was at the Center for Global Development, and everyone was doing cross‑country growth regressions to look at whether aid works and whether it produces economic growth. Everyone was running these complicated statistical models and publishing the results in regression tables.

Then I went into the State Department and not once did I see a regression table. It was unthinkable to put a regression table in front of a policymaker. 

When I came out I thought, ‘Okay, this work is genuinely insightful, but the way we present it has to be completely different if we want it to be useful.’

Think tanks exist to change things

If a think tank is there purely to inform, then converting a regression table into a clear insight could be enough. But if it is there to have an impact, then it has to take one more step by explaining the likely implications of different courses of action or inaction. 

It’s a good example of the tension in the think tank world between the people who want to simply provide objective analysis, and the people who want to use research to sway policy in a particular direction. 

Tevi Troy wrote a lovely article, ‘Devaluing the Think Tank,’ that tells the history of this through the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. One of them was built on the idea of simply providing good information; the other was built to go to the next step and affect policy. 

Heritage is now by far the most influential think tank in the United States. That tells you something.

Reports and events are often credibility theatre

Reports and high‑profile events are a way that people signal credibility: ‘I’m on a stage with this senior official’, or ‘I’m on a stage with this billionaire.’ That can be useful in some ways, but a lot of the time events exist to produce the photo opportunity, not a real world outcome.

It’s a similar challenge when it comes to media. If your target audience is readers of the New York Times or the BBC, then getting on the front page is a good metric. But that might not help get you to your policy goal; it might only get you to your self‑promotion goal. 

Those are two very different things, and they are easy to confuse when the coverage is flattering. It all comes back to the fundamental questions of who is your audience? And are you actually reaching them?

Comms is not a sales department bolted onto a research department

A lot of think tanks think about communications as sales. You do product development (the clever paper) and then you hand it off to the comms people to go and sell it. They write the press release, they do the tweet, they organise the launch. 

That model does not work.

Communications has to be far upstream in the decision‑making process. From the outset, you need to be thinking about your audience, the problem you are actually trying to solve, and the format to get to your desired outcome. If you make those decisions only at the end, your product will be wrong for your purpose.

The job of a think tank executive is branding and fundraising

When I started the Energy for Growth Hub, my first board chair was Sheila Herrling, an absolute maven in organisational effectiveness. She knows I am a policy nerd and love getting into the details, so she could see what was coming. 

I remember her grabbing my arm and saying: ‘All right. You’re running this new org. You have two jobs: branding and fundraising. That is the job of the executive director. You can play around with all that other stuff, that’s great, I know you love it, but remember: branding and fundraising.’

I still spend the majority of my time on those two things. Those are the two things that determine whether the organisation survives, grows, attracts the people it needs, and, ultimately, can have impact.

Four things to look for when you pick a think tank

If you’re a foundation looking for an effective think tank partner, I’d look for four things.

First, is evidence‑based and high quality work. It has to start here. 

Second, what is their approach? How are they using research to change the problem? How do they do problem identification, and why are they picking this problem over another? They should be able to explain that in a clear, compelling way.

Third, their positioning. How are they actually positioned to reach their audience? Are they former government officials? Do they know how their targets think? Do they have a track record of reaching the people who can act?

Fourth, they should be able to tell you about their past wins. Not just ‘we proposed this and it happened.’ That is great, but so what? How did it happen? How did the idea evolve over time? How did they overcome obstacles? What lessons did they draw? You want a reflective think tank that is constantly learning, not just a good data nerd. 

Learning is underappreciated. Everyone can claim credit for a policy change after it’s happened. The question is whether the organisation can walk you through the relationships, the pivots, the moments where the idea almost died. 

If they can’t, you are likely just buying a press release.

Thank you to the 111 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague.

Former political adviser Emma Silver argued in this series that lots of people “have a wafty idea of what they want to do.” She continued: “It’s okay if that’s your mission and vision, but what are the individual [objectives] that get you there and what’s the journey?”

I love that ‘wafty idea’ quote because it is so true. Strategy documents often list off a bunch of hopes and dreams (“we must be more collaborative,” “we must improve the evidence base,” “we must increase our influence and impact”) rather than actual objectives.

The result is that teams don’t really understand what you want from them or what the priority is. Inevitably that leads to a senior management team frustrated that they aren’t getting what they want. And a delivery team that is frustrated that management can’t articulate what they want. The underlying problem is one of approach.

In this piece, we’ll go through the signs that your strategy is wafty, what a good objective looks like, and what happens when you have good objectives.

The two telltale signs of a wafty strategy

Hopefully your organisational strategy sets out where you want to be as an organisation in 3-5 years, and a series of SMART objectives that management believe will get you there. The signs that this document needs more work are typically that it is either full of vision statements, or it objectifies tactics. Let me explain both.

Vision statements as objectives

These are statements like ‘we must change the narrative on X’ or ‘we need to be more influential’. These are more like goals (desired outcomes) rather than objectives (the milestones that lead to you those outcomes).

These statements are too abstract; objectives should be specific. Take the target outcome of ‘we need to be more influential.’ Influential among who? In what time frame? Measured how? Give a team that clarity, and they’ll have a much better chance of cultivating the kind of influence you want to have.

My biggest challenge with vision statements being used as objectives is that this approach rarely unpacks the scale of work that is needed. Changing a narrative, for example, is typically a huge, multi-year piece of work. If you have a handful of such chunky outcomes to aim for, most teams are going to be utterly slammed trying to achieve them.

When you break each vision statement out into clear objectives, it becomes a lot clearer what the work is, what kind of team you need to deliver it, and how much of their capacity it will take up. It has started to become practically useful—and you’re much more likely to achieve things as a result.

Tactics as objectives

If vision statements are too big, objectified tactics are too small. Examples of these include things like ‘produce six reports this year’ or ‘get a meeting with three key politicians’. Whatever you are getting that meeting for is likely your objective, not the meeting itself (and if you don’t have a reason, that is your problem.)

Many Policy Unstuck guests have railed against this approach. Dom Hallas attributed these kinds of objectives as the reason why “so much work in public affairs is crap,” and Tom Madders made a persuasive argument (that changed how we do our internal KPIs) that qualified KPIs are often more useful than quantified KPIs in this work.

The challenge with objectifying tactics is that you create perverse incentives.

Colleagues do the thing that you’ve incentivised them to do—even if they know it’s not the best thing to do. For example, they may prioritise getting as many newsletter subscribers as possible—even if those subscribers are completely the wrong audience who contribute nothing to your influence. Or colleagues may get a meeting with a politician even though they don’t have something substantive to say, simply because they need to get meetings for their annual review.

It’s easy to dismiss this as ‘this would never happen at my organisation,’ but time and time again, politicians and political advisers say in their Policy Unstuck interviews that they regularly have meaningless meetings. Clearly many of us are doing this. It’s not only an inefficient way of working, but it damages your organisation’s reputation:

What does a good objective look like?

I have hopefully established the ineffectiveness of vision statements as objectives, and the futility of tactics as objectives, but what does good look like when it comes to objectives?

There are lots of frameworks you can use. We often use the SMART framework (objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.) It is well-known yet often poorly implemented. The main culprit is simple: good objectives are binary.

When it comes to an objective, you should either be able to achieve it or fail. Purgatory does not exist in objective land, it’s heaven or hell. If your strategy document says ‘increase our brand salience among policymakers,’ it has not met this criteria. That statement can be argued in different ways. It is not binary. To fix it, you’d need to answer questions like:

• What does brand salience mean?

• Which policymakers do you mean?

• How are you going to measure it?

• Over what time period?

This questioning is an important part of the process, because it is getting you, the author of the strategy, to be specific about what you actually mean. It is really easy to write vision statements, much harder to rationalise an objective. But by doing that work, it means everyone else understands what you want from them. The above example could end up something like: Increase the number of MPs referring to our research in parliament (via Hansard) from AA to BB, over the next MM months.

We can (and should) argue about whether that is the correct approach to increasing brand salience among policymakers, but for a team receiving that objective, there is nowhere to hide. They either achieve it or they don’t. A binary objective creates accountability because the team responsible has a clear target, and their leadership has a straightforward way of evaluating. Everyone knows what the deal is.

The benefits of good objectives

For the person orchestrating the strategy, the value of objective-setting is the thought process behind it. By the end of it, you will have a very clear sense of what you want from your team(s). That clarity of thought is priceless.

For the team receiving the objectives, they finally understand what you want. They understand your expectations, know how they are going to be evaluated in their annual reviews, and they understand the role they play in the organisation.

As for the organisation, it is more likely:

1. To achieve its long-term goals — because everyone knows the milestones that are on the way, and who is responsible for attaining them.

2. To be seen as the ‘voice of the sector’ — because it will start using communications as a strategic discipline rather than a tactical one

3. To become more efficient and productive — because clear objectives give you a clear sense of the roles and skills you need on your team (and in your consultants!)

If you’ve enjoyed this post, you may find our course on strategic policy communications useful. It takes this argument further, through audience segmentation, framing, persuasion models, and why messengers matter more than people think. And of course, please give me a shout if you need a thought partner to guide and inform your strategy development.

Tom

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I really enjoyed Lord Mark Pack’s phrase “the accumulation of sludge on the statute book” (Orwell would approve of the metaphor.) Mark is referring to legislation that has been passed by Parliament but that has never actually commenced. Law that has been adopted, but not adopted; it is neither alive, nor dead.

If our goal is a ‘policy win’, we may say we have succeeded (the legislation has passed). But if our goal, as Rakesh argued it should be, is “a meaningful or measurable difference in people’s lives”, then we have failed: nothing has changed.

Even when legislation does commence, it still doesn’t mean anything will necessarily change. There is a difference between an ability to do something, and a desire to actually do it.

An example: last weekend I joined many thousands of Londoners in having my bike stolen. It’s a bike that I’m fond of—I rode it 2,000km from London to Ukraine to fundraise for landmine removal. Many people got involved in that ride (forever grateful for your company and wind breaking skills, Tom!) including Revamp Bikes who sprayed it in United Kingdom and Ukrainian colours—the paint job is epic.

Within 48 hours of the theft, we had identified the thief’s eBay account as they sold off the parts, and found out where they live by buying one of their other listings. But there is nothing to be done: the police are not interested.

The legislation is clear—theft is illegal—but meaningless. It’s meaningless because the Metropolitan Police’s policy is not to do anything about theft. The Police have the ability to do something, but they have no desire.

All of which leads to today’s provocation: is there any point in calling for new legislation unless you’ve done the deep thinking on how it will be commenced, implemented and actually used?

Tom
P.S. the website we designed and built for the Centre for Future Generations is up for a Webby, and we are up against Canva (5k employees compared to our 13). It’s David and Goliath territory. I’d hugely appreciate it if you’d help us and vote here: https://wbby.co/57621N (it takes 10 seconds)

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Secondary legislation: power to the government or madness

When people talk about secondary legislation, they often talk about concerns over how much power it gives the government to slip things through quickly. That is a legitimate concern, but my goodness, so much secondary legislation moves so slowly.

Alongside that, there’s the commencement issue. There are bits of legislation that were passed years ago that have never been commenced. Perhaps the most famous example is the legislation to change the date of Easter a century ago [in the Easter Act 1928]. Despite receiving Royal Assent, it’s never been enacted. 

This leaves us with a mad level of complexity in the statute book, and becomes really quite operationally challenging and confusing when one clause in a piece of legislation has been enacted, but another clause has not. 

Build the statute book like a codebase: structure it

If you think of the statute book like a codebase, well, no developer would do it this way. There’s stuff that has been coded multiple times in different ways, bits of code that nobody’s ever got round to actually turning on: it just slows everything down and makes it harder and more error-prone.

We need to clean it up. The challenge is partly that there’s little career benefit to a politician or civil servant from being the one to go around tidying stuff up. We’ve never had the bureaucratic equivalent of competitive cycling’s belief in marginal gains, that mindset that the way you get dramatic success is to marginally improve lots of different things.

Politics and the British government is very much in the mindset of looking for the big solution, rather than the 1,001 ways we can make life a bit better.

→ What’s the legislative equivalent of Deel’s use of ‘ghostbusters’?

Know your audience, and what they can do

Most of what I hear and see from think tanks and lobbyists is what they want the Prime Minister or Cabinet to do. They’re focused on the big picture and that’s natural. 

But you’d get a different approach if you were to ask, bearing in mind that I am a backbench opposition politician in a small party: What might I be able to change? What might I be able to have some influence on? 

If we take the example of political reform at the moment, it’s natural to want to talk about big picture things in political finance regulation, such as whether there be a cap on donations. And hopefully I’ll be able to have some influence on those things, but really where I can be effective is right down in the details, like ‘what are the government’s plans to change the design of poll cards?’

For most of us, a lot of the outside lobbying and engagement isn’t pitching at what we’ve got the biggest hope of being able to change.

The Lords is about scrutiny, not policy making

Informing the scrutiny process in the Lords is rather different from lobbying about policy. One of the best things to suggest to a Peer is ‘these are the top questions you might want to ask’.

If you think about transport for example, you could say ‘You might want to look at how the DVLA is operating and how much money it’s taking. Is it being run efficiently?’ as opposed to ‘We’d like to persuade you that HS2 is a good/bad idea.’

The difference between the Lib Dems and Labour…

Some joke that you’re more likely to find a Lib Dem pointing at a pothole, and you’re more likely to find a Labour politician waving a Palestinian flag at an event. 

It’s sort of unfair but also has a bit of truth to it in the sense that I think what particularly motivates a lot of people in the Lib Dems is the desire to get stuck into fixing something practical, something you can actually deal with. 

Are you most motivated to go out tomorrow to campaign for a new pedestrian crossing outside a local school or are you most motivated to sit down and talk with your friends about Donald Trump's foreign policy? Both matter but it’s the former where you can make a direct difference.

The Lib Dems strategy is about seats, not national vote share

If you look at what has been really successful for us, it’s been to focus on winning seats under the electoral system that we have. When we’ve really focused on chasing seat numbers under first past the post–and not maximising national vote share–it absolutely has delivered the goods. And therefore we’re very much focused on maximising our seat tally because in the end that is what matters.

The Reform coalition may well suffer if net immigration collapses

Immigration tends to unite Reform voters. But what divides them are all of those other more traditional left-right issues: you will find plenty of Reform voters who are split on whether we should cut taxes and shrink the state or whether we need more money going into public services to make them better.

At the moment we are seeing net immigration numbers falling through the floor. The big risk for Reform is that the thing that is so important to keeping their disparate coalition together may well not work for them politically as an issue in a couple of year’s time when net immigration has fallen massively, when it’s maybe even gone past zero, and when that has really fed through to public opinion. 

Thank you to the 107 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague.

“There are just some kind of men,” Miss Maudie tells Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, “who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”

If anything, the problem is the other way around in communications. We are so busy worrying about what happens today—Stephen talks about our yearning for the ‘adrenaline hit’ of ‘shiny’ media hits—that we ignore the ‘next world’, the longer-term ramifications of those actions. Bell Pottinger comes to mind.

Arguably Bell Pottinger are the exception: more often than not, it isn’t that our work has negative long-term ramifications, but that it has none. We chased the shiny, got the shiny, and everyone promptly forgot about it.

Why do we have this short-term, tactical focus? Stephen’s contention is that it starts with how we get into the communications industry: we are thrown into the job and do not take the time to study the theoretical underpinnings of what we are doing.

Stephen’s argument is that we all should. And as someone who has built and sold two communications businesses, been a President of the CIPR, and currently advises the leadership of several others, maybe we should listen.

Tom

💡 Training

• Strategic policy communications. Most of the campaigns that fail do so because they don’t have good objectives. Learn why good objectives matter and how to craft them, what a useful audience segmentation is (and is not), and how to reframe your arguments based on them. Starts 16th April {Read more}
  

• Generative AI for policy communicators. AI is the thing everyone knows they need to work on, but few know exactly what they should be doing. Get policy-specific advice and ideas on how you can integrate LLMs into your work, and use them to increase your productivity. Starts 16th April {Read more}

Strategic communications as a corruption of the public sphere

If you abstract Habermas’ argument to its limit, absolutely, the stratcomms practice is a corruption of the public sphere. His argument is a call to action to think about and consider your own position within society and the organisation that you are working with and the power you have.

Ultimately, he is describing a power imbalance between the organisation and the public. In this sense he views communication as a mercenary force used by an organisation to flood a sphere with its own perspective to win an argument. 

Nonprofits are not immune to power dynamics and individual bias

Well, everyone thinks they’re on the side of good, don't they? It’s a bias built in the human psyche. So of course you're going to make the argument that what you’re doing has an economic or social purpose. 

If you are a nonprofit or charity driving for change to improve society, I don’t think that’s too far from where Habermas was talking about communicative action as a means of engaging with the public: listening, responding to its needs, and then developing a position.

But there are charities that take extreme positions and disruptive approaches to communication in the public sphere. Some, like Greenpeace, are literally disruptive. So yeah, it’s a range. Of course it is. But what Habermas asks us to do is think about that and sit with that discomfort.

Comms practitioners lack academic reflexivity

The problem is that I don’t think many communications practitioners think about this stuff at all.

If they do, it’s usually from a dismissive or hostile point of view. Always politely of course, but it’s: ‘We're busy people. We’re doing a job. And academia doesn’t have a perspective that fits with the practical day-to-day of what we do.’

But actually it does. It’s about legitimacy. It’s about power.

Practitioners fall into public affairs and public relations. They usually come from an arts background, and they’re not formally prepared for communications or trained in any way as you might be for law or for finance. When they get into the comms role, the role is all about doing, so the intellectual components are never examined.

If that’s you, go and do a professional qualification. I recently created the Communications Management and Leadership course as a bridge between contemporary communications and management theory and practice for that purpose.

It’s not just practitioners…

The divide between practice and academic theory is on both sides, by the way. It’s really bizarre how there are a whole bunch of scholars who seldom engage with practitioners.

Betteke van Ruler wrote a great essay 25 years ago arguing that practitioners are from Mars, scholars are from Venus. We are different people. We look different. We don’t operate in the same spaces. We don’t have the same media. We don’t have shared events. It’s two completely separate worlds.

The anti-intellectual pragmatism of communications, and its downside

Practitioners are practical, busy people. We are solution-focused. This is partly why we’ve been labeled as a tactical function, because typically as a practitioner you don’t unpick the issue and think about how you might solve it strategically–you go straight to the answer instead.

And there lies the problem: lots of practitioners don’t understand the strategy, because they haven’t done the hard work. Some of us are making this real effort to push into management at the moment, and that starts with doing the thinking to get the credibility so you can.

Understand the role that communications plays within an organisation’s strategic objectives. Do that deep, strategic thinking. And then go and have the conversation. Don’t turn up with tactics to a strategy fight.

Clients are part of the problem

Organisations are driven by quarterly goals, sometimes shorter. Clients respond to this and often want you to focus on the here and now, getting the five media hits or especially that one that will get under the minister’s nose... it’s shiny and you can show what you’re doing.

But that’s often not where change happens. Investing in relationships over a long-period of time… yes, it takes forever, is nowhere near as exciting to do and you don’t get the adrenaline hit, but that is how you get most structural things done.

Communicative action in practice

That long-term thinking requires you to do the reading and keep your ideas sharp.

One of the things I've tried to do as part of my study [Stephen is in the midst of a PhD] is find the gold hidden behind academic paywalls and bring it into practice. Because even if you can get your hands on it, half of it is so dense and so ideas just don’t flow when you read it.

I turn up every week on Substack; I analyse something and try to take a critical perspective of it. Part of it is just the discipline of reading more and engaging with ideas. Part of it is keeping my literature fresh.

Substack has brought me an academic and research audience who push out their ideas through it, and comms people who want to operate at management level and see the value of knowledge moving back and forth.

It’s Habermas’ theory of communicative action in play.

Thank you to the 106 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague.

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas died earlier this month. Habermas argued that stratcomms—what he called ‘strategic action’—is bad for democracy because it treats citizens as targets to be manipulated, rather than equals to be reasoned with.

Instead of influencing people, Habermas argued that we should use ‘communicative’ approaches aimed at trying to reach a mutual understanding on a particular issue. For Habermas the structure of change should not be how most of us approach stratcomms:

Objective → influencing → political change.

Instead, the process should be:

Engagement and debate → mutual understanding and alignment → political change.

There is a deep irony that while Habermas argued for mutual understanding, he chose to make his arguments using dense, impenetrable prose that I imagine most struggle with (or just me).

There is, however, a practical reason to persevere and read him. In today’s fragmented landscape, a mutual understanding is one of few ways to ensure your policy survives the next political transition. The catch is that the consensus society reaches might not be the one you set out with.

Where Habermas’ ideal falls down in practice is the assumption that you can actually have a debate; that the public square is a thing that people respect and value. That ideal feels far away when you read Lee’s comments below, and the strength in the words and phrases Lee uses: ‘ferocity,’ ‘gunfire,’ ‘nasty,’ ‘intimidated,’ ‘scared,’ ‘the ugliness of it all.'

Lee's experience highlights how readily the people we disagree with become enemies that we should shun, rather than opponents with whom we should debate—and maybe even learn from. Habermas is right that our positions can and should change as we explore them. Indeed, the point of Policy Unstuck is not agreement with every point a guest makes, but how we can use what people say as a way of challenging, reflecting on, or even understanding what we think.

That feels like something Habermas would approve of.

Tom

💡 Training

• Communicate to persuade. Unlike Habermas, we think objectives are really really important, and most of the campaigns that fail do so because they don’t have good ones. Learn how to write good objectives, useful audience segmentations, and how to reframe your arguments based on them. Starts 16th April {Read more}
  

• Generative AI for policy communicators. AI is the thing everyone knows they need to work on, but few know exactly what they should be doing. Get policy-specific advice and ideas on how you can integrate LLMs into your work, and use them to increase your productivity. Starts 16th April {Read more}

Beware the tyranny of being right

There are people who believe strongly in the case they’re making, which is great, but they can be very pious. They are completely blinkered to the constraints the decision-maker is facing and the competing claims, and that discredits them in the eyes of the decision-maker.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side of that desk. People have the thing they are selling and they just drone on about that. Well, I don't care about that. I've got my own problems.

If you haven’t got more than one strategy, you haven’t got enough

Public affairs is about relationships and whether you or your message connects with someone. It’s impossible to know in advance if the chemistry is going to be there, so a good advocate has multiple approaches.

You need to think about it like you’re doing a maze: what are the different ways I can get to my end destination? It’s lateral thinking, not linear. Try a bunch of different stuff, have tenacity, and expect it’s going to take a while. If you do enough of that with enough people over enough of a period, you will get a result.

If no-one cares about your thing, what things do they care about?

When I started at Sustrans they saw themselves as a cycling charity. But literally 99% of journeys are not by this form of transport, so why would a decision maker give a damn?

Our job was around how to broaden it out. What has political traction and salience? Health does. At the time, climate change did. The economy does. 

So I mapped out the groups that have credibility in the political and media sphere. What are the connections between what I care about and what they care about, and how can I build unexpected alliances to broaden the appeal of the agenda that I want to advance?

→ Alice Grimes, formerly of the CBI, gave a good example of this in practice.

Focus solely on Westminster at (y)our loss

Most UK organisations completely undervalue the role of regions and nations. They see them as an irrelevant drain on resources, but it’s where some of the magic can really happen. 

It’s much easier for me to get an alliance with the British Heart Foundation, British Telecom, or the British Medical Association in Cardiff than it is for my equivalent in London to get a relationship with their opposite number.

There’s a nimbleness outside Whitehall that people inside Whitehall are completely oblivious to. It’s the Bill Clinton phrase: federalism is a policy laboratory. We don’t use devolution like that enough.

Rationalists beware: evidence alone achieves nothing

There is an entrenched strand of thinking in policy that evidence is enough. It is not.

When it comes to 20mph limits, technical evidence doesn’t take you very far. It’s not about facts, it’s about feeling and identity. Too many people, particularly in policy specialisms, can be very self-righteous about having the evidence on their side.

The evidence that mattered is: people don’t like the idea of being told to go slow, but they also don't want the cars in their street to go fast. As a driver, I will say, ‘bloody nuisance making me go 20 here.’ But if you ask the people who live in that street, they don't want speeds going back up.

Allies, but only when it’s easy

When it came down to it, the groups who campaign on this stuff were really poor… At the sound of gunfire, they all ran for the hills.

Two-thirds of the parties in the Senedd supported the 20mph limits, but when it started to get rough, nobody was to be found. It was literally just me and the First Minister. 

More depressingly, community advocates felt intimidated into silence. Local campaigners and hospital consultants who had been prepared in advance to say ‘this is the right thing to do’ were scared off when it started getting nasty.

I’m not criticising them–they were intimidated and they self-censored and that’s human. We should have been better prepared for it, although I’m not sure you can fully prepare yourself for the ferocity and the ugliness of it all.

Timing is everything

People say the comms around the speed limit weren’t good enough, or the message was wrong, or we weren’t flexible enough in how it was implemented. All those things are true, but we got it over the line.

My reflection on that episode is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you wait until everything is perfect, you never get it over the line because there’s a window in politics. You can have the best-designed policy and implementation in the world, but if you miss that window it is all academic. It’s yet another paper that nobody reads. 

Why the system produces weathercocks

As soon as you’re in politics, you are seen as venal and self-interested, and you’ve somehow got to constantly prove the opposite.

That’s exhausting and demoralising. You feel trapped. It’s understandable that politicians feel, ‘I will follow the path of least resistance.’ But that means we end up with politicians who do not say ‘I want to change this and I’m going to do everything I can to change this.’ Instead they say ‘I’m not going to push my luck on that because it’s unpopular.’ 

It’s the Tony Benn quote on the difference between a weathercock and a signpost. Weathercocks point whichever way the wind is blowing that day. Signposts say this is the way we should go.

You need a mix in politics. The challenge is when you get too many of one kind, and we have too many weathercocks at the moment.

Thank you to the 104 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague.

For my colleagues in Ukraine, war has been a reality for four long years.

I remember the first time we heard the drone of an air raid siren over a team call. A colleague apologised for the disturbance, said they needed to go, and several cameras turned off in quick succession.

War and resilience are a regular topic of conversation with our clients in Brussels. But in the UK, few outside of the national security and foreign policy space seem to be talking about it. It feels far away in many senses—geographically, culturally, generationally (it is telling that before 2022 my reference point for what an air raid siren sounds like was WW2 films.)

The lens through which many view the prospect of war and growing defence spending is ‘it’s taking our budgets’. This is of course true—but, if you were in government, how would you respond to growing geopolitical instability? And if our governments are planning for war, should we be planning too?

It’s just one of the many questions that Catherine Day, today’s guest, intends to grapple with through the National Strategy Project. Catherine is a career insider who has spent over a quarter of a century advising successive British governments from within No. 10, the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

One of the reasons she co-founded the National Strategy Project is because of this sense that as a society we are vulnerable: we don’t have the right kinds of institutions for today’s challenges; we conceptualise community as something local and atomised—not national; and we don’t sufficiently interrogate what our role as a citizen is or should be. You can read more about the challenges the Project intends to address here.

It’s not just our nations and societies that should be thinking about this, but our organisations too. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me five years ago that Cast from Clay would shortly buy power backup units and have conscription contingency plans.

Tom

Success is not necessarily what does happen, but what does not

A lot of my career has been in the national security space, the international space, and on geopolitics. Perhaps because of that, my career highlights are often about what we avoided or prevented, rather than what we made happen.

This is one problem with views on government today: its core duty is keeping us safe, but people don’t see most of that because security is largely measured in things not coming to pass.

The proximity of war

We are wildly vulnerable right now. We take a lot for granted in the UK today when it comes to defence, and I say that as someone who grew up in Northern Ireland and served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We’re not resilient. Successive governments have opened us up to risks in many ways by failing to plan and prepare for the long-term. The COVID pandemic showed how fragile our supply chains are. The war in Iran is showing how vulnerable our energy systems are. And we’ve quietly let our civil resilience fall away. We’re not bringing up our children in ways that will help them to survive if and when things get difficult: their ability to critically think is vulnerable. 

There is nothing surprising about the risks. We have simply not invested in preparing for them. In many countries, citizens are trained and organised to act when crises come. Here, we mostly assume someone else will deal with them–or that we’ll call in the army. 

Your role as a citizen is to challenge and better the state

Just because we’ve stepped into a set of systems that dictate ‘this is the way things are done’, does not mean that it has been thought through properly. It definitely does not mean that it is the right way to do things in the future. 

One of the things I’ve always found strange is that Northcote and Trevelyan would still recognise the structures and functions of the government that we have. Despite the fact that they wrote down the rules for the permanent civil service nearly two hundred years ago. 

That is not okay. The British state and context was entirely different then. It simply is irrational to think that institutions that were set up so long ago are fit for the times in which we’re living today. 

Political incentives are one of those vulnerabilities

There are huge challenges that we have to deal with: demographic change, climate change, technological pressures, economic shifts… These are all long-term challenges, but we rely on a politically-dominated short-term system to respond to them.

People in the system are trapped in this way of doing things that sees politicians having to win elections every few years, and which sees a civil service having to implement whatever the current government has come up with. Those things are often not necessarily rooted in reality. They are rooted in the realities that enable politicians to win elections. We inhabit a system with the wrong incentives.

I was part of the team that did Boris Johnson’s Integrated Review of foreign, defence, development and security that was meant to set our strategy for the coming decades. One of the bits of direction we received was, ‘Well, you can’t touch Europe. It’s still too toxic.’ 

You can’t come up with a serious national strategy that ignores the massive market on your doorstep because of such short-term constraints.

The methodologies that prop up a flawed approach

Focus groups and surveys don’t answer the right kind of question–they’re like a dipstick of where public opinion is now. They don’t ask people to engage their minds on the reality of the issues at hand.

It’s why we are embracing deliberative methods in the National Strategy Project. We don’t want a measure of where people are now, but a measure of where people are when they have thought about the matter at hand, and when they have exchanged views with people who have different views to their own. 

Changing our institutions starts with you

We have a strange learned dependency culture of government in this country where the government is an Other. We don’t see it as being of us; it’s something else. That makes it easier to blame when things go wrong: this idea that government is something that politicians do to us, and that the civil service facilitates.

Government is the expression of our people. It is the sum total of the choices we make as a society about how to organise ourselves. It is not some Other.

You don’t get that in other countries. In Vietnam and South Korea they have this vibrant sense that they’re all in it together, and they’re going to organise themselves to have a better future.

The problem is maybe how we conceptualise community. In Britain, what we mean by community tends to be our local communities. We haven’t put equal and opposite effort into thinking about ourselves as a national community. 

Our current political fragmentation is the natural end result of that: you can’t devolve out and devolve down and expect everything to hang together unless you’re also thinking about what brings us together. We’ve all got a role to play in that.

There is a cohort of people who reliably read to the end—thank you for being one of them.

You’ll hopefully know that we have a handful of training courses: one on strategic communications (objective setting, audience definitions, etc.), one on writing effectively, one on how to engage ministers and their teams, and one on getting the most out of AI.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be moving to a new training platform. And with that, we’ll be starting to offer organisational membership. One flat annual fee, and your colleagues can pick and choose which training they want to do. If that is something you’d be interested in discussing, please hit the button below.

For some time after Labour’s election victory, pundits argued that Keir Starmer should produce a Substack. Then the Prime Minister started, and now the message is ‘Yes, but not that way’. The reasons people cite:

1. It is inauthentic: it neither feels written by him, nor does it fit the norms of the platform.

2. It lacks coherence: what’s the objective?

3. The audience is uncertain: is this intended for political insiders who understand the different bits of policy being talked about, or the wider public, who probably don’t?

Take the last Substack. It starts by referring to the war in the Middle East and then awkwardly pivots to the spring statement. What’s the betting someone really important said just before this went out: ‘We must acknowledge the war’, ‘…but this isn’t about the war’, ‘I know but we’ll look out of touch if we don’t talk about it, just acknowledge it’, ‘but it will be weird’, ‘acknowledge it.’

The comms person was right—it’s weird.

It uses epistrophe (the repetition of a word or clause for effect) with the line “Nigel Farage and Reform want to scrap it.” We’ve seen politicians struggle with this rhetorical device in the past; it’s not always easy to get it right. Regardless of the device itself, the way it is used positions Labour as weak to Reform. Nietzsche would call this slave morality; Labour are defining themselves by their opposition to Reform, not by the strength of their own vision.

Lastly, the piece falls into several of the usual policy communications traps. It over-indexes on political statements and policy outputs, not real-world outcomes. It uses unimaginative language and cliched metaphors, like ‘turning point’ and ‘a clear destination in mind.’ And the piece has more chameleons than London Zoo; words and phrases that change their meaning depending on who is watching. What is a Labour value? What does the PM mean when he says ‘working people’?

The discipline that sits underneath all of this is political rhetoric, and today’s guest, Professor Alan Finlayson, is a specialist. If you are interested in digital communications and how to think about social media in 2026, I’d strongly recommend his recent interview in Renewal on whether the left understands the internet.

As to his Policy Unstuck interview below, I had a career highlight being able to ask someone in all seriousness: ‘what would Aristotle think?’

I still have Alan’s shriek of laughter in my ears.

Tom

✍️ Do you ever wonder whether your writing is any good?

Policy communications is awash with poor writing, whether because of overly complex sentences, metaphors that do not evoke, or because it is simply boring. Don’t be part of that crowd. How to write well, 5 week online training, starts 19th March.

Welcome to the post-common culture era

Communication doesn’t just share information, but organises people and their relationships with one another. A national newspaper read by everyone on the same day brought people together, thinking about the same things, at the same time. 

Digital media and social platforms are fundamentally different. They completely dissolve all the ways people were previously organised and connected to political parties and policy decisions. That change has been so rapid that the mainstream political system has not caught up at all; traditional parties are blindsided by how movements like Reform and the Greens organise through these new means.

It’s not just politics–outside of sports, very few things are watched by millions simultaneously. The effect is that we now live in a post-common culture era.

The specialisation of the political and policy elite

Politicians are disconnected for simple, well-known reasons. The long story of post-war politics in Britain is partly a massive decline in party membership. There were over two and a half million Conservative members in the 50s. The Labour Party, via trade unions, used to have around six million. That’s all declined. Party membership dropped markedly during the New Labour years, spiked briefly with Corbyn, and is now about 300,000.

This disembedding of parties from wider life—their connections to communities, trade unions, churches, and charities—means politics is now much more of a distinct niche hobby interest, rather than part of a larger life. 

Furthermore, the increased complexity of political management means it has become a specialised, graduate-entry career rather than something that becomes an extension of work elsewhere. That’s not unique to politics: there’s an intensification of specialisation across all kinds of areas.

Politics (and communications) is a mix of science and art

Problems arise when you have people who are great at arguing policy with other wonks but lack an understanding of politics beyond that. Politics is not just a policy science, it is also a performance art. How do you represent and perform what you’re doing? How do you mobilise people?

The simple point of rhetoric, from ancient Greece to now, is adapting what you’re saying to the audience you’re talking to. You cannot know that simply from your focus group data or opinion poll data: you need a thick sense of how they live.

MPs used to get that by spending time in the Labour club or the Conservative association, and by coming from the same world as those they represented. My sense is they don't do that so much now. Expertise is important, but knowing what you're doing in politics means understanding the sociology and culture of the nation. If you just know the formalities of a policy, you don’t know how to get there.

Politics is downstream of culture

The politicians who argue against the idea that politics is downstream of culture are completely wrong. It is. 

The Breitbart claim is not original. It was understood by Ancient philosophers—Plato was worried about how theatre shaped politics, for example—by figures such as Gramsci in the 1930s, and picked up by French right-wing intellectuals in the 70s as 'metapolitics.' The Labour and Conservative parties used to know this intuitively through their vast social memberships.

Breitbart’s implication is that you win by first engaging in a battle over culture - identities, myths, world-views - and over representation in mass culture. The liberal left used to know this too. They championed the representation of gay people in soap operas to help legitimate equality policies. If you haven't first won the battle of ideas, culturally and intellectually, you don’t have a movement to sustain your policy.

If you want a current example, look at how the vocabulary around migration has shifted in media and online. That’s the outcome of a strategy implemented by the right and it is paving the way for Reform’s policy demands. 

The right effectively uses inductive reasoning in its rhetoric

The rhetorical device of inductive reasoning is a characteristic of reactionary discourse, because it argues that everything is going to hell, and it proves that proposition by listing visceral instances of victimisation: ‘This person got arrested for a tweet. This asylum seeker committed a crime.’

It builds a larger claim from tangible, local examples that people can easily understand and respond to emotionally. It powerfully instantiates their claim that the system is broken.

The left’s tendency to moralise is a fatal political weakness

The liberal tendency goes the other way around: starting with a general moral rule, looking for examples where the rule is broken, and telling people off for it. If your politics is just pointing out people’s moral failings, you aren’t giving people a meaningful orientation or involving them in a process.

Liberals ought to recognise that there are competing moral orders in play. Political life is about building a coalition out of people with different forms of moral reasoning to achieve a common cause. You disable action if you just point out moral failings.

The old cliché is true here: the left looks for enemies, while the right looks for allies.

What would Aristotle say about British politics today?

I think he would find Labour’s communications to be… inartistic. 

Classical rhetoric is about combining three appeals: character (ethos), emotion (pathos), and logical propositions (logos). Powerful rhetoric unifies these into a meaningful proposition. Labour doesn’t have a unified conception of that. They flit between trying to affirm ethos by putting up flags, but it isn't connected to a coherent policy proposition or a meaningful emotional understanding of the situation.

Ultimately, it doesn’t persuade anybody because it doesn’t offer an analysis of our current situation. Labour is just saying, ‘The Tories made everything bad, we will make tough decisions.’ It doesn't give us a sense of where we belong or what we can do.

Successful policy requires persuading and involving the implementers

Lots of people think policy is writing a briefing document with instructions for a bureaucracy. But ultimately, policy is about getting lots of people to do something differently. Health service policy is about changing the behaviours of a million NHS staff and 65 million patients. Education policy is about changing how people act in classrooms. You can do that by instruction and incentive, or you can involve them in the process and persuade them to be part of it.

What’s gone wrong is that governments try to make policy without involving the people who will actually implement it. They order them to do it, which breeds resentment, or they use financial incentives, which leads to perverse outcomes.

Policy needs to engage and activate people. When governments have been most successful—like the 1945 welfare state reforms or early Blairism—it’s because they galvanised key parts of the professional communities they were trying to change, and gave people a vocabulary they could use to think and act for themselves.

Thank you to the 103 readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

My grandmother died this time last year, at the grand old age of 98.

I lived about half an hour away from her when I was at university, and I’d jump on the train every month or so to see her. We would debate Middle Eastern politics, I’d show her how to do things on her computer, and—very importantly—she’d cook me a proper meal.

My grandmother’s catch phrase was: “But what does it mean?” When she said “mean”, it was like she was using a medieval torture device to stretch those vowels out as far as they could go.

Many of us in the policy world would do well to have my grandmum sitting on our shoulders as we write. Perhaps today’s interview with Jemima Hartshorn, the founder of Mums for Lungs, illustrates why.

School Streets is a scheme intended to protect school children from cars—both in terms of not getting run over, but also from pollution—at the start and end of every day. Jemima lays out how School Streets is sound policy, but politically challenging. As we spoke, I had my grandmum at the back of my mind.

What does “School Streets” communicate as a name? That this street happens to have a school on it? It certainly doesn’t communicate the value of the policy. What if it were called a School Shield?

Jemima gives the example below of how some journalists report on School Streets through the frame of revenue raising. The policy isn't about protecting kids, the headlines argue; it’s a cash cow. I wonder what difference it would make if the name signalled the policy outcome. Local authorities making money from drivers missing road signs is one thing—but making money from drivers who have actively driven through, pierced, a School Shield paints a somewhat different picture.

Tom

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Nudging: useful or immaterial?

It sometimes feels like you can do incremental change through behaviour change, right? If some of us choose not to drive, not to have deliveries, not to burn our fires, not to use the gas stove at home, we can reduce air pollution levels. That’s true–but the result is going to be limited. 

Really in order to achieve the change that is needed, it requires the government to step in and make interventions that then result in national behaviour change. Across the country, we are experiencing air pollution levels that cannot be tinkered with. They need to be addressed, and that requires political leadership.

The policy is there, but is the politics?

What we have seen in air pollution is that the modelling of interventions, and how they translate via behaviour change into air pollution reduction, is really precise. Precise in the sense that the ULEZ [London's traffic scheme designed to reduce air pollution by discouraging the use of older, more polluting vehicles] is doing exactly what it was meant to do, and a tiny little bit more.

So the understanding of what drives people to do certain things—such as driving at certain times, in certain cars, in certain places—is well-established. The fact that these models are playing out in real life with the policies that have been enacted has given me loads of confidence in experts, it’s great!

But clearly politically this is not the time and place for more clean air zones to be introduced anytime soon, and that is where the problem is. The challenge is not mapping the solutions to the problem. It’s the communications, the narrative, the politics… that is where we are struggling to make progress.

Does your policymaker need evidence, or ammunition?

I've been campaigning on air pollution from road transport for nine years. No local authority officer that I've ever spoken to needs compelling evidence. They know the problem. They know the reality. Usually, what we hear from policy officials is that they want to go much further, faster, and quicker.

That’s not the same as the wider public. Lots of people have heard that air pollution is a problem, but I think the vast majority still don't truly understand that their lung or heart issues might already be linked to the dirty air they are breathing or  it could very well impact their own lives and the future. That is what we, as a clean air movement, need to change. We need to make it more personal—making it a topic that isn't just a 'nice to have', but something that viscerally impacts you.

Does our focus on ‘stories’ trivialise reality?

I want to push back on the notion of 'stories' because I dislike the term. That is both because it sounds a bit like make-belief, and relatedly because this is about health and real-life human experience. These are people going to the hospital with their children. These are people losing children to air pollution, whose lives are impacted on a daily basis. These are people who have heart disease and cancer. These aren’t stories, they are people’s lives. It makes much more sense to use terms like ‘narratives’ or ‘arguments’.

Think about your messengers (it may not be you)

We've consistently made a strong argument for the ULEZ. Being on the radio as normal people, as parents—people the public can relate to—really works. It helps immensely in a time when political messengers are often viewed with controversy, and when discussions around cars, even if they relate to health, are constantly dragged into culture wars.

Not everyone has the same incentive

A School Street is a scheme where you close the road next to a school to through-traffic twice a day for about an hour, right when huge numbers of children are walking to school. We know that children breathe in a disproportionate amount of air pollution during the school run, so a School Street is a really obvious solution.

And yet, the media headlines we see are often along the lines of, “XYZ local authority has made this much money through School Streets.” The way these schemes make money is that there will be a road sign stating you’re not allowed to drive there at a certain time, accompanied by a camera. If people still drive through it, they get a fine.

So rather than asking why drivers are ignoring road signs, the media frames the scheme as a cash cow. Which then turns people against a scheme that is there to look after our kids. Is this what the media should be doing?

Thank you to the 100 (woop!) readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

The keen-eyed among you will notice Andy has been on Policy Unstuck before. Last time, he explained why the Civil Service operates the way it does, arguing its perceived slowness comes down to the sheer scale of the challenges it faces, and that a powerful finance ministry is a good thing.

Today, we’re exploring a recurring theme of this newsletter: what do ministers actually want? Previous guests on this include current Minister Kirsty McNeill, former Secretary of State Gillian Keegan, and former civil servant Reza Schwitzer.

Andy recently developed a training course with us that answers exactly that, exploring how ministers and their civil service teams want external organisations to engage with them. Today’s interview serves as a primer so you can see if the full course would be useful for you or a colleague.

I especially enjoyed his translation of what civil service phrases actually mean: we could probably do a whole separate interview just on that.

Tom

P.S. We are hiring a brand/social media consultant (£35k-40k salary). Know someone? Please do forward the job description on.

What civil service phrases actually mean

‘The government is minded to’ means we have only briefly thought about this and we're worried it might not be the right thing, so please tell us quickly before we go further. 

Another one is ‘when parliamentary time allows.’ This phrase generally means that while you feel this issue is important, it is not yet important enough for the government, so it's not going to happen for a while. Just ask anyone working on audit reform over the past six or seven years how many times they’ve heard those words.

Are you meeting the right people at the right point in time?

Map what stage the policy development is at and what kind of policy development is happening because that sets your scope for opportunity to influence.

If you’re having a meeting early on in the policy development phase and you understand that ministers are fairly open then you have a massive opportunity. Don’t be afraid to ask direct questions: Have you got a clear sense of where you’re headed? What is it? What is it you need from us? Are you open to ideas or do you just need help making this successful in reality?

That assumes that policy is actually in development. If what you want exists within the current bounds of political preference then engage with officials to shift things within that window. If not, go and make noise. 

The category error to avoid

Don’t waste the first 25 minutes of a meeting. The best people move quickly through the credibility setting: ‘Here is what we know, the policy work we’ve done, our position in the sector and ask: what can we help you with?’

For example, on private sector rental policy in 2013, the government had no budget for communications or legislative change; we wanted to involve organisations in the development of the ‘How to rent’ guide and have their support in communicating it. 

The organisations who were useful (and had influence) said ‘here’s the data, here’s the policy work we’ve done, and if you incorporate some of our suggested changes, we will use all of our channels to get this out to the people who need it.’ That is what happened–and that guide is now given to every tenant in England nearly 15 years later.

Not every minister wants to talk detailed policy

At one end, you have the expert—often from the House of Lords, having spent years in an area and often a relevant sector before that. They spend time on the details. Baroness Barran [read Baroness Barran’s Policy Unstuck] is one who utterly cared about that. 

Others might be slightly less engaged in a particular area but focus on working for the Secretary of State and delivering their agenda, willing to make trade-offs. Then there are some who are only big picture—focused on communications and winning political arguments. Engaging them in policy can sometimes be challenging. 

How do you know which camp a minister falls into? Officials are always up for giving you a sense of how much is being led directly by the minister versus how open they are to advice. A good clue is the specificity of a politician’s answers to questions in parliament. If you're getting lots of advocacy without much specificity, they are probably more of the big picture breed.

Categorise your civil servant partners

Generally, officials are collaborative by nature, want to understand problems, and enjoy working in government as a means to enable change. Within that, some care deeply about being the expert. They take pride in understanding the detail and outlasting the external people seeking to influence them. 

Then there are those who move around quickly, climb the ladder, ask the right questions, and trust others to know more while navigating change through the system. This ‘mover and shaker’ might sometimes be a better ally to make stuff happen quickly, whereas the long-standing expert is someone you want a deep relationship with to shift policy over time.

You should work out if the person can help you achieve your policy objective. Do they have influence internally? Quite often, movers and shakers have more influence, even though they know less. To be a trusted partner to someone influential, you need to be responsive. If they're with a minister and need a quick view, you can’t take three days to respond.

Yes, use powerful stories, but situate them and connect to solutions

It's important for people to tell emotive stories in policy influence. But some people almost require policymakers to come and live that story with them. Policymakers are required to be objective: the challenge is getting the right level of detail without being drawn into stuff which risks tilting you away from the full evidence base.

For example, working on modern slavery, you'd hear a really hard-hitting story, but to include it within policy formulation you would need to understand where it sat within wider prevalence data. 

So can you say more about what it shows regarding the nature of the crime and what policy interventions you think might help protect this person and others. (Freedom Fund were one organisation we worked with who did this brilliantly.) 

Want to learn more from Andy about how to work with ministers and officials? Here is who the ‘What ministers want’ course is for, and what you’ll learn.

The course is for people who have been working for a few years publishing reports and engaging with policymakers, but haven't quite had the impact you hoped for. This course will help you reflect on your approach and come away with concrete actions for next time. There are broadly three things we cover:

• Decode Whitehall: Build a true insider's understanding of how government functions (and stalls).

• Think like a policymaker: Step outside your organisation's bubble to understand what civil servants actually need (and want) from you.

• Master ministerial reality: Understand what ministers' lives are actually like and how to effectively use your time with them once you secure it.

Through course exercises, you’ll apply what you are learning directly to your current work, like writing policy briefs or preparing for engagements; you will take things you are already working on and build a progressively deepening understanding of how to improve them.

What ministers want starts on the 5th March. It is a 5 week online course, costing £375+VAT per person. We offer organisational discounts for purchases of 5 or more seats. Find out more about the course and sign up.

Thank you to the 97 readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

I met Anna Dolidze at the Open European Dialogue in Milan, a forum for European members of parliament of all persuasions to learn from each other.

Many referenced the 'technocratisation of language’ (the phrase itself perhaps an embodiment of the problem). Politicians were frustrated that the language they were being given by their policy communities was too technical; they could not use it to talk to voters because no-one understands it.

The corrosion of language is a theme we have touched on several times in Policy Unstuck. Previous guest Anna McShane made the (bang on) point that when we start using technocratic language in communications among ‘elite’ groups, eventually that technocratic language drifts into the public sphere.

A kind explanation for this is that the language has become so normal within a group that they think everyone understands it, or that they think precision of language is more important than comprehension of language. A less kind explanation is that they are using language as a shield—it’s much harder for someone to challenge you if they don’t understand what you have said.

When a politician talks to the public about ‘fiscal headroom,’ and you consider that most will not understand what that politician is talking about, it is a failure. It breeds this pervasive feeling that the system isn’t built for ‘people like me.’ Fiscal headroom can be explained simply if they want to: ‘how close we are to breaking the financial rules we set ourselves.’

Technocratic language is only one half of the problem. The other is the abstraction of language and the use of dead language. Rather than using metaphors or similes that evoke an image in your head (“their polling numbers are buckling like a cheap suitcase”) we use metaphors that have entirely lost their visual or emotive connection. They meant something once upon a time, but they have died…

• A ‘delivery vehicle’ is no longer a van that drops off parcels, but a group of people working together to ‘execute something.’

• ‘Executing something’ is no longer chopping something’s head off, but ‘delivering change.’

• ‘Delivering change’ is no longer giving someone 20p back from a fiver, but ‘managing a transition.’

It was great to get into these issues with today’s guest, Anna Dolidze, not least given her career move from academia to politics, and—her words—having to ‘unlearn’ how to speak. It’s a class I could certainly do with taking!

Enjoy,

Tom

💡 Training

• Communicate to persuade. Agree with us that ‘policymaker’ is a terrible audience definition? Learn how to write a good one—and see how it changes your approach to communications. Starts 26th Feb.
  

• What ministers want. Too often external engagement with ministers and their teams ignores the reality of how government works. Learn how to engage effectively with what those in government are looking for. Starts 5th March.
  

• How to write (so we want to read). Good writing is a communications superpower. Analyse what good looks like, and learn how to apply the key tenets to your work. Starts 19th March.

Do you spend enough time with the people you want to convince?

If a politician is making several media appearances a day, who is the person they have in their mind as they speak? They might be imagining their friend, their colleague, their adversary… but those are not the person they should be speaking to. They should be speaking to their voters.

Why don’t they speak to their voters? It's a question of lived experience. Think about it: where does this politician spend most of their day? To whom do they talk? Where do they get their information from? Where do they get their metaphors from? When politicians get an office, they distance themselves from their constituents, and their communication suffers.

Advisers may not be in a better situation

It’s equally hard for political advisers to course correct, because they exist in the same bubble. Nor is it easy for consultants to go to a politician and say, “What you are doing is not working.”

I’ve seen a consultant try to convey the message, “People are calling you a loan shark,” and the politician responded, “Well, that's not a bad thing.” It is a bad thing! But people don't like being told they are wrong, and it’s especially hard to do if you want a contract from them.

Policy reports have no soul

99% of the time advocacy groups don’t give you what you need to make a political argument. If somebody gave me a policy argument already translated into influential, accessible language, I would take it as a gift. Usually, they just give data.

And so political analysis has become incredibly boring from the perspective of a normal person. The people who go to the ballot box are the same people that watch shows in the evening because they are fun: those shows touch their emotions and existential fears. Policy reporting is so far removed from that.

→ Take this training if you want to inject soul into your writing.

What is the British dumpling?

A good politician is a person who is an interpreter between different realms, including between voters and the world of experts. Their job is in part to be Google Translate.

For example, in the minimum wage or inflation debate, I use the dumpling check. The Georgian dumpling is the most popular food in Georgia; nothing beats the dumpling. I tell policy experts that whatever numbers they have, they must translate them into how many more dumplings a person can get in a restaurant with that money.

I don't think the policy world thinks in those terms on its own.

‘Dead language’ creates the space for populism

I remember meeting a voter in a hair salon who said “I admire you, but you have to speak simpler.” All the new non-mainstream parties understand that this is a serious grievance that a lot of people have–that people do not understand the language that politicians speak from their podiums. And so those parties fill that void.

To fix this, you have to engage with the vocabulary of expertise, but you must be like Anthony Bourdain: able to go to a shabby little diner and also go to Davos. You have to be bilingual in that broad sense and translate the codes.

Even people from populist movements eventually have to speak with the World Bank or the Big Four auditing companies. The ability to traverse these fields lies in being able to switch between those two languages. 

If you can’t, you lose touch with the people whose hearts you have to win.

The technocratisation of political careers

Political parties in Western Europe have become bureaucratised. They take a young person who then serve through the ranks, and becomes technocratised in the process. 

Look at the biography of someone like Angela Merkel: she was in politics from the time she was a student. The upside of that for the politician is tenure—safety of that office for years. The drawback is the loss of inspiration: when was the last time you heard a political speech that inspired you? 

Think back to the times where classic political speeches were made. They’re full of visual language. It’s why so many songs are made from Martin Luther King’s words, because it is so poetic. What I think they have forgotten—not all of them, but bureaucrats—is that first you have to mobilise in a democracy. This is what the struggle is.

Only after you mobilise people and have the mandate do you translate it into policy and negotiate with power. If there is any good thing about what’s happening in European politics right now, it is that the competition from fringe movements is a wake-up call for people to go back to this very first stage where they secure that mandate.

Thank you to the 94 readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

Recent polls suggest that were an election to be held in the UK today, Reform would comfortably win. More in Common put it at a majority of 112 seats over all other parties combined.

Danny Kruger is the man responsible for ensuring that Reform can actually implement their policy proposals if elected; ensuring they are not hamstrung by, as Keir Starmer put it, “a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than… it ought to be.”

In the interview below, we cover:

• The problem diagnosis: what is the wrong with the current set up, and what Reform want to restore.

• The Starmer case study: what lessons Danny took from Labour’s ascension to power—and what Reform will do differently as a result.

• What it means for you: Reform intend to build a thick manifesto—engagement now is the route to influencing it.

Enjoy,

Tom

💡 Training

• Communicate to persuade. Agree with us that ‘policymaker’ is a terrible audience definition? Learn how to write a good one—and see how it changes your approach to communications. Starts 26th Feb.
  

• What ministers want. Too often external engagement with ministers and their teams ignores the reality of how government works. Learn how to engage effectively with what those in government are looking for. Starts 5th March.
  

• How to write (so we want to read). Good writing is a communications superpower. Go back to basics on what good looks like, and learn how to apply the key tenets to your work. Starts 19th March.

The goal: restoration of the British state

The underlying architecture of the British state is the best in the world. Reform makes it clear: we are very radical in our desire for change, but we want restoration, not revolution.

I'd like to see a revival of the cabinet committee as a meaningful decision-making forum, and restore the role of the secretariat–able officials and advisers who support the cabinet–which is what the Cabinet Office was intended to do.

The notion of the impartial civil service is an admirable one, but there's something essentially broken about the Northcote-Trevelyan model of a professional civil service operating independently of party politics. If we believe in those principles, we're going to have to change a lot about the way it works.

The executive centre is clogged and dysfunctional

Policy is being developed by colleagues led by Zia Yusuf, but downstream of that is the work of thinking about how we actually operationalise that policy. That includes thinking in general terms about the machinery of government—how we ensure that the decisions made by ministers are given effect—as well as how we deliver on manifesto commitments.

There will be some obvious, very immediate priorities around economic policy, around migration, law and order, and so on, that we'll want to see given effect as fast as possible. My job is asking: how do we do that given the state of the system?

The challenge is partly a pretty clogged-up centre. The process of decision-making at the heart of government is dysfunctional, with a bloated and incoherent Cabinet Office, much duplication of roles, all sorts of dysfunctions in the Civil Service, and the inability of ministers, particularly the prime minister, to give effect to his or her wishes.

So, we need to reform the model of decision-making, advice, and implementation that happens around the centre of government.

The challenge goes beyond ministerial departments

Over the last 25 years, successive governments have outsourced a range of functions to arms-length bodies of one sort or another* in an attempt to depoliticise, professionalise, and improve the quality of service.

The result is that we've created unaccountable bureaucracies which are no more efficient than the old model of centralised Whitehall delivery, but have the additional disadvantage of a lack of proper accountability to ministers and therefore to Parliament. So, how do we take back control of the government itself?

And how do we approach the challenge of the House of Lords, where there's a massive inbuilt majority against what a Reform government would want to do? How much can we rely on the Salisbury Convention or the Parliament Act? We will need to create new Reform peers (we currently have none)... will that be enough to ensure that mandated manifesto commitments are not endlessly delayed or frustrated altogether in the Lords?

* Examples include non-ministerial departments like HM Revenue & Customs or the Charity Commission, and quangos like the National Lottery Heritage Fund or the Forestry Commission.

When we say rule of law, what do we mean?

In recent times you've seen the development of judicial review, notions of fundamental rights as being superior to statute, and significant activism on the part of judges right to the top.*

While preserving the rule of law–the judiciary needs to operate without political interference–how do we ensure that the rule of law means the actual rule of law made in Parliament and through case law, rather than the rule of lawyers?

* Previous Policy Unstuck guest Lord Sumption, the former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, explores this in his book Democracy and the Rule of Law and his Reith Lectures.

What Reform learned from Starmer’s playbook

Starmer was convinced, probably based on his own experience of being one of the 'Wednesday Morning Colleagues,' that the system would work for him.

He thought that based on his sympathy with the system and his belief in public service, that when he arrived with a manifesto he would simply switch on the Rolls-Royce machinery, and it would purr into life and drive in the direction of the New Jerusalem.

But it didn't.

The great lesson there is: have a plan. 

If you see what happens when a sympathetic government comes in, one that is supportive of the civil service and whose policy ambitions are on the soft left, and they still fail… imagine what it will be like when a government arrives that is pretty hostile to the current ways of working and has policies most senior civil servants object to. 

We intend to arrive in government with much more than just a thin manifesto of headline aspirations. There will be a proper plan. It will guide us, but it will also signal in advance what is expected of the system so no one can say, 'you didn't tell us what you were going to do.'

The door is open for policy engagement

Across the whole spectrum of policy, there's a role for all organisations to submit ideas. If charities choose to sit on the sidelines with a cross look on their face because they don't like Reform, that's their choice. But there will genuinely be a willingness on our part to listen and engage. 

We are going to go into government with a comprehensive plan, so the opportunity to make policy in opposition is much fuller. We want to do that in an open way because we don't have the capacity internally to do everything. 

I challenge the sector to engage in good faith with a party that has 30% of the popular support.

A Reform government will start with a bang

The public are very attuned to reality. The despair they felt so soon after Starmer came in was because it was very quickly clear that this was another bunch getting into a total mess about trivialities. That's the 'uni-party'; you vote for different ministers but nothing changes.

We're going to do things differently.

The public needs to see us doing things that are structurally meaningful from day one. To a certain extent, that will communicate itself by the howls of outrage we're going to encounter from established powers. 

We intend to be ready for them.

Suggested additional reading for those of you that got this far, both written by Danny: ‘Radical change to deliver a smaller, better civil service’ and ‘Restoring Government.’

In Alison Griffin’s Policy Unstuck, she identified five barriers to change: decision-makers don’t know about the problem; they don’t care; vested interests are too strong; there’s no bandwidth; or your analysis is wrong.

On the back of Henry’s comments below, perhaps we should add a sixth: nobody is project managing it to fruition.

It points to the very real, and very mundane, reason why so many things—in every kind of organisation—are never delivered.

But Ali’s barriers assume you at least know what you want to achieve. I am not convinced that is always—or even often—the case. I remember Cast from Clay being asked to bid for a piece of work. We asked what the client wanted to achieve with the budget, to which the response was: “We don’t know, we just need to do something.” Perhaps not the best use of budget.

It’s not an isolated incident. The lack of clear strategy manifests in organisational documents that lack objectives, or metrics that target noise rather than signal—like the common goal of ‘media hits.’

Media hits are a useful tactic to securing political interest, but a short burst of news articles rarely changes policy. The hard work of getting something through a government system, as Henry describes below, is not solved by a headline in The Times.

Today’s interview explores how to make things happen within government from the perspective of a political appointee. It’s based on an article Henry recently wrote which is definitely worth flicking your eye over.

Enjoy,

Tom

P.S. a warm welcome to the recent influx of Canadian subscribers.

💡 Learn things…

• Use AI to massively increase your efficiency, starts today {last call}

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You think you know what a political adviser should do, but…

Some people have misconceptions about what the role of an adviser should be.

Obviously, you have policy advisers and communications advisers, and the names give it away. But actually, I found that one of the most valuable things an adviser can do for their minister is to project manage things through the department.

You can't guarantee that stuff will get delivered unless a minister or an adviser is project managing it. That skill set isn’t necessarily found in a communications or policy professional. The dream combo is someone who can do policy and comms, but also has the ability to project manage something through the department.

I don't want to overplay it; lots of people have very impressive operational experience and management techniques. This is really basic stuff: keeping to deadlines, holding people to account to make stuff happen, and unblocking things to move forward. It’s not rocket science.

If special advisers find it hard to work cross-department…

The brutal truth is that if you want to actually get something done in government, you want to do the stuff in your department, that you can control yourself.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do cross-governmental work—when you sit in Number 10, that is all you do. But the number one thing you hear people say in Number 10 is how frustrating it is to get anything done.

When you’re in your department and you have control over the spending, you can actually do stuff. If you have a list of things you want to do, prioritise the things you can do that don’t require going elsewhere. You’ll achieve much more, much quicker. 

Take on some cross-governmental stuff, sure, but go into it with your eyes wide open that it’s going to be much harder.

The power of a forcing function

If you said, “the Secretary of State is going to do a speech on potholes on this date, and he needs something to say that includes progress on all these things,” you can use that as a forcing function to make the system work.

The beauty of the Bletchley AI Summit as a forcing function was that it was prime ministerial level, and we had leaders of other countries coming. We just had to make it work.

I don’t buy this idea that you can’t create forcing functions in areas seen as less sexy. If the government makes an area a priority, then it will happen.

But it’s about the hard work of not just saying, ‘I really care about this,’ but coming back to it every single week. And doing not just one forcing function, but three: a speech here, an event here, and a report there.

Too often it’s, ‘Oh, I made a speech, that means everything’s done,’ and surprise, surprise, nothing actually happens.

Hands up who wants to get shouted at?

Politicians care about making new losers for obvious political reasons.

Civil servants care about it because you have teams of people whose sole job is to engage a specific sector, and so they have lots of relationships with stakeholders.

If we do something that annoys those stakeholders, their job literally gets worse. It’s painful for them to walk into a meeting and explain something they themselves don't necessarily like. Of course, you want to do the thing that makes your stakeholders happy and makes your job easier.

That doesn’t mean that stakeholders dictate the rules.

Of course stakeholders don't want you to do certain things, but you've just got to do what you've got to do. You have to make the argument, be brave, and get on with it. 

If politicians want to get something done, they can get it done. The UK State can do a bunch of stuff if the prime minister and the team around them want to make it happen.

Thank you to the 93 readers who have referred a colleague.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about cognitive biases on LinkedIn. One post explored the curse of knowledge: once we know something, we struggle to imagine what it’s like to not know it.

We then communicate assuming that everyone else has the same level of knowledge as us. In many (most?) situations, that is a flawed assumption.

There are endless examples of people tripping up over this. Perhaps the most relatable: we have all been in a room where someone is using acronyms that we do not know. In most cases, the speaker is not trying to be clever; it is unimaginable to them that people wouldn’t know what this assortment of letters refers to.

So while the speaker continues with their point, the listener is distracted—their brain whirs into action pondering what the acronym means, trying out different words combinations that could explain it, and wondering whether they are the only one in the room who doesn’t get it. The speaker’s argument is lost in the noise.

It’s even worse when there are double meanings—when you think you know what someone is saying, but it just isn’t adding up. Some of my favourites: CSIS or CSIS? CPS or CPS? IEA or IEA?

This bias afflicts us all, including the Government—as Anna’s recent research shows. I especially enjoyed Anna’s points around the futility of announcements, the use of meaningless words, and the lack of imagination when it comes to narrative shaping.

My challenge to you is to think about your organisation when reading her comments: these challenges are not unique to government.

Tom
P.S. Our clients at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies are on the hunt for a Communications Officer. Could it be you?

💡 Learn things…

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Announcements do not signal ‘delivery’

Government announcements aren’t a credible signal of action anymore for the public.

This isn’t just to do with the current government, it has been a relatively long-running trend. There are just so many of them and they don't cut through.

The government announces hundreds of things every year and most things capture a tiny bit of attention for maybe 24 hours, and then attention flatlines and doesn’t return. Words just aren’t enough.

Maybe because the words themselves don’t mean anything 

We did a piece of research looking at the language the government uses just before Christmas which was called “What are you talking about?” We did the research because so much of the language that comes out of government just doesn't exist in the real world.

I got a bit of pushback from some in government who argued “Well, sometimes we're speaking to the voters and sometimes we're speaking to elite circles and we use different language for different places.”

The problem is that that ‘elite’ language then becomes commonplace in how we speak in government, and that then drifts into how people speak because they think it's normal. It’s not normal. 

Who has ever said “joined-up care pathways” or “outcome-based commissioning?” No one speaks like that. If you wouldn’t say it at the pub, don’t put it in your public communications.

In this really low-trust world that we live in, it just sounds evasive. Using plain language—speaking in feelings and experiences—is key.

Should you even be using words to talk about policy?

There’s a quote that stuck with me from a focus group I did. The question was, “What can Starmer do to regain or gain your trust?” And the guy said, “There is nothing that Starmer can say to earn my trust. He’s going to have to physically show me.”

That “physically show me” bit is important. When you’re planning your policy and you know where you want to get to—let's say it’s a million and a half homes in five years—what are the milestones along the way to get there and what are going to be the opportunities to show that we're getting there?

The government needs to think about how it is going to communicate progress. And it needs to embrace visual storytelling.

Even when there is a real opportunity to use imagery or video to tell a story, the government doesn’t seem to want to. My favourite example was the government announcing that they were going to use drones to identify fly tippers, and they were going to crush their cars. And then they never spoke about it again. 

Come on! Where are the videos of Starmer on a 4x4 or a monster truck crushing cars? It can't be that hard to think of these moments that are novel and show the policy in action in a visceral, exciting way.

The government grid incentivises short-term media hits

The error that they've made is that they don't use the grid strategically enough. They don't think about how they're going to announce something once, and then at what point they're going to return to things. It’s very much a method for that first press release.

And even when they come back to it once or twice over the next 12 months, it still feels like they're trying to make it a new story. But because of that, it doesn't feel like it builds on anything. The repetitiveness that you need to have a really coherent narrative gets lost in the grid because it's just “what's the next new thing?”

It seems that they are thinking that “as long as our grid is really busy and we look really busy then we’ll look really purposeful.” But without that bigger thinking of what sits above it, what that narrative is, it just doesn't work.

I should say that I don't think we should drop the grid. It is important because loads of stuff happens in government, it’s a chaotic place. You don't want departments announcing big things at the same time and the grid helps with discipline. There are lots of benefits to the grid–but it does need to be used strategically as well as tactically.

It’s also a question of who is hired into government comms roles

When you’ve been trained in that newspaper room environment, your ultimate goal is to get the headline that day. That’s the goal. But strategic communications is a completely different skill set. It’s a completely different muscle that needs to be used to build a narrative and then have the perseverance to keep going on essentially the same thing.

It can be boring because it is boring when it is just ‘breakfast clubs, breakfast clubs, breakfast clubs.’ But that is what you need to do if you want to create a narrative. You can’t keep jumping around to new shiny things.

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