I had the privilege to speak with Professor Fukuyama ahead of the launch of his new book, ‘In the Realm of the Last Man’. It is a reflection on his intellectual evolution, and the failings and flailings of liberal democracy.

The title is a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man concept (and of course this), which argues that for as long as our societies optimise for equality and ease of life, we will produce weak, enfeebled populations (“Last Men”).

Fukuyama says Last Men we are.

Populist movements on both the left and right are the responses to it. Not everyone wants an easy life, and a good chunk of us want to struggle, want to be respected, want greatness. We are unfulfilled, and populism—the struggle for recognition—gives us meaning.

The question is what to do about it. As we cover in the interview, the solution is unlikely to be found in public policy. For Nietzsche, the route to greatness and fulfilment was a personal mission of self-mastery. Fukuyama’s arguments are more social. They revolve around thymos, this idea of relational pride, of the need for social recognition. For Fukuyama, the answer is to focus our desire for recognition into constructive outlets: sport, business, democratic politics.

Where Nietzsche eschewed national projects, for Fukuyama they are crucial: it’s the way you achieve this at scale. He cites Kennedy’s moon landing goal (Nietzsche would disapprove of the nationalism, but strongly support Kennedy’s ‘we do it because it is hard’ framing—pure Will to Power).

Such an approach is markedly different to today’s abstract political projects of growth or devolution. What about building the first fusion power plant? Curing dementia? Eliminating factory farming?

Tom

P.S. we’re running a 30-minute taster session of our ‘How to write so people want to read’ online course on the 17th September. Register for free here.

Policy Unstuck with Francis Fukuyama. Interviewed, edited and titled by Tom Hashemi.

Have we forgotten what matters?

You appreciate a liberal society when you live in an illiberal society. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of refugees that are trying to leave impoverished, dictatorial countries where human rights are routinely abused, and move to Europe or to the United States or other liberal countries. Those refugees understand perfectly well what’s at stake.

We’ve had this 70-year period since the end of the Second World War where we’ve had pretty much continuous peace and prosperity. Ups and downs, but it’s been a pretty good life, and people take that for granted. 

Right now in the United States, we’ve got people on the progressive left that are saying that communism was actually not that bad, that maybe the Soviet Union and Mao’s China weren’t such terrible places. That reflects outright ignorance. Even in Eastern Europe, which was liberated from communism only by the end of the 1980s, you still have a whole generation of young people that never experienced it. And therefore they can pretend to themselves that the EU is the big monster, and not Stalinism.

Populism is less a policy problem, more a listening one

Policy per se is not the solution to populism. Certainly if you restrict access to benefits among certain people, they’re going to feel slighted and disrespected. But a lot of it is really about the way that people either talk or listen. 

One of the things we’ve realised over the past decade is that a lot of educated people aren’t very good at listening. When working-class people were losing jobs that were being outsourced to China, we had all sorts of ways of saying ‘well, we can compensate them by giving them job retraining’ and so forth. But they weren’t paying much attention to the way this was being experienced by the people who weren’t in secure, high-skilled jobs.

Part of the secret is to be able to listen to people that are unlike yourself, and to speak in a way that is understandable to people different from yourself. That whole listening and speaking approach is at least as important as anything you’re going to do in the policy sphere.

People want outcomes, not a rule-compliant class of officials

The vast majority of people would say that bureaucrats are too rule-bound, too picky. You’re waiting in a queue to get a driver’s licence. The place closes at 5:00 and it’s 4:59 and the bureaucrat says, ‘No, sorry, we’re closing at five.’ That lack of flexibility is a universal experience with bureaucracy. The bureaucrat doesn’t take into account the circumstances that the person in front of them is facing. 

You’ve got to explain to people that sometimes it’s a good idea for people in authority to use their judgement. We have to trust them to do their jobs.

In the United States, we have something called the Federal Acquisitions Regulation. If you’re a government officer and you want to buy an office desk for your office, you have to go through a document that’s several hundred pages long. It has all of these detailed rules about who has a right to bid, who can appeal the decision if they don’t like the way it's gone, and so forth. 

That’s not the way to make policy. It was originally put there to clamp down on waste, fraud, and corruption, but in the process they’ve completely lost sight of what the law was supposed to do, which is to facilitate the government buying the things that it needs to operate.

People want outcomes. They want clean water, they want safe air travel, they want protection from disease. They want physical security on the streets. If there’s a focus on actually producing those outcomes rather than following a mass of rules, people will realise that yes, there is a point to having government, and these bureaucrats are serving my interest, as well as some kind of general public interest.

Have we helped cause this problem?

Government’s job is to make rules, but the absolute worst way to go about doing this is for the legislators and the groups backing the legislation to think their job is to come up with a really detailed set of rules about exactly how the government is supposed to implement something. 

You want new rules, you want reform, you want change, but there has to be a certain willingness to delegate authority to the people that are actually in charge of making things happen. Unless the government officials have that freedom, they’re simply not going to get results.

The quiet ‘accumulation of sludge on the statute book’*

This is a general problem with liberal societies. You have to have constraints on the way that the government exercises its enormous power, but there is also this challenge where year after year, decade after decade, you accumulate more and more detailed rules, and you seldom roll any of them back.

The private sector is complaining about this all the time—they don’t like being regulated by government. I’m making a slightly different point, which is that the government itself is over-regulated, and it’s constrained in ways that create a class of public officials who get their promotions by following these detailed rules rather than by actually doing things for citizens.

* from Lord Mark Pack’s interview

Westminster’s dependence on integrity 

Compared to Germany, France, and particularly the United States, the classic British Westminster system has relatively few checks and balances. You don’t have a Supreme Court that can invalidate legislation. You don’t even have a written constitution. You have a weak upper house. You don’t have much devolution of power. But it’s worked over the years.

One of the lessons is that the institutional rules any society develops are ones that evolve out of its own experience. Part of what makes the Westminster system work is that the political culture has a certain moderation.

The Westminster system would not prevent a prime minister from going after and jailing opposition politicians, or people that criticise him in the press. This is what Donald Trump really wants to do in the United States. The reason you haven’t seen that kind of abuse of power in Britain is that the kinds of people that go into politics just have a different culture. It wouldn't occur to them to do the sorts of things that Trump is trying to do.

But if populist politics takes hold in the future and you get a prime minister who’s frustrated that he’s being criticised constantly, you may see the boundaries of acceptable behaviour being challenged. And because there aren’t these formal checks on the power of a prime minister, you’re going to have a real problem.

The fuzzy borders of norms and law

Cultural norms and laws support each other. One of the things we’ve learned in the United States is that everything is normative, in a certain sense. We have something called the Hatch Act, which makes it illegal for a president to do campaign events on government property. Trump has violated that all the time. We have an emoluments clause in the constitution that says that the president can’t accept gifts. And yet he’s accepted this $400 million aeroplane from Qatar.

The trouble is that the body responsible for enforcing the law is the executive branch, run by the president. If he’s the offender, he’s not going to enforce these laws on himself. You begin to realise that actually what we call the rule of law—all these formal restrictions—are only as good as the willingness of powerful people to observe them.

Buy ‘In the Realm of the Last Man’ from Waterstones, Amazon, or your local political bookshop.

Thank you to the 141 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Interviewed, edited, and titled by Tom Hashemi.

Which lane do you swim in?

The Sheila McKechnie Foundation social change grid was really helpful in our rebrand. It led us to refine what we thought our distinctive place was in this big complex messy world of social change. 

There was something really important for us in just naming what it is we do, and knowing we have to do that really well. There’s stuff for other people to do too—and it’s important we know they’re there—but this is our lane and we’re going to double down on it.

Too many cooks spoil the strategy

The foundation sector was going through a period of introspection at the start of my time at Carnegie. Partly because of Black Lives Matter, partly climate, partly COVID. 

It was merited, let’s be honest, and led to positive changes that brought more voices into decision making. But it also gave rise internally in some organisations to what I think was quite an extreme ‘every voice has to be heard in every single decision all the time’ thing. We had our bit of that, and we came to a point of recognising that actually that kind of approach doesn’t help anyone do their job well. 

Ultimately someone has to decide, and if you don’t, you just end up swirling round and round in circles. The more cooks you have, the harder it is to hold on to real clarity about what we’re doing and why.

Clearly if you are going to be moving into the next phase of your existence with broadly the same people you had at the start of the strategy process, you need to think carefully about how you secure their buy-in, as well as their insights. But it’s a mistake to mix that up with saying everyone has to have a voice in every decision.

📣 Two things for your perusal

• Are you up to speed on how to use AI in your role? The next cohort of Artificial Intelligence for Policy Communicators starts on the 10th September. {Find out more}

• Our friends at the Good Food Institute are recruiting a new Executive Director (UK/Belgium based). Could it be you? {Read the job description}

The complexity of an organisation isn’t visible to everyone

There’s that moment in a strategy process where you recognise that not everybody in the organisation can see the whole. If you have everyone participating in the final decisions, there’s a risk that you are asking people questions that they are not equipped to answer. 

People inevitably answer from their perspective, which can be a relatively narrow one. If you’ve been working on a specific piece of policy for the last five years, the likelihood is that you think there are some great future opportunities in that area for the organisation’s strategy. It’s not so easy to see how these line up alongside new and emerging priorities. 

The key thing people want to know is: what does this mean for me today? What do I have to do today? Endless collective strategising does not answer that question.

Throw away the proof points that prove nothing

When I arrived in 2019 we were reporting things to our Board which they had asked for long ago, but which were completely irrelevant to the change we were trying to achieve. Everybody knew it, so we threw it all away and put a new impact learning framework in place. 

Clearly, your board has to buy into a change like that (and if they don’t, perhaps they aren’t the right board?) Ours accepted that the things we were measuring did not tell us about impact. It means that we are no longer chasing the meaningless stuff. 

A good board is expert in the strategy of the organisation

A good trustee, in our context at least, needs to be expert in the strategy of the organisation. You have to really understand our mission. You have to know what the operating hypothesis is and the assumptions underneath our work. And you have to use that as your shared basis from which to hold me and my team to account for whether we are properly learning from what we’re doing.

We use a set of questions to frame our reporting to our Board: what, so what, now what. If a board spends its time on the what, then it’s not adding value, because we know what’s already happened. But if they really push and challenge us on: yeah, this all looks great, but what have you learned? That’s the so what. And what are you going to do about it? That’s the now what. That is where a board can add value.

How do you stop them getting into the conversation of the what? It’s very much a work in progress. We partly do it through the templates we use for reporting. We try to write less in the what bit, and make that a bit less engaging if we can. We really spell out what we think is interesting about what we’ve noticed: what are we thinking this might mean, what are we going to do next with it?

The inverse relationship between media metrics and influence

We did a piece of work where we could absolutely attribute a decision by someone to adopt a bit of policy governance architecture because of us. They heard me talk about it, they came and asked if they could borrow it, they took it away, they turned it into their version of it, and told us they were going to use it.

The Board’s reaction was: that’s great, but you should be shouting about that, you should be press releasing that. But there was no additional value in that because we were already making the positive impact, and in fact increased interest might have undermined our approach. 

The outcome is what we’re focused on and the Board needs to know what that was. No one else needs to know about what we did.

Thank you to the 140 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

This is the last Policy Unstuck you’ll receive before September–we’re taking August off.

Two things before we go:

1. Online training

Three of our online courses are kicking off at the start of September. If you’ve been considering one… the first 10 Policy Unstuck subscribers to sign up get a 25% discount (use code: SUMMER25). The choices:

1. Learn from Nick Scott, who’s trained teams at the World Resources Institute, World Health Organisation, and the European Policy Centre, on how AI is changing policy communications, and how you should be using it (or not). {Course info here, starts Sept 10th}
   

2. Learn from Andy Ormerod-Cloke, who took the National Security and Investment Act 2021 through Parliament, on how to successfully engage ministers and their teams. {Course info here, starts Sept 10th}

3. Learn from Alex Wilson, the copywriter who took Tango to Twitter (yes, the fizzy drink), on how to write so people actually want to read your research. {Course info here, starts Sept 17th}

2. Future guests

We’ve got some great guests lined up in September, from political scientists like Francis Fukuyama (of ‘end of history’ fame), to nonprofit leaders like Sarah Davidson, CEO of Carnegie UK Trust, and, hopefully, a few former ministers.

Who else should we be thinking of? Who will challenge some norms and get us all thinking? Hit reply and let me know. 

Enjoy your summer, 

Tom

Thank you to the 137 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Interviewed, edited, and titled by Tom Hashemi.

The power of the One Big Number

In 2019, the Youth Jobs Gap allowed us for the first time to quantify the employment gap between young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and their wealthier peers. 

Our experience with delivery partners meant we already knew that the difference was significant—we had all the anecdotal data—but this was a quantitative data set we could point to and say: ‘this is what’s actually happening on the ground’.

It established our credibility in the space in a way that hadn’t been the case before. We’d been known in the charity space predominantly as a grant funder. Having the Youth Jobs Gap put us more on the map with think tanks, with other civil society organisations doing similar things and also with government. We hadn’t had that brand identity before.

The shaping of the Overton window

I’ll caveat all of this by saying that Boris Johnson never actually ended up delivering on our policy asks, which happens. But it meant we were then thought of as a trusted partner: we were part of the conversations and processes around delivering the Kickstart scheme, for example, and the Youth Offer. 

That was a really key moment, when we started moving from being an organisation doing external pressuring, to being thought of as thought partners and delivery partners.

Frame your arguments within their context, not in spite of it

Once the immediate aftermath of the pandemic started falling away and we went back to normal life, the NEET issue [Not in Education, Employment or Training] fell down the public agenda, and the political agenda too. It felt a bit like one step forward, two steps back: we found ourselves again having to build up the case publicly for why people should care.

This was around 2022–23, and it coincided nicely with the looming general election, the rising cost of living and the implications of Brexit becoming clearer. We made a conscious decision to pivot away from the crisis response we’d made during the pandemic, towards a longer-term economic case. We were really conscious that we had to show a guarantee for young people could realistically be implemented, and that it would benefit the wider economy.

→ Impetus will be posting a long read on the journey they went on to achieve the youth guarantee. Keep an eye on their website.

What’s the right message for the audience? (And the right messenger)

Our economic modelling found that if we reduced the number of NEET young people in this country to the numbers seen in the Netherlands, we could generate almost £70 billion for the economy.

People ask whether the £70 billion number or the Netherlands comparison worked better, and I don’t think you can choose. It depends on the audience. 

£70 billion, for the average person, might be a bit of an ‘I don’t actually know what that means.’ So for government and the Treasury, that was more the number that worked. Whereas people understand the Netherlands, they'll think, relatively small country in Europe, probably relatively similar to us.

The trick to coalitions: be massive

We’re one of the co-chairs of the Youth Employment Group, a coalition campaigning for inclusive employment for young people. It’s now 300-strong.

With smaller coalitions you often have to take everyone’s views into account, and that can be tricky. I’ve facilitated a coalition of nine organisations across higher education, and when it’s that size you have to engage everyone. 

But with a 300-organisation coalition you start seeing themes emerge, and that almost makes it easier. It’s about the bigger picture, rather than the needs of specific organisations.

Don’t let the report become the goal

On the public affairs side we hold ourselves to mission-level outcomes. We’re constantly reminding ourselves that our Youth Jobs Gap work doesn’t exist for the sake of the Youth Jobs Gap; it exists so we can unlock funding at the government level to support more young people into education, employment or training. 

It’s easy to get lost in the output and think, okay, another report, another report, another report. So even before I start a project, I have to remind myself to draw the thread to the end goal: if I’m commissioning this research, how is it going to get more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into jobs?

We fund curiosity, not just success

When we select the nonprofits we work with, there’s a threshold. And it’s not: ‘is their thing working already?’ But: ‘Do they care whether it’s working? Are they curious about whether it is working or just assuming that it does? Are they asking whether what they’re doing actually improves outcomes? Are they gathering data in the interim to inform that?’

When I joined Impetus, people were throwing around the word ‘humility’ constantly, and I thought, ‘what does that even mean for a charity?’ Now I get it. It’s being brave enough to take a good long look at what you’re doing, bring it into the cold hard light of day, and say maybe this element isn’t working. That’s tough. There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears that goes into running these organisations, and people are attached to the things they’ve been working on. But just because you’re doing a thing, it doesn’t mean the thing should be done.

Thank you to the 135 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Joe Martin, in his words. Interviewed, titled, and edited by Tom Hashemi.

Whose job? Your job!

I’m always frustrated when I hear former cabinet secretaries, permanent secretaries or ministers going on podcasts and saying ‘it’s such a shame no one’s reformed this.’ It was literally their job. 

There are always urgent things that come up, and managing crises is a large part of their roles, but it can’t continually crowd out space for longer term thinking. Laying the foundations for better institutions for citizens is equally important. Too often they have absolved themselves of that responsibility and then come on afterwards to say ‘it’s really a shame no one tackled this.’

“Leadership is disappointing people at a rate that both you, and they, can cope with”¹

Leadership is about sometimes doing the unpopular thing today for a better organisation or outcome tomorrow. Civil service leadership became too focused on static stewardship: keep things as they are and don’t upset anybody. And that comes at the expense of the quality of our services and the outcomes for you and me.

The same dynamic plays out in smaller organisations too, where the board or senior team takes the organisation easily to the next step rather than making the hard decisions that will see it thrive in the years to come. 

The world is changing around us—a good steward is dynamic and keeps reinventing the organisation to keep it effective.

¹ Saïd Business School’s Professor Sue Dopson

Process over outcome: what matters more?

Individual agency has been replaced by standardisation and the processification of working life. So an individual working in a flawed system feels completely disempowered to say ‘yes, we know it’s mad, we'll step away from the process because we know it doesn’t work.’ 

Whitehall loves standardisation because in some ways it de-risks certain issues, especially in areas like procurement. These processes were adopted for good reason but the pendulum has swung too far.

It has come at the expense of the person who wants to commission the work saying ‘I need X, I know Tom is really good at it, I have a strong relationship with him, and he can do it for a good price.’ All of that knowledge and relational value gets stripped out and put into a process that has been designed by someone who is no longer involved in it and doesn’t understand what they are procuring.

The think tank challenges triptych

First, their research agenda is too broad. In the UK, these are often organisations no bigger than sixty people, and much more likely to sit under twenty-five. If you’re focusing on five or six massive themes at that headcount, you are never going to become the centre of gravity for any of them. You’re always going to be spread too thin.

Second, people conflate objectives with strategy. They’ve got a set of things they want the world to look like, but not the actual route to get there. What are the stepping stones? Does it give the broader team an indication of what they should and should not prioritise? People talk about objectives all the time, and not enough about how to deliver them.

Third, being strategic is about being impactful tomorrow, not today. If you’re chasing today’s impact, like jumping on news stories, you’re being tactical. This is often a sensible thing to do, but it’s not strategic. If you’re trying to build a body of thought or drive a big transformation, you need to lay the foundations of the debate, identify the network you need to engage, and become a credible partner within it.

Demos Digital does this incredibly well. They say ‘we do this element of a huge policy space, we’re really good at it and have a huge influence across the community we serve.’ Having built that reputation, they attract yet more funding which enables them to deliver even greater impact. That’s a demonstration of what happens when you focus and work strategically to a longer timescale.

What is influence?

Getting your name in a big publication is either a result of having impact, or it’s a means to an end. Where it goes wrong is when people think of it as an end in itself. That’s really the prioritisation question: are you getting into the publication because you’ve done something cool, or are you doing something because you want to get into the publication?

The proof point of influence is less the splashy name in the paper and more: if something happens, who is going to message you and ask for help? I spoke to someone hoping to become a special advisor in Burnham’s government, and they said their plan is that if there’s something they don't know the answer to, to reach out to people. I’ll know we’ve succeeded when we’re on the other side of that call every time.

Departmental co-ownership as the goal

The world I want to get to is where Demos hasn’t written a Demos paper, but Demos and the Cabinet Office have written a paper. Demos and the Government Digital Service have written a paper. Demos and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority have written a paper. 

At that point there’s ownership. I don’t have to go to the minister and say ‘I think this is what you should do’.  Instead, me, her team and her officials have developed the answer together. I’ve provided space for really radical thinking, some additional resources, and a platform to help build the coalition within and without government. At that point, I’m no longer trying to influence: it’s about mechanics.

Thank you to the 133 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

The Lenin question?

Lord Maurice Glasman has this after-dinner party line about needing both the Marvin Gaye question and the Lenin question. The Marvin Gaye question is ‘what’s going on?’; the Lenin question is ‘what is to be done?’

I absolutely think we need to understand what’s going on. But just understanding things is not sufficient. What we need is a prescription: a policy agenda for how to deal with the problem.

One of the things the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear said is that therapy teaches us you can just dwell on your problems. You can intricately understand all of your problems–why you’re doing something, why you’re addicted to something, why you have this bad behaviour–but still not do anything about it.

I think something like that happens on a more macro level too. We can say a thing is bad and that we ought to be doing something about it, but that doesn’t really change anything. Yes, it matters that we understand the problem, but what are we actually going to do to fix it?

As for an example…

I’m working on a paper on the politics of property tax reform for the Fairness Foundation. There’s a huge amount of elite consensus across the political spectrum that we need to update valuations and we need the system to be much more proportional. It’s outrageous that houses in Kensington are paying less than somewhere up north. But why hasn’t it happened? 

There’s been loads of policy on this. We don’t need more policy. What we need is to understand how we can actually get it done, and that means understanding how British political economy has developed and how reliant it is on housing speculation and home ownership. In order to get this policy through, we need to confront and navigate those problems and the trade offs and obstacles involved with doing something about.

What we do not need is another paper saying ‘we need property tax reform.’

Better stories aren’t going to help anyone

If another person tells me the left needs better stories or we need better narratives I’m going to shoot myself. What we do not need are better stories. You develop a story by actually doing things. You develop a story by demonstrating you can do things.

Comms-Alt-Delete

There are way too many comms people and PR people within Westminster. Stephanie Mudge’s book Leftism Reinvented is an anthropological history of who has occupied leadership positions in social democratic parties. In the 19th century it was trade unionists, then economists in the mid-20th century, and then more recently PR consultants and the spin doctor. This has been catastrophic for left politics. 

We need good comms people. We absolutely need to be able to sell what we’re doing. But we need something to sell. 

Herd mentality > factionalism

Westminster is dominated by this ‘who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out.’ It’s a way for Westminster to avoid talking about anything more complicated. And for journalists and others whose job it is to understand Westminster to justify what they do. All of this though is almost entirely detached from the condition of the country. That can be very frustrating.  

Factions exist, but they’re much less important than people think. Sure, there are differences of perspective across the Parliamentary Labour Party, but the bulk have fairly nuanced views. What is a problem is that because Westminster is dominated by insider gossip and intrigue, there's a lot of herd mentality. On something like immigration reform, you’ll have people from across the party tell you privately that we need to do something, and that [UK Home Secretary] Shabana Mahmood is doing a good job. But publicly they’ll come out and call her a fascist. It's ridiculous. 

The left’s problem with talent recognition

Lefties are committed to the idea of egalitarianism, and they don’t like to think that some people are just better than other people at doing jobs. Right-wing people are much more comfortable talking about talent, getting talented people in, and being very deliberate about that. The left needs to discriminate: to say this person’s good and this person’s not.

Trad comms people are on the way out

Political comms is increasingly dominated by the internet. The trad comms people–the people who go on Sky News or GB News, the people who write for legacy publications–are going to be less and less relevant. We all need to recalibrate how we communicate ideas and our understanding of how ideas travel.

Contrary to what we’re told, there is little evidence that the internet has locked people into inescapable echo chambers. People, particularly young people, aren’t listening to hours and hours of podcasts to reaffirm their existing beliefs. They’re listening to them for ways of understanding what’s going on, for deeper explanations and interpretations than what they find elsewhere. 

As Alan Finlayson has argued, we’re now in a political world where political education–how people come to politics, how they understand political issues, how they understand political processes–takes place on and through online platforms. 

Someone who’s really interesting on this is Josh Citarella, who does a podcast called Doomscroll. He has spent years in obscure message boards and forums trying to understand how today’s media streams work. His argument is that there is no mainstream anymore, only a chaotic information environment in which outsiders have become insiders, and insiders outsiders, and where alt media such as YouTube and Substack is now quantitatively larger than traditional media.

Message boards as the new think tank

Over the last decade you’ve seen message boards turn into think tanks, and anonymous posters become political actors. The ‘posting to policy’ pipeline is remarkable. Look at how the term ‘Boriswave’–a term coined by the online right to describe the significant rise in immigration after Brexit–is now used by front bench politicians. 

Meanwhile, instead of thinking seriously about how to use the internet, left politics has retreated and siloed itself into the NGO sector and academia. Most of these places are stuck in a previous era—they can’t compete.

Thank you to the 132 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Good briefings are skimmable

When I was writing briefings for politicians before I was elected, I was like, ‘This is awful, I didn’t have enough time to write this.’ And then it turns out the member of parliament also might only have 10 minutes to write their speech using that briefing. The pace of parliament is hard: something I would usually spend a day on, you have to do in five minutes.

The briefings I have found really helpful include a few clear key points we’d want to come out during the debate; particular points we’d like to see movement from the Scottish government on; quotes from people who are experiencing whatever the issue is, or an amalgamation of what the organisation is experiencing in that area. And statistics are not unhelpful either. The main thing is it needs to be skimmable.

The 30-minute meeting culture is extractive

There’s this culture of 30-minute meetings with stakeholders which feels extractive to me. I remember when I was on the other side, working in and around the Middle East, especially on Yemen. You’d come in and meet a decision maker, and they’d be like ‘Tell me the one thing you need me to do on Yemen.’ Everyone just panics because there isn’t just one thing to do on Yemen. I’m worried about becoming that: asking people to tell me what to do, when actually there’s no reason why that grassroots organisation should understand how parliament works.

The heft of large organisations

What’s a shame is that it’s the larger organisations with the greater capacity, and dedicated public affairs or policy people, that can turn briefings around fast. What it means is that I don’t then hear in the same way from the grassroots organisations that, for the kinds of issues I want to talk about, are probably more important. I can’t ask grassroots organisations to send me briefings—we get told what the debate is one day ahead of the debate. So how do I get that kind of useful feedback loop so grassroots organisations are feeding in useful things I can then use? I don’t know what the answer is.

Use the attack as the frame (don’t tell the framers)

I really appreciate how Zack Polanski has dealt with attacks. Let’s say the media do lots of anti-Polanski messages, like ‘Zack wants to legalise all drugs, isn't that nonsense?’ He’ll use that in his own communications, and be like, ‘This is what everyone’s saying about me, and this is our process for legalising drugs, and why we want to do it.’ He repeats the frame and then leads it as the foundation for his argument. That’s quite brave, it’s a hard thing to do, but it does seem to be working.

What won’t show up in your parliamentary monitoring

What you find in parliamentary debates is that people are looking around at you and nodding, and I’m looking around at people from other political parties and nodding back at them. We’re building relationships nonverbally; we’re making eye contact and being like, ‘Yeah, what you’re saying is helpful to this, we’re on the same page here’.

You would never get reporting of ‘these members of parliament were nodding at each other’, or ‘Dawn Black and Kate Nevens nodded at each other’, but it’s really meaningful. It says more than what was actually said. I wonder how often that is the case, and how often the media warp our view of what politicians are doing and how they’re thinking.

It’s the media who toxify politics

I remember the Fawcett report about how toxic Westminster is for young people. I was worried about how toxic it might feel within the Scottish Parliament: this is a space for decision makers and people with power. Actually, I’ve found the feel of parliament outside of chambers very welcoming and inclusive, and that includes the Reform MSPs. While we may be disagreeing in the chamber, it doesn’t feel like anyone shouldn’t be here. The only people making any of us feel we shouldn’t be here are the media.

A new majority brings a new culture

I wonder how much this is impacted by there being a lot of new MSPs. We have the largest group of new MSPs ever, it’s a majority, 60-something. Maybe we’re bringing in a different culture, maybe this has always happened, I’m not sure. But maybe because we’re all sort of testing the waters and being like, ‘How do we do this?’, maybe we’re doing it a bit differently.

There’s a bit of solidarity in that we’re all learning together. We don’t quite know what we’re doing… am I supposed to do this way? Who am I talking to? What button am I pressing right now? The presiding officer and deputy presiding officers are also being very kind about us not quite getting it right yet, not quite having the systems down yet.

→ N.B. Kate was elected to the Scottish parliament in May 2026.

What is an effective political argument?

Is it about bringing other politicians along with me? Is it about bringing the public along with me? Is that then saying something the media will pick up and run with, for better or worse? Is it about saying things others aren’t willing to say? I wonder if there’s a time and a place for all these things. There’s not one effective way of making a political argument, there’s different ways for different reasons.

Thank you to the 130 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Start with the end goal, not the research question

Think tanks often come at things from the wrong starting point. We start with an interesting research question, we do our research, we produce a report, and then we say ‘here, policy makers, this is what we found, do something with this.’

We should be flipping it and starting with the end goal: what is the policy we are trying to change? What is the law we’re trying to change? Then from that decide what research is needed, or even whether research is needed at all.  

To influence the end goal you may need a five-year randomised control trial that spits out a precise estimate. Maybe. But I doubt it.

Has your thing entered visceral territory?

Once an issue is of high salience—once it’s a voting issue, once there are daily headlines about it—there’s just less proactive policy-making space. Policy makers feel constrained by what other politicians and the public think.

Evidence is still useful in those instances, but it has to be a different type of evidence. Policy makers don’t need theoretical research and big-picture numbers. What they need is practical, evidence-informed policies that can be implemented now, that are relatively constrained in how they’re designed, that sit within the Overton window, that can be sold to policy makers and the public, and that have some positive benefit they can sell more broadly.

Don’t complain about your comms team if you don’t give them the space they need

Comms people are very often not enabled. Their skills are not valued at the same level as researchers’. They’re not brought into conversations with researchers at the beginning, and they’re not meaningfully consulted throughout—researchers will sometimes listen, but they’ll rarely change what they’re doing because of that advice.

Comms teams are also often overworked. Most think tanks put out way too much, including ours. Even if the comms team wants to do strategic communications, even if they’re empowered to, they’re so busy editing blog posts and writing tweets that they don’t have time for that macro work.

And researchers themselves often don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve. You’d need a researcher coming to the comms team saying ‘this is what I’m trying to achieve, these are my audiences, this is what I want them to do with this research, what do you think?’ Very few researchers I’ve worked with think like that.

If a product has not been designed to achieve a specific outcome, putting it out is mere dissemination. And yet we talk as though it is strategic communications. It isn’t.

Build an operating model that creates, and resolves, tensions

When I started at ODI [development think tank], there was a central communications function doing what I’d call dissemination: a media person, a blog editor, a publications editor, an events person. But individual programmes also had embedded comms officers with knowledge of the subject area. My very first job was a comms officer in the politics and governance team.

You weren’t just there to work in partnership with researchers on how to structure their questions and get their work out, you were also a bridge between the research programme and the central comms team. A translator. 

The central team would say ‘we want this’ and you’d say the research team is just not going to do it like that. The researcher would say ‘we want to run this event’ and you'd say the events team is never going to say yes to that. You were always trying to find a halfway house. It worked extremely well as a model.

Who drives organisational change?

Some think tanks have forty or fifty years of research pedigree and a reputation for big exciting ideas in top-five economics journals. Re-orientating them to start with the end goal first is going to be extremely hard; it’s much easier to start a new think tank built that way from the beginning. 

What helps to drive toward that goal is internal and external pressure. Internally, younger staff really want to know they’re having an impact, that they’re contributing to something larger, and they’re getting more ballsy about calling on their organisations to care about that. 

Externally, we’re getting pressure from donors, as we should. As we move from big, long-term, flexible grants towards smaller, much more focused grants—increasingly from the effective altruism community—they demand a theory of change and a theory of impact. That forces you to change.

Where’s the line between advocacy, policy and lobbying anyway?

Advocacy is often a dirty word in think tanks. Some will say advocates don’t necessarily go with what's evidence-led: they’re trying to achieve a particular policy goal and will use all avenues to get there, whether or not it’s evidenced. Whereas we can say ‘here is what the evidence says, policy maker, do with it what you will.’ 

But is there really a big difference between advocacy, policy engagement, dissemination, and strategic communications? How can I say I’m doing strategic policy communications but I’m not doing advocacy? Where is that line? And where should it be, if we’re going to be impactful?

Thank you to the 126 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Do you speak human?

International organisations can struggle to get through to people these days. They often sound like they are repeating platitudes which have been edited by a giant and humourless committee. There are exceptions: Tom Fletcher, the United Nations humanitarian relief chief, and Annalena Baerbock, the President of the General Assembly are the examples to note.

What they do is speak human. They’ve listened to George Orwell’s warning that jargon and length can all too often obscure and confuse the point, or even act as a disguise for having nothing real to say.

Tom Fletcher is very good at telling stories about what things are like. He spoke at Chatham House earlier this year about how the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had put together a costed plan to save 87 million lives with humanitarian aid. The equivalent of that entire cost had already been spent on the Iran war.

It gets at something people have probably heard before—that the world always manages to find money for war, and doesn’t seem able to find the money for feeding the starving and vaccinating the kids. But putting it that way, ‘87 million lives, and it’s all been spent already’, really cut through.

What changes your mind?

At my previous organisation, we once asked colleagues what have you read or listened to in the last month that changed your mind about something. With different colleagues, different things would change their minds. Our research director noted he’d normally only change his mind if he read a book, because he’d need a really solid, weighty argument, and an op-ed was not going to cut it. Other people would be more persuaded by a podcast—maybe there’s something about hearing a person speak that they find more convincing.

The take away is that people change their minds based on different things. If you’re trying to change someone’s mind, do you know how they changed their view on something in the past? 

Why should people care about your thing?

If you’re working in an expert or policy field, you probably love what you do and find it really fascinating. You have to ask yourself the slightly difficult question of why should the person you’re talking to care? 

Everyone needs to take a step back and think about where the journalist, politician, or the member of the public, is coming from. They may not know anything about what you’re talking about. That doesn’t make them ignorant. We’re in a world where we can’t know about everything, and that’s why you have a role. But you probably need to link what you care about deeply to what they happen to be thinking about. It’s about stepping back from your own position to empathise with your listener.

Me, not we, is what people listen to

There are people within the UN ecosystem who shy away from the kind of personal communication that Tom Fletcher and Annalena Baerbock use. You’ll see a lot of videos from the two of them walking into a building, telling you, “I’m here doing this.” Some people in the UN system think it should always be ‘we’, that it shouldn’t be ‘me’, that it’s too individualistic. But the personal voice is what people listen to in the current environment of distrust in institutions.

Who can have the conversation that you cannot?

I learned a lot about the value of different messengers at The Elders. They were really good at getting access to serving heads of state, because they were former heads of state and could have a conversation with a head of state that nobody else can have. Not all heads of state respect one another, but there’s still some sense that they’ve had a similar experience, and that they therefore have a shared basis of understanding that no one else can have.

It made me think about peer-to-peer learning, and how people engage peer groups in lots of learning initiatives—this is a high-level version of that. It really matters that when someone has run a country, stood in elections, won an election, lost an election, they speak with an authority that I don’t have, because I haven’t done those things.

Of course it depends on how you reach the impact you want. For UNA-UK, our members want our membership and audience to grow, and they’re much more interested in us making the case in fresh ways to those new audiences rather than going deeper into the insider conversation. How do your messengers change if you are going to have a very wonky conversation for the specialists, or something that is much broader?

Does the messenger have to talk about your thing?

At our 80th anniversary event in January, one of the speakers was Professor Brian Cox (the UN champion for space). He didn’t talk about UN reform or insider stuff, but about the weird uniqueness of Earth and the need not to screw it up. He concluded by talking about how he’d had the chance to tell heads of state at the Glasgow COP how insanely unique and fragile Earth is, and trying to convey to them their level of responsibility. People loved it.

There’s always a risk in our world that you have the same people saying the same things. It was a good reminder to switch things up every so often.

Be kind, but not too kind…

You learn over years of policy engagement to understand where policymakers are coming from. But there’s probably a point at which it’s possible to get too close, too sympathetic, and to be so kind and polite in the engagement that they don’t actually hear anything.

I’ve been to briefings where people tried to inject constructive criticism very politely, and the person having the meeting said, “Oh good, that validates what we already thought”, and you think, ‘Hmm, you didn’t hear what we said’.

Thank you to the 125 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

Phil wrote an excellent essay, ‘Power Failure: A new theory of power’, for the Future Governance Forum earlier this year. We touch on some of the themes from that essay, but it’s definitely worth reading his thinking in full if his thoughts below float your boat.

Also: we have one spare spot at a Policy Unstuck dinner tonight (at our offices in Vauxhall, 5:45pm-8:30pm). The subject is outcomes vs outputs, there are readings, and there will be Rioja. Hit reply and let me know if you’d like to join us - first come, first served.

Tom

Power is two levels beneath what you can see

Steven Lukes’ working definition is a good one. Power appears to be the overt stuff: getting people to do things, having a fight and winning it, and so on. But his analysis is that there are two levels below that. 

One is who sets the agenda: who sets the frame within which those arguments happen, where certain things get ruled unserious or old-fashioned or crankish (sometimes for good reason). And then there’s an even more insidious one, which is the attitudes to the world that you’ve just absorbed, so you don’t even think that a certain thing might be an issue.

The two-way mirror test

I can absolutely see why, if you’re a cash-strapped, overstretched, deeply committed organisation trying to achieve a specific goal, you don’t have the bandwidth to go, ‘well, actually, maybe this is the 134th most important thing for the country.’

But there is a strategic utility, as well as a democratic, humanitarian and moral one, in thinking more broadly, in gaming out what the objections are and how you might respond to them. 

I don’t just mean the immediate push-back from your obvious opponents. I mean the people who aren’t actually that interested in it, who might think something else is more important, or who can see the opportunity cost of using the money to do X rather than Y.

Probably the most effective way to make the case to an organisation who thinks their thing is the most important thing might be to get a focus group together of people who aren’t particularly bothered about that issue, put the organisation on the other side of a two-way mirror, and have them just watch what people say about their arguments.

Watch the phrases your own brain has stopped hearing

When people are talking through their routine arguments, they often recite them very, very quickly, because their brain has already jumped to the next thing. They’ve said these things so many times that the neural pathways are well worn. You get this with politicians a lot.

That mental turning off is also something to watch for in other people. When I’ve got a book idea or an article idea, I’ll often keep running it past people whenever anyone will listen, and really take note of when people’s attention wanders, or when they start slightly interrupting. It signals where you need to adjust your pitch.

We have prioritised the things we can measure over outcomes

Metrics, quantification and systems of rules are there for excellent reasons, and there are many reasons we should keep quite a lot of them. But our increasing overreliance on them has stopped us thinking in ways we used to—and have to go back to—in order to run life in a way that’s more responsive to people’s cries of pain. 

📣 The interlude

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The civil service incentives are skewed towards protecting the rules

I’m told by more than one person who’s worked in the civil service that if you stick to the rules and you get it wrong, you’re fine, you’re covered. 

If you bend the rules in order to do something you think will benefit the public, and it does, and it goes really well, you may not even get the credit for it. The incentives are skewed towards respecting the rules, rather than serving the public.

‘Full due process was followed’ is not good enough 

Any rule book is implicitly trying to anticipate all possible outcomes. The danger is when you believe you’re actually doing that, so anything that doesn’t quite fit is treated as at fault and made to accommodate itself to the rule book.

When Starmer was defending the Mandelson decision, he tellingly used the passive voice: ‘full due process was followed’. That’s exactly the problem: nobody’s instinct said ‘even if the process is followed perfectly, are we actually happy about this as a matter of judgment?’

We’ve misconstrued risk by only ever looking at the measurable side

We tend only to look at one side when it comes to risk—and generally the more measurable side. It’s the same with budgeting and the Treasury. Immediate costs are more measurable than potential benefits, so making decisions based too heavily on metrics risks over-caution. 

Likewise, you may be able to show that a person has broken the rule, but they might have used much better judgment than someone sticking strictly to the rules. And if you’re going to deny the worth of human judgment, what are the consequences of that?

Orthodoxy is replaced through incremental change, and patience

Thatcher set out to break away from post-war orthodoxy. This was only possible because the beliefs that underpinned it had been breaking down since the late 1960s, as the overriding nightmare of mass unemployment was superseded by new fears: endemic strikes and high inflation. 

People thought you couldn’t challenge the power of the unions: the Tories had tried it in the early 1970s and been defeated. Thatcher’s approach to trade union reform is an object lesson in changing an ‘unchallengeable’ orthodoxy: I can’t think of a better one in British democratic history. 

There was resistance in the Tory party itself, lots of resistance in the wider country, and a sense that the last time the Tories were in power they were destroyed by strikes, because they just provoked the unions. So they passed their first Employment Act with the relatively moderate Jim Prior as the cabinet minister responsible, and went as far as they possibly could while their more zealous backbenchers screamed at them for being cowards. 

Then Thatcher replaced Prior with the more ‘Thatcherite’ Norman Tebbit, and he passed another bill, which was more radical, but followed the same careful strategy. Then they did it again and again and so on to the point where it was so clear what the direction was that ministers were coming to Thatcher and saying ‘I’ve got an idea for new trade union law’ and they kept weakening the unions, step by step.

Ideology is stability

Government cannot assert power without ideological conviction, because what is ideology except a view about who should have power? Socialism is broadly the view that the state should have a relatively large amount of power compared to business. A free-market ideology says the opposite. It’s all about who should have power, who’s got too much right now, who’s got too little, and what we can legitimately do to change that. 

Ideology is stability: it’s clarity about what you’re trying to change.

Thank you to the 125 of you (+3 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. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.

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

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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
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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.