The Latest Thinking on reforming Government systems

Most suggestions for reform come from Think Tanks and are incremental in spirit. The rare exceptions are those from NESTA such as Radical Visions of Future Government NESTA (2019) a visionary rethink of how government might be organised which destroys the thinking represented by Deloitte reports. Let me first give a taste of the more conventional crap - Mission-driven Government The Future Governance Forum paper sent to the UK PAR Select Committee (2025)

Mission-driven government is new and compelling – but it cannot gain traction, nor function properly, within the confines of old, unchanged systems. Barriers include:

● The concept of mission-driven government, as well as the missions themselves, being poorly framed and/or misconstrued

● A siloed approach within government, where officials and political advisers work first and foremost to ‘my Secretary of State’

● Rigid boundaries between central and local government, other parts of the state, other sectors of society and the economy, and between state and citizen

● Public finance allocations and processes working against ambitious cross-departmental working

● A risk-averse culture, where civil servants self-censor for fear of failure or political exposure

● Hollowed-out capacity at the centre of the state. The UK has lacked a purposeful centre of government for some time. Some necessary structures, skills and culture have lost effectiveness and those that are still in place are the products of a previous age and not fit for the current moment.

● Missions being seen as another word for ‘priorities’, leading to departments ‘mission-washing’ in order to gain prominence or secure funding for projects and initiatives.

Overcoming these barriers and moving to a mission-driven model will be difficult – and will not happen just by willing it into being. It requires sustained commitment from both political leaders (including the Prime Minister, Chancellor, Cabinet and senior advisers) and senior officials (Permanent Secretaries and Directors Generals). Without strong, visible leadership, missions are unlikely to take hold – tarnishing both the concept itself and wider efforts to modernise government.

Government must:

1. Lead with purpose. The centre should articulate an overarching vision that sits above its five missions, as well as clear, outcomes-focused ‘theories of change’ for each mission. If missions announced in early 2023 no longer reflect the current context, they should be repurposed. Missions should be backed by strong, personal commitment from both the Prime Minister and Chancellor, with a small Missions Leadership Group – consisting of the ‘quad’ of the PM, Chancellor, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Deputy PM – providing political leadership of missions. A more sophisticated and expansive set of strategic capabilities should be brought into No.10, enabling the Prime Minister to effectively drive forward the missions agenda.

2. Govern in partnership, orchestrating the collective efforts and resources of a wide array of actors – state and non-state – around shared missions. To enable this kind of partnership approach, Whitehall must ‘open up’ culturally and become a better partner – embedding external engagement into every stage of the policy cycle, professionalising relationship management and building a new culture of collaboration. Missions should be seen as a shared national endeavour involving every community and citizen, building the legitimacy needed to endure over the long-term.

3. Work collaboratively across government. Missions should sit above departmental silos and be collectively owned. A new model of shared accountability is needed to capture where an intervention by one department creates benefits or savings elsewhere. Governance should be focused on how well this system is learning, not just top-down targets.

4. Ensure the money follows the missions. Public finance should be aligned with mission goals at every stage – from how departmental budgets are set to how policy is appraised. That means embedding missions within the Treasury’s mandate and processes, including the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), Green Book guidance and procurement rules. A dedicated ‘preventative’ category of spending should be created, recognising the long-term value of early investment and reform. At the local level, place-based public service budgets should be introduced, enabling greater collaboration and preventative investment. The upcoming CSR in June 2025 represents a critical test of whether this new approach to public finance will be realised.

5. Rebuild state capacity in critical functions: Mission-driven government will only succeed if the state has the tools and capabilities to deliver it. That requires building up the civil service’s dynamic capabilities in mission-aligned areas – equipping the workforce to adapt to evolving needs and events, while investing in the tools, technology and infrastructure it relies on. This means both bringing in new expertise into government – through recruitment reforms and a high-profile ‘Missions Secondment Programme' – and building up capabilities among the existing workforce through investment in learning and development and a renewed focus on talent pipelines. Reducing reliance on external consultancies for core functions will also be a critical step here. Local government capacity must also be rebuilt, including by using digital and technology to modernise how councils work and deliver services.

6. Encourage a culture of test, learn and grow. The centre should be prescriptive about ends, but flexible about means, and provide the necessary political cover for officials to experiment and take risks. Whitehall’s deeply-ingrained aversion to uncertainty and risk should be swapped for a culture that tolerates experimentation and adaptability. Structural change is also needed for officials to work in this way – with significant focus needed on building greater flexibility into Whitehall processes, as well as updating the competency, reward and performance frameworks that govern organisational behaviour.

Dan Honig’s presentation about his book can be found here Mission-driven government – he seems a rather bumptious character.

The Radical How Anthony Greenway and Tom Loosemore (Nesta 2024) is a rather 

disappointing exception to my comment which started the post

There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing assumptions. We’ve been arguing in favour of it for years now, and the more it gets used, the more we see success and timely delivery.

We think taking a new approach makes it possible to shift government from an organisation of programmes and projects, to one of missions and services. It gives the next administration an opportunity to deliver better outcomes, reduce risk, save money, and rebuild public trust.

Making the Radical How a reality.

• Make outcomes matter most; Ministers should see delivering outcomes as a path to accelerating their own ambitions

• Let outcomes define accountability Hold senior officials accountable for delivering promises, not paperwork

• Demand politicians set direction through missions; Empower civil servants to determine how to make them happen

• Add more teams to get more done; Because multidisciplinary teams are the best unit of delivery, not individual generalists

• Open up ; Mandate that teams work in the open, sharing their successes, failures and knowledge in public

• Fund teams, not programmes; Invest public money incrementally, with oversight proportionate to financial risk

• Reinvent procurement; Buy or rent services that support teams, not simply to whom outcomes are outsourced

• Train civil servants for the internet era; Find, develop and keep the best, most skilled people; reward and incentivise them competitively

• Invest in digital infrastructure; Open data, common platforms, clear design; the basic foundations for everything

• Lead with courage; Accepting and committing to reform is the hardest, but essential first step

Recommended Reading

• State of the State Deloitte/Reform (2025) A typical thinktank report, regurgitating the 

conventional wisdom

Who is Government? The untold story of public service Michael Lewis 
(2025) Marvellous account of government work which the author discusses 
here with Aaron Bastani

• Failed State – why nothing works and how to fix it Sam Freedman (2024) A disappointing 

book from someone who advised Michael Grove in the UK Department of 

Education

• The Return of the State and why it is essential for our health, wealth and happiness 

Graeme Garrard (2022) a Canadian political writer working at a UK university. 

Historical and a bit abstract

• The Return of the State – restructuring Britain for the Common Good ed Patrick Allen 

et al (2021) A collection of British essays on how progressives might 

reform the state 

• The Idea of the Labour Left; A du Cros (2021) a useful overview of some key thinkers

• The Richer, The Poorer – how Britain enriched the few and failed the poor – a 200 year 

history Stewart Lansley (2021) Fantastic read

Successful Failure Matt Andrews (2021) the US (Harvard) guru who advises many governments on their reforms

• Radical Visions of Future Government NESTA (2019) a visionary rethink of how 

government might be organised which destroys the thinking represented 

by Deloitte reports

Making Sense of the Nazi period

In a few days will see the centenary of Mein Kampf’s publication by Adolf Hitler who managed to publish it on July 18^th 1925 after he’d spent 9 months in a Munich prison. I owe this to John Kampfer’s post which told us he’d been rereading the book (in both German and English) to save us the trouble of doing so. In fact an English historian, Neil Gregor, offered in 2005 a guide to How to Read Hitler

Immediately after the war, three Germans (2 historians and a philosopher) tried 

to explain what had happened  
The German Question W Roepke (1946) – one of the historians 
The Question of German Guilt Karl Jaspers (1948) – the philosopher whom wikipedia 
explains thus 
The German Catastrophe – reflections and recollections Friedrich Meinecke (1950)
Since then, material about the Nazi period has become a veritable industry, 

starting perhaps with Karl Bracher whose The German Dictatorship – the origins, 

structure and effects of National Socialism came out in 1971. But Richard Evans 

(with Ian Kershaw) are the 2 Brits who have devoted their lives to explaining 

Hitler’s rise. In Hitler’s Shadow (1989) identifies some of the protagonists

Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is it time to forgive the Germans? Now that most of those who carried out the crimes of Nazism are dead, should the younger West Germans who constitute the majority of the Federal Republic’s population today learn to be proud of their country rather than being ashamed of it? Have the memories of Germany’s twentieth-century misdeeds been distorted by the legacy of wartime propaganda? Has the moment arrived when we should take a broader and more balanced view, and accept that the evil of Nazism, terrible though it was, did not significantly differ from other evils which have plagued our troubled time, from the Gulag Archipelago to the killing fields of Cambodia?

Over the past few years, these questions have aroused an impassioned debate both within West Germany and outside, as a substantial number of West German historians have argued in various ways that the answer to all of them should be “yes.” This book is an attempt to lay out the fundamental issues in this sometimes angry and convoluted discussion, and to reach as balanced an assessment of them as possible. It is not a polemical book. Polemics, though they can have a useful function in bringing a problem to public attention, tend to obscure the central issues in a controversy, and the aim of winning debating points too easily leads to a lack of fairness and discrimination in the weapons used. Nor is it an account of personalities, though a certain amount of background detail has been provided on some of the principal antagonists in the debate. The purpose of this book is to discuss the issues in the light of what we know about the historical events upon which they touch. To help the reader unfamiliar with this controversy, it also attempts to give an account of the political context in which the debate has arisen, and to point to some of the implications for German and European politics as the twentieth century draws to a close.

A few years later Daniel Goldenhagen put up a different picture in Hitler’s 

Willing Executioners – ordinary germans and the holocaust (1996)

How the Nazis came to power, how they suppressed the left, how they revived the 

economy, how the state was structured and functioned, how they made and waged war 

are all more or less ordinary, "normal" events, easily enough understood. 

But it was probably Ron Rosenbaum who offered the most satisfactory angle 

with Explaining Hitler – the search for the origins of his evil (1998)

It was (it is) about the search. About the differing ways people seek to answer the question “Why?” The differing modes of interpretation, the differing lenses through which one can look at Hitler. And what they reveal about the explainers—about the eyes of the beholders—and the nature of their failure to explain Hitler. The way Hitler escaped the nets of the systems brought to bear upon him.

Explaining Hitler, in other words, is not my got-it-all-nailed-down instruction manual. It’s not a biography; it’s more a dissection, well, an examination of biographies—an essay in intellectual history. I do not have the hubris to declare discovery of a Unified Field Theory of Hitler. No “Theory of Everything” Evil. That doesn’t mean there won’t—or can’t—ever be one, or that it’s not worth the attempt to further clarify what we mean by Hitler, by evil, by origin. Indeed, as I’ve tried to point out in the book, the attempts often tell us more about ourselves, our own self-images, and our cultural predispositions than some indisputable truth about Hitler. “Cultural selfportraits in the negative” was the phrase I used: Hitler is everything we (hope)

Rosenbaum was interviewed about the book

Walter Langer was a US psychologist who, during the war, published 

A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler which was eventually published by the 

Office of Strategic Studies in 1999. He also published The Mind of Adolf Hitler 

– drawing on interviews with someone claiming to be Hitler’s psychologist

But a question which needs asking is - WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM ALL THESE 

PUBLICATIONS? In what sense have they advanced our understanding??

Other Recommended Texts
Germans into Nazis Peter Fritzsche 1998 
The Third Reich in Power Richard Evans 2005
Hitler – a biography Ian Kershaw 2008
Hitler – a biography Longereich 2019

The Nazi Mind

After my effort to make sense of the Trump mind, it seems appropriate to follow up with a just published book by the British historian Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind – 12 warnings from history (2025). Its a long book based on several hundred interviews (both victims and perpetrators)

In this book, for the first time in my work, I explore how psychology as a discipline can help us understand the mentalities of the Nazis, and aspects of neuropsychology and behavioural and social psychology have all offered me valuable insights. Before talking to academic psychologists and studying relevant scientific papers, I had not been aware of the immense advances that have been made in these areas in recent years. In particular, the relatively new field of evolutionary psychology has been of considerable value. We sometimes forget that our brains evolved while our ancient predecessors were hunting on the savannah, and insufficient time in evolutionary terms has passed since then to allow much change.

His chapters are headed

1. Spreading Conspiracy Theories

2. Using Them and Us

3. Leading as a Hero

4. Corrupting Youth

5. Conniving with the Elite

6. Attacking Human Rights

7. Exploiting Faith

8. Valuing Enemies

9. Eliminating Resistance

10. Escalating Racism

11. Killing at a Distance

12. Stoking Fear

Anthony Scaramucci has linked up with Alastair Campbell to run a Rest in Politics 

US and has just interviewed the very articulate Rees about his book - 

12 warning signs that democracy is dying. 
Another interview on the book was with an American I’ve never heard of, Matt 

Lewis but its a great interview.

At one time, to attribute human motives to Hitler was lese-majeste – but the past 

few decades have seen a significant change – with his personal attributes being 

celebrated 

• Hitler - abridged version Ian Kershaw (2008 – 550pp)

• The Charisma of Hitler – leading millions into the abyss Laurence Rees (2012) only 250pp

• and even a novel - Look Who’s Back Tibur Vermes (2014 180 pp)

• Hitler – only the world was enough Brendan Simms (2019 1250pp) 

• Hitler – a Biography Longerich (2019 1380pp) 

Out of the Darkness – the Germans 1942-2022 Frank Trentmann (2023) is an important book which just happens to begin its account on the year of my birth for the reasons the author explains here

And why did I start in the middle of the Second World War? There's a big moral turmoil 

that is spreading, beginning in the winter of 1942, 1943, the time period we now call the 

Holocaust. A growing number of Germans started asking themselves troubling questions 

about their own possible responsibility for the plight that they were now being exposed to. 

So I choose this as an opening partly because it allows the reader to get into the heads 

of Germans at the time who don't know yet that the war is lost. 

Its a big book - 1077 pages - and presented in videos here and here

Laurence Rees is also a documentarist and this is one of a series he’s produced The Nazis – a view from history

On Not Resisting the Temptation to write about Trump

I had been wanting to write something about anarchism – or Lawrence Ree’s most recent book “The Nazi Mind” or even a post about “contextual analysis” of which Rory Stewart is such a good exponent. 

Instead, I have been seduced by this post about Fascism in America from a site 

called The Rational League to speculate about the state of Donald Trump’s mind 

– and that of his MAGA followers.

You can’t negotiate with someone who sees compromise as surrender. You can’t persuade a person out of beliefs that serve as emotional armor against uncertainty and fear. And you certainly can’t build a functioning democracy when 30–40% of the population interprets equality as an attack, and compassion as weakness. This is the psychological blind spot at the heart of MAGA, and it explains why even policies that make life objectively worse for their own communities are still embraced if they reaffirm authoritarian values or hierarchical dominance. The MAGA movement thrives because it supplies this audience with what they crave: certainty, submission, identity, and an enemy. And once they have that, they will defend it, even to the detriment of their health, their economy, their fellow citizens, and democracy itself. That is why no policy rebuttal, no moral appeal, and no set of facts will shake them. These are not flaws in their thinking; they are features of it.

The history of authoritarianism teaches us that these minds will not course-correct. They require a society designed to check them, constrain them, and strip their ideology of legitimacy. If we fail to do that, their psychological needs will continue to override our collective needs. They will vote against healthcare, education, the environment, and equality, not because they are evil, but because fear and order are more important to them than fairness or truth. And once again, as before, they will drag civilization backwards. Not in a fiery revolution, but with the silent obedience of billions, marching to the steafdy beat of “order,” “tradition,” and “the way things ought to be.” The warning is simple: if you do not stop authoritarianism when it is soft and delusional, you will face it later when it is brutal and unapologetic.

Europe, of course, has seen this before – there was a flood of books in the early 

1950s trying to make sense of German behaviour in the 1930s, books like The 

Authoritarian Personality ed Adorno et al (1950) with a later edition – see the link 

- in 2019 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. 

At Glasgow University in the early 1960s (when I studied Politics and Economics) 

I had a Romanian tutor (in political sociology) Zevedei Barbu who held me spellbound 

as he introduced me to Weber and Michels, drawing on his own experience (which 

I didn’t know about at the time) of Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology 

and patterns of life which he published in 1956. He was, after all, a psychologist 

by training. Bob Altemeyer was another psychologist (Canadian this time) who 

published 50 years later The Authoritarians (2006) which I found very confusing 

since it focuses more on the details of his psychological experiments and fails to 

mention Adorno let alone Barbu. 

But he’s published 2 further books on the theme Authoritarian Nightmare – 
Trump and his followers J Dean and R Altemeyer (2019) and a short (60 page) 

addition in the light of 3 important books Updating Authoritarian Nightmare (2021). 

The post with which I start quotes extensively from the first of these books and led 

me to another interesting book on the subject The Politics of Antagonism – security 

narratives and the remaking of political identity (2024) by a writer on war and 

international relations - Georg  Loefflemann 

This book demonstrates how populist security narratives served as the driving force 

behind the mobilization of Republican voters and the legitimation of an ‘America First’ 

policy agenda under the Trump presidency. Going beyond existing research on both 

populism and security narratives, the author links insights from political psychology on 

collective narcissism, blame attribution and emotionalization with research in political 

communication on narrative and framing to explore the political and societal impact of a 

populist security imaginary. Drawing on a comprehensive range of sources including key 

interviews, campaign and policy speeches, presidential addresses, and posts on social 

media, it shows how progressives, political opponents, immigrants, racial justice activists, 

and key institutions of liberal democracy collectively became an internal Other, 

delegitimated as ‘enemies of the people’. Developing an innovative conceptual‑analytical 

framework of nationalist populism that expands on established concepts of political 

identity and ontological security, the book will appeal to students of critical security studies, 

critical constructivist approaches in International Relations, and US politics 

A final article worth reading is Collective Narcissism and Weakening of American democracy Oliver Keenan and AG de Zavala 2021

Who’s Afraid of Dying?

I last addressed this issue some 5 years ago with an annotated post of 21 books which started with Jessica Mitford’s book of 1963 which she updated some 30 years later The American Way of Death Revisited. The second book was On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross(1969) which detailed the famous five stages of grief -

• denial

• anger

• bargaining

• depression

• acceptance

Since then, I’ve found 10 more which deal with old age and the prospect of dying

Stay of Execution – a sort of memoir Stewart Alsop (1973) just 75 pages
The Human Encounter with Death Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax (1978) 258pp
The Hour of our Death Philippe Aries (1981) 900pp
Wrestling with the Angel – a memoir of my triumph over illness Max Lerner (1990) 200pp
Intoxicated by my Illness and other writings on life and death Anatole Broyard (1992) An amazing 

little book (only 82 pages) from a book reviewer who was diagnosed with late-stage prostate 

cancer

The 100 year life – living and working in an age of longevity L Gratton and A Scott (2016) 327pp

Old Age – a beginner’s guide Michael Kinsley (2016) 83pp

The New Long Life – a framework for flourishing in a changing world A Scott and L Gratton (2020)

186pp
The Lost Art of Dying  LS Dugdale (2021) 185pp

Age Proof – the new science of living a longer and healthier life Rose Kenny (2022) 299pp

The one thing I take from this post is the need to give a higher profile to my blog and the riches it offers – whether it’s

• Diaries, Letters and Memoirs July 2025 which is an annotated list of more than 300 books (with hyperlinks to the original books)

• books about Death and Dying June 2025 – only some 30 books

• Notes on the concept of CHANGE - brief comments on almost 150 books about different sorts of change

• Postmodernity Anyone? Jan 2024 – another short (30 page) essay trying to make sense of this label

• Patterns of decline (Nov 2022) impossible to count the number of hyperlinked books mentioned in this essay

• Puzzling Cultural Values (Sept 2022) annotates some 50 books about cultural differences

WHY DON’T WE REVOLT?

We are all feeling angry and alienated from “the power elite” (however that’s defined) – particularly in the USA. But why on earth are we not expressing that in outright revolt? Is it simply fear? Whether that is of being different – or of the consequences now that breaking the law is increasingly faced with severe penalties. It’s rare for me preach revolution but 2 books have inspired me to explore that option – the first by a Turkish/US writer Twitter and Tear Gas Zeynep Tufekci (2017) who has this site; and the 2^nd by a Greek/US writer After Democracy – imagining our political future Zizi Papacharisti (2021) whose intro’ puts it this way -

I decided to focus on three varieties of regimes:

1. My first focus was democracies that are vibrant and have a long history but also are somehow flawed. These are democracies under distress. To obtain as broad a representation as possible, I worked with the following countries: Brazil, Canada, Greece, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I chose these because of their considerable experience with democracy but also because of their successes and recent difficulties with corruption, economic insecurity, and populism. The countries selected reflect a variety of ways in which democracies have responded to contemporary problems.

2. My second focus was regimes that are labeled as authoritarian by the West but are populated by citizens with democratic aspirations. Democracy cannot be reimagined by excluding those who have not had the opportunity to experience it. Moreover, democracy cannot exist in the imagination of the West only. Therefore, I interviewed citizens in China and Russia. I chose these countries because they are both major forces in global politics yet typically are excluded from discourses on democracy. Any country may undergo a level of authoritarianism in its form of governance. Democracies in the West have had their share of authoritative rulers, and several have emerged out of dictatorships to reclaim democracy. The citizens of authoritarian regimes have a democratic future, and they should have a say in it.

3. My final focus was attempted but failed democracies. In most of these cases, it was not easy for me to travel to these countries, and identifying or interviewing people from these countries presented a danger to them and me. For example, even if I were able to set up interviews in Syria or Afghanistan, the task of networking, obtaining translators, and conducting the interviews would be difficult, would draw too much attention, and would probably not yield meaningful responses from people who felt endangered. So I decided to work with refugees from those countries. I worked with local embassies and refugee centers in countries that maintain an entry port to the European Union, where frequently refugees flee. I interviewed refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Albania, Egypt, Ghana, and Pakistan and used translators provided by refugee centers and embassies to conduct the interviews in the refugees’ native language when necessary.

Recommended Reading

• From Mobilisation to Revolution Charles Tilly (1978) one of 2 great US writers on revolution, 

the other being Sidney Tarrow 

• Revolutions – how they changed history and what they mean today ed Furtado (2020) 

the aim of this book is to look at revolutions around the world and through history: not only at 
their causes, crises and outcomes, but also, for the more distant events, at their long-term 
legacies and their changing, sometimes contested meanings today. Historians, mostly native of or active within those societies, have been asked to reflect on the following questions: What were the essential causes of the revolution? What narrative of events, protagonists and ideologies is most commonly accepted? What impact is it believed to have had? What legacy does it have today in national self-perception and values? Has this changed significantly over past decades?

• People without Power – the war on populism and the fight for democracy Thomas Frank 

one name scholars have applied to this tradition is the “elitist theory of democracy.”

 It holds that public policy should be made by a “consensus of elites” rather than 

by the emotional and deluded people. It regards mass protest movements as 

outbreaks of irrationality. Marginalized people, it assumes, are marginalized for a reason. The critical thing in a system like ours, it maintains, is to allow members of 

the professional political class to find consensus quietly, harmoniously, and without 

too much interference from subaltern groups. The obvious, objective fact that the professional political class fails quite frequently is regarded in this philosophy as uninteresting if not impossible. When anti-populists have occasion to mention 

the elite failures of recent years—deindustrialization, financial crisis, opioid epidemic, everything related to the 2016 election—they almost always dismiss them as inevitable

If only it were possible, they sigh, to dissolve the people and elect another.

• Revolution, rebellion, resistance – the power of story Eric Selbin (2021) In particular, 

by using the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, it is possible to identify and illuminate four basic stories of revolution which show up in a surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. These four stories are the Civilizing and Democratizing story of revolution, the Social Revolution story, the Freedom and Liberation story, and the Lost and Forgotten story.

• Revolutionary World – global upheaval in the modern age ed David Motadel (2021) The 

introductory chapter demonstrates the richness of the author’s 

reading.

UPDATE

https://toussaintf12.substack.com/p/representation-is-not-revolution