MAKING A DIFFERENCE?

A new government is in power. Different people, different politics, different plans. But how much of a difference can they make to people’s lives if the institutions of the state are setting them up to fail? In his new book, 

Failed State, the political commentator Sam Freedman (author of Comment 

is Freed) outlines how it feels like nothing works in Britain anymore. 

Why is everything going wrong? It's easy to blame dysfunctional politicians, 

but the reality is more complicated, Sam argues - politicians can make things 

better or worse, but all work within our state institutions, which are utterly 

broken. Last week we and the Policy Institute at King’s College London hosted 

a webinar to discuss the book’s diagnosis and prescription for change, 

featuring Sam alongside Polly Curtis (Chief Executive of Demos), Emma Norris (Deputy Director of the Institute 

for Government) and Duncan Robinson (Political Editor and Bagehot columnist at The Economist), with Professor 

Bobby Duffy (Director of the Policy Institute) in the chair.

Event summary; Sam outlined the three big trends from recent decades that he thinks have made it so hard to run the country:

Centralisation (to Whitehall, undermining the capacity and power of local government and then overwhelming central government to the extent that it has no capacity either to deal with big strategic issues or to deliver, and is reliant on poorly performing and unaccountable outsourcing companies; but also within Whitehall, with an overmighty Treasury filling the void of a weakened Number 10 post-Blair to the extent that spending controls are the only strategic driver of Decision-making in government) 

Scrutiny (the executive avoiding scrutiny from the legislature through tricks like timetabling changes in parliament and over-use of secondary legislation, leading to poor quality law-making, forcing both the Lords and the courts to become more involved in improving or challenging legislation; and less effective and robust internal scrutiny by the civil service in response to increased hostility to civil servants from government ministers) 

Media (‘comms has eaten policy’ in reaction to the 24/7 news cycle and social media, such that politicians are incentivised to govern through constant policy announcements rather than developing effective long-term policies, while changing media consumption habits have reduced the money available to hire specialist policy correspondents, leading lobby journalists to report on policy issues as well as politics, but with a focus on the political aspects of policy, further incentivising the government to focus on meaningless announcements rather than effective policies)

Key issues raised in the panel discussion and audience Q&A:

There’s a broader problem of low trust and confidence of citizens in the state, which is self-perpetuating, because if politicians don’t feel trusted to make tough decisions, they will be inhibited and won’t act boldly to improve things
Devolution is messy and creates winners and losers (but arguably is better than the status quo, which mostly creates losers all round)
We’re stuck in a cycle of superficiality and short-termism, with lots of people in Whitehall and Westminster who are good in crises but less on long-term projects
Number 10 is too focused on the detail and not enough on strategic leadership
People in government matter as well as the systems, and we need to incentivise and support Ministers to make good, bold and often difficult long-term decisions

We need a better approach to evidence; Ministers talk the talk but really want policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy, while civil servants sometimes stifle innovation because of a lack of ‘proper’ evidence

Solutions suggested by Sam and the panellists included:

• Devolving more power (e.g. to mayors)
• Having a more coherent (and limited) approach to outsourcing
• Giving the legislative function of MPs more status and power
• Making MPs more representative of the population
• Involving citizens more in policymaking
• Raising more money from taxes and spending more on local government
• Giving Ministers more control (e.g. powers to appoint special advisors)
• Focusing government on long-term missions to provide strategic clarity

Some reflections; In a 2023 post on his substack (The Policy Paradox), Sam identified three reasons why ‘no brainer’ policies (such as putting more money into preventative health) often never see the light of day. The first is Treasury spending rules - linking to the point in the book about the centralisation of government (the IFG also recently recommended reforming the centre of government to deliver more effectively on policy priorities). The second is misdiagnosis (wrong problem > wrong solution), which links to centralisation, scrutiny and the media. The third is ‘fear of the electorate’ - an often unjustified assumption that the public won’t like a particular policy. In other words, not only is there a risk that, once in government, you pull a policy lever and nothing happens, but you’re also likely to be pulling the wrong lever, or you might not pull the lever in the first place, either because of fear of public (and media) reaction or because the iron grip of the Treasury won’t let you anywhere near the room with the levers in. (Of course, this leaves to one side the whole set of arguments that change also comes about through other means than governments pulling levers.) In his book The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking, the philosopher Roman Krznaric identifies the barriers to long-term thinking (for the sake of argument, let’s equate this with effective policymaking, even if there’s not a perfect correlation), which echo some of the issues identified by Sam and his fellow panellists:

• Human nature (“the inherent short-sightedness of our marshmallow brains”)

• Outdated institutional designs (political systems geared to short time horizons)

• The power of vested interests in an economic system “bent on short-term gains”

• Insecurity in the here and now causing people to focus on immediate needs

• Insufficient sense of crisis (boiling frog syndrome)

The Canaries and Deepening the Opportunity Mission argued that inequality is itself a barrier to the new government’s missions, and The Fairness Foundation will publish shortly a ‘wealth gap risk register’ setting out how wealth inequality damages our society, economy, democracy and environment (and what we can do about it).

Against Reform – why we should be wary of those who preach it

One of the first actions of the newly appointed Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in July was to commission Lord Darzi to conduct a rapid independent investigation of the NHS. Streeting is not one of my favourite politicians – having accepted large sums of money from the private health sector and being a known supporter of privatisation. A report of 160 pages on the NHS in England (with an Annex of 330 pages) duly arrived a few days ago. What, you might ask, about Scotland which manages Health with devolved powers? The previous year Audit Scotland had published a scathing report on the NHS in Scotland which the BMA had called “staggeringly bleak”

So all was set for the new Prime Minister to announce yesterday that the 

NHS had to “reform or die”

Keir Starmer delivered a speech in central London in response to the Lord Darzi report 

on the NHS, which concluded the health service is in a “critical condition”. 

Many of the social determinants of health – such as poor quality housing, low income, 

insecure employment – have moved in the wrong direction over the past 15 years with 

the result that the NHS has faced rising demand for healthcare from a society 

in distress. In 2010, 94 per cent of people attending a type 1 or type 2 A&E were 

seen within four hours; by May 2024 that figure had dropped to just over 60 per cent.

More than 100,000 infants waited more than 6 hours last year and nearly 10 per cent 

of all patients are now waiting for 12 hours or more.  

Starmer, like Lord Darzi’s scathing report, did not mince his words. 

He warned the NHS needed to “reform or die” and stated firmly that 

there will be “No more money without reform.”  The prime minister went on 

to reflect that the NHS is “broken but it is not beaten”, restating his belief 

the health service can still be saved. 

But not without radical, root and branch upheaval: he promised Labour’s remedies 

will amount to  the “biggest reimagining of the NHS since its birth”. 

Starmer duly identified the government’s three priorities for reform, namely: 

“moving from an analogue to a digital NHS” (technology), 

“shifting more care from hospitals to communities” (primary care), and 

“moving from sickness to prevention”.

For the modern Labour party, reform basically means privatisation. And the 

country has to gird its loins for a major fight against this fate. 

Jane Kelsey’s The New Zealand Experiment (1995) contained an amazing annex 

“A Manual for counter-technopols” with some 40 recommendations from which 

I’ve extracted the key messages -

1. Involve the community

My experience of people coming together at a local level to work for the common good has convinced me of the power of community activists. I spent a lot of time supporting the work of social enterprise in low-income communities. None of this went down all that well with the technocrats or even members of my political party. And the national politicians to whose books I contributed (eg Gordon Brown) soon changed their tune when they had a taste of power. People and systems do not readily surrender their power! Only constitutions can do that!

– Promote participatory democracy – encourage people to take back control; empower them with knowledge to understand the forces affecting them and the points at which they can intervene. Stress that no one has a fail-safe recipe for change, and that everyone has a contribution to make. Recognise the skills, resources and insights of individuals, communities, sectoral groups and civil society, and the right to act both separately and in concert.

- Show that there are workable, preferable alternatives from the start. This becomes progressively more difficult once the programme takes hold.

– Encourage community leaders to speak out – public criticism from civic and church leaders, folk heroes and other prominent ‘names’ makes governments uncomfortable and people think. The fewer public critics there are, the easier they are to discredit, harass and intimidate. Remind community leaders of their social obligations, and the need to look themselves in the mirror in the morning.

– Support those who speak out – intimidation and harassment of social critics works only if the targets lack personal, popular and institutional support. Withdrawing from public debate leaves those who remain more exposed.

2. Insist on Openness;

Name the key players behind the scenes, document their interlocking roles and allegiances, and expose the personal and corporate benefits they receive.

– Challenge hypocrisy – ask who is promoting a strategy as being in the ‘national interest’, and who stands to benefit most. Document cases where self-interest is disguised as public good.

– Avoid anti-intellectualism – a pool of critical academics and other intellectuals who can document and expose the fallacies and failures of a structural adjustment programme, and develop viable alternatives in partnership with community and sectoral groups, is absolutely vital. They need to be supported when they come under attack, and challenged when they fail to speak out or are co-opted or seduced.

– Resist marketspeak – maintain control of the language, challenge its capture, and refuse to convert your discourse to theirs. Insist on using hard terms that convey the hard realities of what is going on.

– Maintain a strong civil society and popular sector – extra-parliamentary politics are essential to complement resistance through traditional party channels, and may become the front line once institutional politics fall captive.

- take communications seriously – internal and external/

- Develop alternative media outlets – once mainstream media are captured it is difficult for critics to enter the debate, and impossible to lead it. Alternative media and innovative strategies must be in place before people and financial resources come under stress. Effective communication and exchange of information between sectoral groups and activists are essential, despite the time and resources involved.

3. Take Economics seriously

Economic fundamentalism pervades everything. There is no boundary between economic, indigenous, social, foreign, environmental or other policies. Those who focus on narrow sectoral concern and ignore the pervasive economic agenda will lose their own battles and weaken the collective ability to resist. Leaving economics to economists is fatal.

– Expose the illogic of their theory – neo-liberal theories are riddled with bogus assumptions and internal inconsistencies, and often lack empirical support. Agency and public choice theories in particular need to exposed as self-serving rationalisations which operate in the interests of elites whom the policies empower.

– Raise the level of popular economic literacy – familiarise people with the basic themes, assumptions and goals of economic fundamentalism. Insist that economic policy affects everyone, that everyone has a right to participate in the debate, and that alternatives do exist.

- Establish well-resourced critical think-tanks – neo-liberal and libertarian think-tanks have shown the importance of Well-resourced and internationally connected institutes which can develop an integrated analysis and foster climates favourable to change. Unco-ordinated research by isolated critics can never compete.

4. value and maintain solidarity. It’s not a phrase that falls easily from anglo-saxon mouths

– Work hard to maintain solidarity – avoid the trap of divide and rule; sectoral in-fighting is self-indulgent and everyone risks losing in the end.

– Employ the politics of international embarrassment – if the forums of institutional politics have been taken and local resistance neutralised, marginalised or suppressed, the most potent political arena may be the international stage. Neo-liberal governments and free market economies depend on foreign investment and international approval. Image is everything. The international sphere is one arena they cannot effectively control.

5. Reinforce the concept of an independent public service

– undercut attempts to discredit, sideline and colonise the public service by acknowledging deficiencies and promoting pro-active models for change. Create a constituency of support among client groups and the public which stresses the need for independence and professionalism, the obligations of public service, and the risks of the managerial approach

6. bring democracy into our companies – whether through cooperatives, social enterprise or worker-ownership

– Be proactive and develop real alternatives – start rethinking visions, strategies and models of development for the future . “Democracy at Work” Richard Wolf (2012)

– Localise politics – recognise the power held by regional and local authorities and the ability to secure information and influence decisions at that level. Encourage accountability of local officials and participation in local politics. Continue local struggles to maintain services which provide for local needs; build solidarity, political awareness and a belief in the possibility of change.

– Ginger up party politics – maintain pressure on political parties through popular mobilisation and public education campaigns, document failed policies and unacceptable practices, and use the politics of embarrassment at home and overseas to complement the work of party activists within.

- Think global, act local – develop an understanding of the global nature of economic, political and cultural power, and those forces which drive current trends. Draw the links between global forces and local events. Target local representatives, meetings and activities which feed into and on the global economic and political machine.

– Think local, act global – actively support intemational strategies for change such as people’s tribunals, non-state codes of conduct, non-governmental forums, and action campaigns against unethical companies, practices and governments. Recognise that international action is essential to counter the collaboration of states and corporations, and to empower civil society to take back control.

Ways of thinking about the Future

 The last post was about Geoff Mulgan’s thoughts about the future in which he made a reference to what someone had called the tenth chapter problem – namely these books which spend the first 9 chapters describing the mess we’re in but cannot produce anything for the final chapter except anodyne platitudes and truisms. Mulgans’ lecture shows how it should be done by offering some imaginative ways to think about the future 

But there are many methods that can be drawn on to expand a possibility space. 

Applying a few simple rules can help anyone or any group to generate options, for 

example to transform an existing activity like childcare, pensions, libraries, tax 

so as to multiply options.  
First you think about extension - taking an aspect of existing practice and going 

further, like Bach’s extension of fugues to six voices or extending the idea of rights 

to new fields, extending school hours, extending suffrage by giving the vote to 

sixteen-yearolds, or six-year-olds.  
Then you try grafting (or combining) taking an idea from another field and applying 

it to another. Again, this is very common in the arts—for example, grafting ideas 

from photography back into painting—and other examples include the way that the 

idea of auctions was grafted onto the management of the electromagnetic spectrum 

(the radio waves used for mobile phones, satellites or television), or how the idea of 

the jury was grafted onto democracy in the form of citizens’ juries.  
A more radical approach is to use inversion, as practised in the Middle Ages during 

Carnival, when for a day the poor pretended to be rich and vice versa.  What if 

farmers became bankers (as happened with the microcredit provided by Grameen 

Bank); patients became doctors; or social care were provided by people who had 

themselves been recipients of care?  What if consumers became makers of things? 
Addition and subtraction are also useful. Baroque and traditional Hindu architecture 

are good examples of extreme addition, and any social service can easily add on new 

elements—like a family doctor who also offers advice on welfare. Much modernist 

art and music favoured subtraction, leading to Malevich’s painting ‘White on White’ 

in 1918 or the silence of John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″. This way of thinking 

can also be generative in social contexts: what if you took away half of the roles in 

a hierarchy or introduced a maximum income? Or what if you had to cut a budget by 

half?  Noone likes cuts but I’ve worked with public parks that faced a 50 per cent 

budget cut and were prompted to come up with dozens of creative ways of raising 

money, through events, music, festivals and food, leaving the parks more vibrant 

than they had been before. The cheap prices of today’s supermarkets are only 

possible because Clarence Saunders in Memphis in the early twentieth century had 

the inspired idea of subtracting service staff and letting customers pack their own 

bags. 
Sometimes, not doing things is better than doing them. A surprising example of this 

was found in the military’s experience that taking immediate action to treat soldiers 

suffering from PTSD tended to make it worse. It proved better to let people mobilise 

their own resources and then to focus on the 4 or 5 per cent for whom that approach 

hadn’t worked. Less can be more. And of course veganism is an approach which 

subtracts—excluding meats and dairy products from diets— while much law and 

regulation is now focused on reducing energy use, carbon emissions and travel, 

rather than increasing them. 

If these are some basic methods creative thought can also be helped by mobilising 

metaphor and analogy—seeing one thing and thinking of another (a variant of the 

grafting process described above). Much of social change comes from shifts in 

metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism; a building, a machine 

or a family? Is the economy analogous to a household, which means being very careful 

not to spend more than you earn, or is it more like an entrepot or trading post, 

in which case debt may be essential? 
We are at a time of extraordinarily fertile analysis of the past – the ‘long durées’ of 

inequality, governance, values, families – and just as fertile analysis of the present. 

But we’ve made it harder for social scientists to engage with understanding or 

shaping the future. If we really are in a time of multiplying crises then we badly 

need options, and social scientists need to be part of this work. 

 We need the best brains to be working out how to design and run a zero carbon 

economy; a society with more disability; how to make ubiquitous smart technologies 

serve us rather than the other way round; how to counter polarisation; 

misinformation. We need to populate our fuzzy pictures of the future with complex, 

rich, plausible deas, pictures of the possible – a possibility space that is capacious 

and helpful for action in the present. There may not be an immediate demand for 

these, not least as governments attend to the immediate.  

But it is precisely at these times that we need to look ahead, just as in dark days of 

1930s and WW2 some worked hard to think about what could come after, from 

designing welfare states to macroeconomics, decolonisation to human rights and 

the creation of the UN, which a decade before it was founded seemed utterly 

utopian. 

Further Reading
Future Matters – action, knowledge, ethics  B Adam and C Groves (2007) explores 

the adequacy of current ways of handling the future – although the book is just over 200 

pages, this is only google excerpts
Future Babble D Gardner (2010) more books could benefit from this useful summary
Future Vision – scenarios for the world in 2040 Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman  (2012) 

The book is almost 300 pages and is a useful outline of scenario planning – the epilogue 

traces 10 possible shocks.
Global Trends 2040 – a more contested world National Intelligence Council (2021) 

You can always rely on the security services to demonstrate a realistic approach! 

The final section on 5 future scenarios is particularly worth reading.
Global Risks Report 2024 (World Economic Forum) I’m not a great fan of WEF reports 

which tend to suffer from groupthink. This a short (120 page) report which doesn’t 

mention the risk of pandemics. 

THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

Another interesting reflection from Geoff Mulgan – this time a lecture he delivered in 2022 at the Academy of Social Sciences on its role in mapping and shaping the future

Search for well informed proposals for how welfare, democracy, tax could be a 

generation or two from now and you’ll find surprisingly little. Why has this happened? 

My suggestion is that this has partly happened as a unfortunate by-product of 

perfectly sound, well-intentioned shifts.  Healthy pressures to attend to hard data 

and evidence have had the unintended consequence of squeezing out attention to the 

future since by definition evidence and data refer to the past and present. 

A well-intentioned focus on impact has encouraged incremental work on policy – 

how to tweak a little, ideally aligned with the interests of the government of the day 

but discouraged the serious design of how our society or economy might be a 

generation out since of course a brilliant idea that will flourish in 30 years’ time won’t 

show up in the REF.  

An equally healthy commitment to rigour has made it hard or even career threatening 

to be creative, since any genuinely new idea risks sounding flaky, vague or half-baked 

(as any radical idea will be in its infancy). Similarly, as evidence now shows very clearly,

 the very valid reliance on peer review as a near-universal assessment method, by its 

nature discourages the boldest most speculative thinking, favouring safe proposals 

over more radical ones that tend to get a mix of very high and very low scores. 

So many of the brightest opt either for analytical work or for the safer space of 

commentary and critique - often brilliantly – but steer clear of the riskier space of 

saying what they think should be done. And although within every university there 

are pockets of bold thinking,  some very creative and dynamic, and although many 

want to play a part in the great transitions that may be needed in the next few years, 

they are almost without exception on the margins of their fields, happening despite, 

not because of, the incentives of the system. 

He goes on argue that 

Few in 1900 expected a brutal world war and revolutions in the next generation. 

Few in 1925 anticipated a boom, a depression and then another war. 

Few in the 1950s expected the scale of cultural change of the 1960s. Few in the 1980s 

expected the imminent collapse of the USSR, resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, or 

the rise of personal computing and the internet. Few in the 2000s anticipated the 

scale of the financial crisis, or the boom in populist authoritarianism, or that the 

world would grind to a halt thanks to a pandemic.  Few in 2021 predicted a brutal war 

in 2022 or a glorious time for oil companies. 
Thinking about which trends will continue, which will bend, invert, break sharpens our 

thinking and focuses us on the pace of change in different fields – on the one hand 

the slow but remorseless pace of demography or infrastructures that may take 50 

years to change; on the other the feverish pace of social media that gets a billion 

people onto Tiktok in a couple of years.  All of us usually overestimate how much 

changes fast and underestimate how much can change over longer periods, 

yet we still lack a plausible social science of time. 

This is, in fact, a theme picked up in a 2013 report I have just come across 

which was commissioned by the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations 

and entitled Now for the Long Term 

Within democracies, there are clear tensions between the capacity of governments to deliver long-term solutions in the collective interest and more short-term political demands. Politicians are increasingly punished in times of crisis, making it harder to take difficult long-term decisions that produce immediate pain. Since mid-2010, the leaders of more than 75 percent of the European Union’s 28 states have fallen or been voted out of office, including the leaders of France, Spain and Italy. Increasingly difficult decisions, particularly on controversial reforms such as on carbon taxes, nuclear power or abortion, are often delayed or are beset with uncertainty.

All societies face increasing demands for political accountability, higher living standards, economic opportunities and a more sustainable and healthy environment…..

Meanwhile in democracies, more frequent opinion polls, longer election campaigns, the pressures of increasingly vocal and well funded lobbies and the preference for sound bites over detailed analysis can mean the capacity to think and articulate a vision beyond the electoral term are increasingly limited.

Corporate myopia

Responsibility to think and act in the longerterm interest is not confined to the political sphere. The global business community also has a vital role to play. Yet with notable exceptions, businesses are failing to show leadership and grasp responsibility on the scale required. Some businesses, often through their corporate social responsibility activities or philanthropy, have sparked action, but these are only rarely mainstreamed within the firm. This is particularly acute in the financial sector where Andy Haldane, Executive Director of the Bank of England, argues that there is evidence that “myopia is mounting”.

Performance metrics of CEOs based on share prices arguably encourage a focus on short-term stock prices, rather than long-term value creation. Meanwhile shortterm investors who often hold shares for a few days (or potentially just a few seconds) have the same voting power as those who hold shares for a longer period, with this perversely rewarding those who want to make a quick return and are not necessarily committed to a company’s longterm well-being.

And the report doesn’t shy away from exploring the constraints on thinking 

ahead or from making recommendations – the second section asks “What Makes 

Change so Hard?” and looks in detail at 5 possible reasons viz

• Institutional Inertia; “20th century structures and institutions are poorly equipped 

for 21st century challenges, and suffer from legitimacy, authority and effectiveness deficits”.

• Time; “Electoral cycles, media pressures, company reporting timetables and just-in-time 

systems encourage short-sightedness”

• Political engagement and public Trust; “Limited opportunities for constructive 

engagement and declining trust in politics and institutions undermine citizens’ 
involvement in policy. Yet new online tools and methods of participation are potentially widening opportunities for discussion and debate.”

• Growing Complexity; “Issues are becoming more complex and the evidence 

base can be uncertain, whilst an emphasis on consensus undermines our ability to act”.

• Cultural Bias; “Entrenched barriers shut many women and young people out of 

critical conversations and activities, whilst cultural differences provide barriers to change.”

Mulgan’s lecture then points to the contrast between the hard sciences and 

social policy

In sciences – whether life science or computer science – it’s taken for granted 

that if you are ambitious you speculate and design options for the future.  

You are encouraged by research councils, university departments and venture 

capital to generate ideas, the more radical the better.  A future orientation is 

seen as necessary and admirable.  And it’s recognised that although most ideas will 

fail, the rare successes will be useful and some incredibly valuable. In science 

and technology there is no shortage of support for imagination – thinktanks, 

conferences, accelerators, funds - on smart cities, smart homes, AI, genomics: much of it 

speculative and much of it hype and hot air but some of it very real and feeding 

into well-developed systems.  Drug discovery and new surgical procedures on the 

one hand and much of technology have long-established systems for generating options,

 selecting the best and then scaling them up.   By contrast social action and policy 

lacks any comparable systems of support.  There is little support for radical thought 

and variation – little support for experiment and testing and only patchy systems 

for then selecting and scaling the successes.  

TO BE CONTINUED