REFORM – AGAIN

There is a good chance that Reform will win the next election in Britain and I’m indebted to Matin Stanley for alerting me to Fixing the Centre (2026) by Reform MP Danny Kruger which draws on an earlier paper he had written the previous year.

For some reason, I prefer critiques to the genuine article. So I appreciated this 
article dealing critically with a pamphlet from Demos - 
Treating the Symptoms not the causes Political Quarterly (2026) 

A recent report by Demos is the latest in a series of think tank analyses of Whitehall’s problems. In what follows, we argue that the report’s focus on culture risks treating the symptoms of governance problems, not the causes. Academic literature has shown that systemic structural reform of the state is necessary to grasp the nettle of Britain’s governance issues. Because of this failure to get to the nub of Britain’s political malaise, the report exhibits limitations typical of a genre of think tank critique of Whitehall. We maintain that think tanks tend to offer narrowly drawn, incremental reform initiatives aimed at Whitehall. We argue that these are not only unlikely to bed in without broader structural reforms, but they might also deepen the crisis they aim to address.

The Human Handbrake is subtitled: How Whitehall Culture Holds Back Public Service Reform, Demos’s report argues that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

Culture is defined as ‘the shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solves its problems’. The report identifies five obstacles to the adoption of a reforming culture in Whitehall:

(1) An outsized focus on risk in politics, which leads to cautious and defensive behaviour

(2) Incentivisation of an individualistic ‘policy hero’ culture where only those in frontfacing policy roles rise to the top

(3) The separation of people into tribes, undermining trust and collaboration

(4) A preference for standardisation and simplicity, at the expense of adaptive and messy solutions

(5) An impatience for quick, discernible results, at the expense of enduring change. Considering these cultural obstacles, the report suggests several commensurate solutions which include:

• The use of iterative methods and risk stratification, alongside stronger leadership to mitigate against risk aversion

• Altering performance frameworks and changing ministerial role model behaviour to combat individualistic hero cultures

• Building shared identities across institutions to combat tribe forming

• Creating a tolerance for complexity and unevenness alongside improving data systems to overcome the desire for simple and standardised policy

• Telling better stories to combat impatience

Liberated Public Services Demos (2024)  
Another Demos pamphlet whose saving grace is that it quotes from real, live cases which 
 prove its argument “So the limitations of the current approach to public service 
delivery have become more and more apparent by the day; yet we have failed to transition,
 at least at a national level, to a new operating model for public services. 
We believe one reason why is the lack of a credible, coherent and complete alternative. 
This report seeks to define this alternative and, crucially, to show its rigorous 
intellectual foundations and how it coheres as a system. 
In doing so, we are greatly indebted to other recent attempts to develop the concept 
of a ‘new paradigm’ in public services, both at Demos and elsewhere, including the 
Centre for Impact, Collaborate CIC, the IPPR, New Local, the RSA and many others, 
not least Hilary Cottam”. 

Diamond’s “Hyperactive Incrementalism” is an article reflecting on the 
British State’s inclination for reform
 
Elites and Democracy Hugo Drochon (2026) Given my interest in elite 
theory this book seems just up my street. These are the contents -

Introduction 1

I: Elite Theory 4

II: Democratic Theory 7

III: Dynamic Democracy 11

Movement 12

Dynamism 17

Regimes 25

Pessimism 28

IV: Book Structure 36

1 Mosca and the Ruling Class 39

I: Sicily 45

II: Making Italians 52

III: The Ruling Class I 58

IV: The Ruling Class II 69

Conclusion: Dynamic Democracy 78

2 Pareto and the Circulation of Elites 82

I: France, Italy 88

II: Lausanne, Economics 94

III: The Application 98

IV: The Treatise 101

V: The Transformation of Democracy 112

VI: Fascism 116

Conclusion: Dynamic Democracy 120

3 Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy 122

I: Germany, France, Italy 123

II: The Iron Law 128

III: Michels and Weber 133

IV: Michels and Mussolini 138

V: Democracy’s Two Palliatives 141

VI: Dynamic Democracy 145

Conclusion 149

4 Schumpeter and Elite Competition 154

I: Elite Competition 158

II: Economic Competition 163

III: Economic Democracy 166

IV: The Conditions of Minimalism 168

V: Pareto 172

Conclusion: Dynamic, Transformative and Oppositional Democracy 174

5 Dahl and Mills, Polyarchy or Power Elite? 182

I: The Power Elite 188

II: Minorities Rule 192

III: Conspiracy Theories 195

IV: Muncie or New Haven? 199

V: Radical or Conservative? 202

VI: Mosca, Pareto or Michels? 206

Conclusion 209

6 Aron and Divided Elites 212

I: Machiavellians 216

II: Pareto and Burnham 220

III: Divided and Unified Elites 224

IV: Political Sociology 226

V: The Centre Raymond Aron 230

Conclusion 236

The Strategists – Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler – how war made them and how they made war Phillips O’Brien (2024)

O’Brien is an American contemporary commentator on war now working in Scottish Universities

The Death of Consensus – 100 years of political nightmares Phil Tinline (2022)

The consensus whose death we’ll trace in Part One had long roots in orthodox Victorian economics. We’ll start with how it hit a huge financial crisis in 1931. Then we’ll trace the fourteen-year struggle that followed, until a new consensus was secured in the wake of the Second World War.

In Part Two, we’ll explore how that post-war consensus began to break down in the industrial strife of the late 1960s—and how politicians repeatedly struggled to remake the old compromise with the unions, until Thatcherism overwhelmed them.

Then, in Part Three, we’ll follow what has happened since the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher was riddled with fissures by the 2008 Crash. This, of course, is still unfolding, so our story here is more provisional. And each of these three periods is very different. But within each of them, I think a process is discernible. Stripped down to essentials, it

might run something like this:

There is a political consensus, based on a taboo: some nightmarish thing that must not be allowed to happen. Perhaps it is happening in another country, or has happened in our own past. The taboo enables the development of what you might call a ‘concentration of power’, a group whose interests it protects. The death of consensus begins when a crisis strikes, and the existing solutions no longer seem to work. At this point, the existing system can only be kept going with a blatant assertion of dominance by those holding that concentrated power, forcing people to choose whether they still support it.

Those for whom the crisis is a worse nightmare try to fight the concentration of power, but it’s a hopeless struggle. While the old nightmare prevails, it blocks politicians from trying anything radically new.

Opposition to the concentration of power eventually puts the taboo under intolerable pressure, but even then it proves impossible to dislodge, precisely because it is secured in place by fear. This impasse plunges politics into flux and crisis, as the realisation that the old ways no longer work edges closer to the heart of power, yet every alternative still seems unthinkable. Every road leads to a nightmare.

Amid all this, leaders struggle to reinvent the consensus model—their only safe option. But this cannot last. More and more people decide that one of those alternatives might actually be worse than the existing taboo, the old nightmare still governing the limits of politics. Finally, through a new crisis, or a shift in public mood, the breakpoint comes. With the old taboo no longer protecting it, the old concentration of power is exposed to a much more effective challenge. Leaders still hemmed in by the old fears start to look weak and out of time, next to the once marginal figures who step forward to fight them, break the taboo, and take power.

The incoming leaders have a new story to tell about what has gone so terribly wrong, and about the weakness—and treachery—of the old leaders. This marks a sharp break with the past. The way through to a new democratic consensus at last becomes clear: it comes once enough people accept the newly dominant nightmare, the new ‘thing to which we must never go back’. 

Of course, it doesn’t happen exactly this way. There is no precise template, and none of this is to suggest that history is somehow circular. These steps have not necessarily happened in exactly this order. Sometimes they have happened more than once. One major difference is that in 1931–45, the breakpoint was caused by an external threat (Nazi attack, and war), whereas in 1968–85, it sprang from internal conflict (between government and trade unions). It is hardly surprising, however, that societies move through periods of relative consensus and relative crisis, rather as economies move through phases of growth and recession. Nor is it so strange that this process, as it has played out across Britain’s first century of mass democracy, does show some consistent patterns, which may help us understand our current predicaments. To trace how all this played out in messy reality, let’s try looking at British democracy from a fresh angle. We will track a series of people who played a major role as leading politicians in the 1970s: Labour’s Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle and Michael Foot, and Conservatives Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), Keith Joseph and Edward Heath. But we will meet them first as youngsters in the 1930s, as they participated in that process of consensus change; at first from the margins, and then more decisively. We will see how they were shaped by the process too—particularly through their relationship with the nightmare of mass unemployment. So, as we follow the story of consensus from 1931 to 1945, we will trace a series of remarkable connections, from the teenage Harold Wilson’s reverence for the Labour defector Philip Snowden, to the far-left political debuts of the twenty-something Barbara Castle and Michael Foot, at the side of the upper-class firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps. We will move from the student Keith Joseph’s encounter with Yorkshire miners to the young Edward Heath and Quintin Hogg fighting over appeasement. Only then will we jump forwards to the 1960s and 1970s, to trace how memories of the unemployment nightmare of the 1930s shaped these individuals’ actions in the governments they ran. We’ll follow the increasingly desperate attempts by Wilson, Castle, Foot and even Heath to reinvent and rescue the old consensus, and Keith Joseph’s effort to replace it. Finally, we will jump again, to the period from the 2008 Crash, via the travails of the Big Society, Red Tories and Blue Labour, through the Brexit wars, to Covid and ‘levelling up’. And as we do so, we’ll trace what the 1930s and the 1970s can tell us about today’s struggles and nightmares—about our own experience of the death of consensus, and what might be coming next.

Blood and Iron – the rise and fall of the German empire from 1871-1918 Katja Hoyer (2021) An important analysis from this Anglo-German historian