🧱 Another BRIC in the Wall

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.