⚓ Ideology is stability.

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

We’re looking for digital lead. Do you know anyone? We’re looking for someone who blends consultancy and non-profit experiences, and wants to use digital to achieve real-world outcomes (not just engagement stats). Job advert here (£50k-£60k salary).

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.