🚗 Lee introduced the 20mph limit in Wales: here's what he learned

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas died earlier this month. Habermas argued that stratcomms—what he called ‘strategic action’—is bad for democracy because it treats citizens as targets to be manipulated, rather than equals to be reasoned with.

Instead of influencing people, Habermas argued that we should use ‘communicative’ approaches aimed at trying to reach a mutual understanding on a particular issue. For Habermas the structure of change should not be how most of us approach stratcomms:

Objective → influencing → political change.

Instead, the process should be:

Engagement and debate → mutual understanding and alignment → political change.

There is a deep irony that while Habermas argued for mutual understanding, he chose to make his arguments using dense, impenetrable prose that I imagine most struggle with (or just me).

There is, however, a practical reason to persevere and read him. In today’s fragmented landscape, a mutual understanding is one of few ways to ensure your policy survives the next political transition. The catch is that the consensus society reaches might not be the one you set out with.

Where Habermas’ ideal falls down in practice is the assumption that you can actually have a debate; that the public square is a thing that people respect and value. That ideal feels far away when you read Lee’s comments below, and the strength in the words and phrases Lee uses: ‘ferocity,’ ‘gunfire,’ ‘nasty,’ ‘intimidated,’ ‘scared,’ ‘the ugliness of it all.'

Lee's experience highlights how readily the people we disagree with become enemies that we should shun, rather than opponents with whom we should debate—and maybe even learn from. Habermas is right that our positions can and should change as we explore them. Indeed, the point of Policy Unstuck is not agreement with every point a guest makes, but how we can use what people say as a way of challenging, reflecting on, or even understanding what we think.

That feels like something Habermas would approve of.

Tom

💡 Training

• Communicate to persuade. Unlike Habermas, we think objectives are really really important, and most of the campaigns that fail do so because they don’t have good ones. Learn how to write good objectives, useful audience segmentations, and how to reframe your arguments based on them. Starts 16th April {Read more}
  

• Generative AI for policy communicators. AI is the thing everyone knows they need to work on, but few know exactly what they should be doing. Get policy-specific advice and ideas on how you can integrate LLMs into your work, and use them to increase your productivity. Starts 16th April {Read more}

Beware the tyranny of being right

There are people who believe strongly in the case they’re making, which is great, but they can be very pious. They are completely blinkered to the constraints the decision-maker is facing and the competing claims, and that discredits them in the eyes of the decision-maker.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side of that desk. People have the thing they are selling and they just drone on about that. Well, I don't care about that. I've got my own problems.

If you haven’t got more than one strategy, you haven’t got enough

Public affairs is about relationships and whether you or your message connects with someone. It’s impossible to know in advance if the chemistry is going to be there, so a good advocate has multiple approaches.

You need to think about it like you’re doing a maze: what are the different ways I can get to my end destination? It’s lateral thinking, not linear. Try a bunch of different stuff, have tenacity, and expect it’s going to take a while. If you do enough of that with enough people over enough of a period, you will get a result.

If no-one cares about your thing, what things do they care about?

When I started at Sustrans they saw themselves as a cycling charity. But literally 99% of journeys are not by this form of transport, so why would a decision maker give a damn?

Our job was around how to broaden it out. What has political traction and salience? Health does. At the time, climate change did. The economy does. 

So I mapped out the groups that have credibility in the political and media sphere. What are the connections between what I care about and what they care about, and how can I build unexpected alliances to broaden the appeal of the agenda that I want to advance?

→ Alice Grimes, formerly of the CBI, gave a good example of this in practice.

Focus solely on Westminster at (y)our loss

Most UK organisations completely undervalue the role of regions and nations. They see them as an irrelevant drain on resources, but it’s where some of the magic can really happen. 

It’s much easier for me to get an alliance with the British Heart Foundation, British Telecom, or the British Medical Association in Cardiff than it is for my equivalent in London to get a relationship with their opposite number.

There’s a nimbleness outside Whitehall that people inside Whitehall are completely oblivious to. It’s the Bill Clinton phrase: federalism is a policy laboratory. We don’t use devolution like that enough.

Rationalists beware: evidence alone achieves nothing

There is an entrenched strand of thinking in policy that evidence is enough. It is not.

When it comes to 20mph limits, technical evidence doesn’t take you very far. It’s not about facts, it’s about feeling and identity. Too many people, particularly in policy specialisms, can be very self-righteous about having the evidence on their side.

The evidence that mattered is: people don’t like the idea of being told to go slow, but they also don't want the cars in their street to go fast. As a driver, I will say, ‘bloody nuisance making me go 20 here.’ But if you ask the people who live in that street, they don't want speeds going back up.

Allies, but only when it’s easy

When it came down to it, the groups who campaign on this stuff were really poor… At the sound of gunfire, they all ran for the hills.

Two-thirds of the parties in the Senedd supported the 20mph limits, but when it started to get rough, nobody was to be found. It was literally just me and the First Minister. 

More depressingly, community advocates felt intimidated into silence. Local campaigners and hospital consultants who had been prepared in advance to say ‘this is the right thing to do’ were scared off when it started getting nasty.

I’m not criticising them–they were intimidated and they self-censored and that’s human. We should have been better prepared for it, although I’m not sure you can fully prepare yourself for the ferocity and the ugliness of it all.

Timing is everything

People say the comms around the speed limit weren’t good enough, or the message was wrong, or we weren’t flexible enough in how it was implemented. All those things are true, but we got it over the line.

My reflection on that episode is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you wait until everything is perfect, you never get it over the line because there’s a window in politics. You can have the best-designed policy and implementation in the world, but if you miss that window it is all academic. It’s yet another paper that nobody reads. 

Why the system produces weathercocks

As soon as you’re in politics, you are seen as venal and self-interested, and you’ve somehow got to constantly prove the opposite.

That’s exhausting and demoralising. You feel trapped. It’s understandable that politicians feel, ‘I will follow the path of least resistance.’ But that means we end up with politicians who do not say ‘I want to change this and I’m going to do everything I can to change this.’ Instead they say ‘I’m not going to push my luck on that because it’s unpopular.’ 

It’s the Tony Benn quote on the difference between a weathercock and a signpost. Weathercocks point whichever way the wind is blowing that day. Signposts say this is the way we should go.

You need a mix in politics. The challenge is when you get too many of one kind, and we have too many weathercocks at the moment.

Thank you to the 104 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague.