📜 Policy people don't do the politics part well

Know what is politically possible

To be influential, you need to understand where the river is already flowing. And you need to layer on top a deep understanding of the politics. In my foray into the political world, I felt a lot of policy people don't do the politics part well. They will often come up with worthy ideas and then they'll sit on a shelf and that's because they haven't thought about how you translate that idea into the priorities of the person making a decision, or the limitations of the political environment. The ideas aren’t rooted in the politics of the issue.

Advocacy and communications should play in concert

Communications and advocacy are things to be done in concert with one another. Advocacy is about those conversations that we do behind the scenes with people who are influential or important or will have a voice in a debate. At the Good Growth Foundation we do a lot of that private work but we think that communications – that public-facing piece – is equally as important. Think tanks are organisations which shape the debate just as much as informing it. Demonstrating that something is salient, that something is interesting, and novel and that it can get public cut-through, is an important way to show your ideas are relevant in those private conversations as well. And obviously today that means a lot more than getting mentions in traditional media. 

Keep banging the drum

When I was part of Labour’s Council of Skills Advisors we published a report in 2023 – and usually these things just disappear. They sit on a shelf and you never hear of them again. But right up until the 2024 general election, our taskforce was continuing to spread our ideas in this space, banging the drum for them, doing events, and that was important because it meant we could keep the momentum and the buy-in on the big changes that we wanted to see. It’s important to not just produce something and let it sit – it has to continue to be pushed. But…

Your funding strategy will shape your influence strategy

That ‘do one thing and stop’ approach is one of the things I observed coming into this world. When I worked in business, we would always have this long-term plan if we wanted to see change. And being frank, that’s one of the advantages that we have at the GGF. We’re self-funded, not philanthropist or donor led, which means that we can focus on what will be the most impactful, make the most difference, and we can have that longer-term commitment.

Bigger change is possible if you engage with the trade-offs

I ran a business and I tried to solve a social inequality through that business. We delivered the world’s first affordable IVF proposition, which meant being real about the reality on the ground and how you implement it in real life. I've had that real life experience of working with investors and growing a 300 person company. And that world comes with lots of difficult conversations and trade-offs and challenges. That difference of background means that at GGF we don’t have the typical think tank cultural restrictions of ‘this is the way things are done’. But it also means that we’re really good at balancing the trade-offs and challenges and being real about them. You need to have that ambition around breaking conventions, and also the realism that you can’t achieve all of your aims at once.

Implementation is everything

Ideas that sound really great in a fringe event or a panel discussion fall away when you get down to the nitty-gritty of ‘how is this actually going to execute through a system that is very strained’. There is a reality here, there are people here who have to implement this who are already at maximum capacity. If you continually make tweaks to a strained system, how are you ever going to get that to work in a way that will actually be effective? The reality of implementing this stuff is that it’s hard. And if you never get into that detail, your ideas are not going to work.

You may be wrong, and the public right

I really hate this attitude that the public are stupid or ignorant or don't understand. They often judge things better than the Westminster bubble. Take the growth gap right now, and the fact that the public have this sense that someone else is benefiting from the economy today. If you plot returns on capital in this country versus real-term incomes over the last 10 years, incomes are pretty flat, but returns on capital are pretty healthy. The public are not wrong. They're experiencing and reflecting on something which is real in their lives. The Westminster bubble should have more respect for why the public think the way they do. They may well be right, and you may well be wrong.