Interviewed, edited and titled by Tom Hashemi.

One of the more depressing things of my 20-something years sitting in Labour groups—but I think it’s true of all political parties—is the number of times people would say, “Our problem is that we’re not communicating our policies well enough.” 

My answer generally was, “What we really need are better ideas, not better communication of the ideas we’ve got.” I am a slight communication sceptic in that way. Lots of people in politics believe that communication is the gold dust, and if only people knew all the wonderful things they were doing everything would be fine. 

I’m not so sure. I think sometimes what you have to have is better ideas and better delivery of them. Then they will have a better chance of speaking for themselves.

We did not manage to convey the idea to people in a way that allowed people to understand it properly and to support it. So I’m definitely agreeing that there was a communications gap there, and that we were responsible for that, and we should have done a lot better at it. But it’s not just that, is it? 

If you look back at any major shift in the field of motoring, it has always been hugely opposed. Whatever the evidence, whatever the communication, the resistance to it has been huge and hostile. If you go back to seat belts, or to the breathalyser they faced a level of hostility and aggression way in excess of the 20mph experience.

So it’s not enough to say, “Oh, if only we’d communicated it better, it would all have been OK.” We should have communicated it better, and we’re responsible for that part of the difficulty. But even if we’d had the most convincing people out there arguing for it, that wouldn’t have been the end of the issue.

The system has major antibodies to any new ideas. Despite the fact that that’s not anybody’s professed intention, there is just something in the nature of government and in the nature of bureaucracy that means that if you want to do something different, you’re always up against it.

The status quo has an enormous pull on the system, and anything different is always measured against the status quo—as though the status quo has nothing to justify. Of course there are usually vested interests attached to the status quo; it’s also resistance to change.

You might be able to dodge around opposing arguments, but that leaves any change vulnerable to the forces of inertia, and allows those who are opposed time to regroup. You have to take things head on.

As a politician, the manifesto is the most important thing you have on your side to argue for change: it is your democratic mandate. 

It is something that the system does respond to. So you have to make sure you’ve got your ideas ready, that you’ve articulated them in a manifesto, that you are ready then to fight the good fight in terms of how that idea gets translated from a page in a manifesto to something that can be implemented.

There are Labour Party members who think the manifesto process is worthless. And there are others who think that it isn’t sufficiently open to influence. The process really does matter, but not necessarily in the fine detail. What the voice of Party members does is to set the parameters—the values and the core beliefs—within which you are able to think of those policy ideas. That’s really important.

By the time I’d been the health minister for six months, I was completely taken aback to find that the health service cost anything at all, because everybody who came through the door told me that if only I would do this thing that they wanted, it would save me millions of pounds. 

These were never cashable savings. These were savings that said if you spent this amount of money providing this service in the community, those beds would not be needed. The trouble was those beds were then filled by somebody else who needed them. All ministers are worried about money—I certainly was as health minister—but don’t pitch your idea on a premise that doesn’t have validity. It undermines everything else you say.

You should always test your arguments before you get to the minister. Set up some other challenge mechanism where you’ve got to go and convince some people of your idea—don’t let the minister be the starting point of trying that. 

Find some sceptical people. If you want to come and argue for more money for diabetes for example, go and pitch that idea to people from the Stroke Association first, because they’ll be hard to convince, won’t they? Because their job is to argue for more money for stroke services. If you can’t convince the sceptical people, then you probably won’t be able to convince the minister.

If you get your meeting with the minister, you’re not going to be able to say everything you want to say. Meetings work best where people have worked out in advance: here are the three key things we want the minister to know about; here are the things we’re able to provide to make sure those things can be thought of in slightly slower time; here’s the thing we want to get from you specifically at the end.

The meetings that go badly are when people who come through the door are badly prepared or give you clear signals that they think you are the enemy, and they’re going to spend the next 30 minutes hectoring you in the hope that they will feel better.

When meetings go well, it’s because people approach them on the basis that although you may differ about things, everybody is well motivated. Your job is to persuade and to provide the evidence that something could be done differently and better. Ministers will respond very positively to that.

Thank you to the 145 of you 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.