Totally agree. I’m pretty sure Starmer promised he was going to give us a Government that would “tread more lightly” on our lives. That’s a good instinct. But getting his homework marked ad nauseam by panels of busybodies seems like the opposite of that. Just crack on, chaps! We’ve had 14 years of Tories and they’ve left a horrible mess. You don’t have time for this.
I think you’re spot on with the trust point. Possibly the single most pernicious aspect of having had Tory governments that were shit at delivery, even on their own terms (eg small boats), for 14 years is that lots of people have concluded that politicians of all stripes will not deliver. And the most pernicious aspect of the new media landscape is that players will shamelessly lie and say the government has not delivered even when it has. This is especially damaging with the over 60s, who often subsist in a specific corner that tells them black is white (immigration is a great example of this).
On your broader point, I have once seen deliberative decision-making done well and used to accelerate, rather than decelerate, transformative change. But it was at a relatively micro level: changing how stroke care was delivered in London. Stroke consultants were very skeptical about the changes at the outset, but the deliberative process helped get them on board, and it saved hundreds of lives every year. But it needed a very smart and aggressive team to do it — Tony Rudd, Ara Darzi, Ruth Carnall, Hannah Farrar, and others. And it wasn’t a truly public process, because the participants were all specialists.
> Even if you understand intellectually that, say, Britain needs to build more houses, or that we need to introduce a system of road pricing, the reality is that once the bulldozers arrive in the field next to your home, or once you see a new outgoing on your bank statement, its very unlikely that you’re going to be happy about it.
This gets to the heart of the problem - eveyryone has different lived experiences. Even if you were to get a demographically balanced set of people on these Citizens Assembelies, there will be questions on how demographically balanced they are as it will be as the determination of balance will by necessity have a finite number of parameters. 100 people may also be too small to be 'balanced'. But probably too large to be anything but a talking shop.
Even Adrian Ramsay opposes overhead power cables as it would affect his constituents but as co-leader of the Green Party he can surely appreciate the wider picture of the delivery of renewable power.
Delivery is potentially one of the benefits of FPTP as it results in strong government. Not particularly representative, but if a few of Starmers MPs rebel against something then he can ignore them or even expel them without worry as he has such a large majority. Its almost a 5 year dictatorship to let him get stuff done.
Most enjoyable. As someone working in the coalmines of global infrastructure mega-projects, the double-edged sword of consultation in the environmental assessment process cuts me to ribbons. We need to get on with delivery and we welcome participation through consultation as it improves socio-economic project outcomes for the largest possible number of people while ensuring marginalised groups are not ignored. However, it's inevitably also a mechanism of complaint and delay for NIMBYs who will never be convinced and do not want to appreciate the greater good as the infrastructure project is adversely impacting *them*. It's better for democratically elected politicians to make pragmatic decisions early and stick with them so that we can deliver, rather than letting the consultation process cause the death of a project by a thousand cuts. Using a local example, a big chunk of HS2's cost increase and delay was caused by Tory MPs' constituents demanding extensive tunneling through the Chilterns that would not be needed for high-speed lines in France, Spain, or Germany. Consultation caused the cuts to HS2.
The bigger problem to me is that there will undoubtedly be a certain type of person engaged to run the citizens panels, and ensure that misinformation is kept away from them, which will result in them being entirely in line with that type of person's viewpoint.
There's an intellectual slight of hand here that is worth exposing.
Government does a lot of stuff, from building infrastructure to tackling drug abuse. Building infrastructure is an example of a "complicated" problem in that it is characterised by a lot of different parts, but those parts are knowable, as is the relationship between them, and the problem is bounded. Tackling drug abuse is an example of a "complex" problem in that there an unknown number of actors and factors that interact in ways that are difficult or impossible to fully describe, and the problem is essentially unbounded.
James argues against participatory approaches and for "just getting on with it" using infrastructure examples. That is picking the class of problems least suited to the participatory model. Tackling drug abuse is a completely different class of problem where, top-down, determinitic approaches usually fail, and fail spectacularly.
The philosopher James C. Scott wrote a book about this called Seeing Like A State. He labelled the top down, solutionist mindset exhibited by government as "high modernism". It is great, in certain specific circumstances, but deeply flawed when faced with the complex policy challenges or "wicked" problems that we now expect our governments to routinely solve.
We need to have a better conversation about what appraoches government should use when faced with complexity rather than doubling down on "delivery". At the moment, the state is holding a hammer, and treating every policy problem like a nail. That is dumb, the results are predictably bad, and that is ultimately why people's trust is in freefall.
Yep and this is where citizens assemblies have proven themselves, wicked subjects like abortion in Ireland. The UK one on climate had some more sensible decisions made than politicians themselves often would agree to too.
An excellent post, as ever. And it's right that delivery will matter. One thing I'd add to boost trust in politics is that sometimes politicians have to simply have and win the argument, as well as be honest about trade-offs. To take housing and immigration, one reason we get so bogged down is that voters have an instinctive preference for their status quo - not to like their community changing much and keeping their lot intact thank you very much - that politicians tell them is cost free or beneficial. To take an example, there are some lovely market towns and villages that if I lived there I'd personally want left untouched and to live in a 1950s rural idyll. But within a generation or two they will wither as young people move away to find work that better matches living costs and the old die and sell up to wealthy newcomers who can afford the premium to live there or have a second home. Explain to people that it's either build the solar farm or new affordable homes or become a Potemkin village for Humphreys and Jemimas (apologies to any Humphreys or Jemimas - sure you're lovely), and they might be more inclined to support them. Or on immigration, that it's fine to want it down to next to nothing, we're not going to shout at you and call you racist but your tax bill is going up and your kids are going to pay even more to go to university. People may then understand why government acts as it does beyond believing it's because are useless and/or corrupt.
If you treat people like adults and level with them about the wider costs of not doing x or doing y, then even if they dislike what you're doing, they'll tend to understand, and you may just change the conversation to one that's healthier and can win those arguments.
My view of the Irish experience is that Citizens Assemblies have given politicians cover where they know public opinion has changed but powerful voices remain keen on the status quo e.g. divorce, but rubbish at informing the hard choices inherent in governing. The environmental enquiry came up with 150 recommendations with no indication how they would be paid for, or what would have to be sacrificed to deliver them.
Consensus and coalition building is important - compare the success of auto-enrolment into pensions with the failure to reform social care - but it's not something that takes a one-size-fits-all approach.
I was involved in organizing the French Citizens Assembly on Doctor Assisted End of Life. Something Macron promised during his 2022 election. Even by the end of 2023 it was clear he'd gone off the idea, so we were holding these discussions and writing up our reports in the knowledge nothing would happen
And then he called a legislative election...
If he'd just done something at the legislative level in 2022 then we wouldn't have wasted a lot of people's time
“I’m sure Demos would disagree with my characterisation of added layers of “participation” as analogous veto points they want to add to politics more broadly”
Sorry but I disagree with this, they don’t want to ‘add to politics’ all these calls for citizens assembly’s and the like come from the same place, a desire to ‘get the politics out of politics’ it’s why well intentioned fools like Rory Stewart like them so much
Is recent US economic performance potentially a counter-argument here? By most measures, the US has had great post pandemic economic recovery that has probably been spread around quite a bit across the income spectrum. But I don't think that's resulted in an uptick in political trust...
Government decisions are too beholden to what corporations and HNW donors think.
There already is consultation periods between the stage of 'we need to do something to increase X' and actually implementing but individuals generally don't have the headspace to respond. Citizens assemblies seem like they can be a great way of bringing the view of actual citizens to something without adding 'new' veto points so much as providing a more balanced consultation response. Particularly on thorny issues where there's no agreed 'right' answer like abortion, climate action, both of which previous citizens assemblies have been pretty good on
Literally just said "This is data from the British Social Attitudes survey that has been split on a portrait page and stacked up. Reassemble it into a csv dataset" and attached two screenshots of the data! It was amazing. (Might try and make a little video and embed into a future newsletter.)
Amazing! And thank you. My conclusion from your query is that LLMs really should be treated like humans - don't underestimate, just ask, see what results you get, and they'll surely tell you if they can't/won't do it 😉
I'm very much not an expert, but isn't the problem that veto points on building infrastructure are already 'baked in' in that sense that Government legislation has required climate impacts/equality impscts/wildlife impacts etc to be 'considered' by the Civil Service which then invites legal challenge(s) about whether this has been 'considered' properly? The whole point of the consultation might be to demonstrate that these things have been considered...
Saying "crack on" is fine but if cracking on means deciding X is more important than Y then all the people that think Y is vital will fight you to the death and have ample routes to so. What then?
I think that's part of the game of politics. Instead of endlessly dithering and consulting different interest groups, politicians should do politics, and take calculated risks that their decisions will pay off in the longer run. (Like Starmer is barrelling ahead of planning - which is a risk, and it might fuck up and lose the next election, but better to deliver it now and get it moving.)
True, but I suspect barreling on with planning (details tbc) isn't going to say 'to hell with "considering" X, democratically elected politicians can do what they like", so as long as X has to be considered then deliberation with friends of X is necessary in some form
Totally agree. I’m pretty sure Starmer promised he was going to give us a Government that would “tread more lightly” on our lives. That’s a good instinct. But getting his homework marked ad nauseam by panels of busybodies seems like the opposite of that. Just crack on, chaps! We’ve had 14 years of Tories and they’ve left a horrible mess. You don’t have time for this.
I think you’re spot on with the trust point. Possibly the single most pernicious aspect of having had Tory governments that were shit at delivery, even on their own terms (eg small boats), for 14 years is that lots of people have concluded that politicians of all stripes will not deliver. And the most pernicious aspect of the new media landscape is that players will shamelessly lie and say the government has not delivered even when it has. This is especially damaging with the over 60s, who often subsist in a specific corner that tells them black is white (immigration is a great example of this).
On your broader point, I have once seen deliberative decision-making done well and used to accelerate, rather than decelerate, transformative change. But it was at a relatively micro level: changing how stroke care was delivered in London. Stroke consultants were very skeptical about the changes at the outset, but the deliberative process helped get them on board, and it saved hundreds of lives every year. But it needed a very smart and aggressive team to do it — Tony Rudd, Ara Darzi, Ruth Carnall, Hannah Farrar, and others. And it wasn’t a truly public process, because the participants were all specialists.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/london/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2019/09/London-Stroke-Model.pdf
> Even if you understand intellectually that, say, Britain needs to build more houses, or that we need to introduce a system of road pricing, the reality is that once the bulldozers arrive in the field next to your home, or once you see a new outgoing on your bank statement, its very unlikely that you’re going to be happy about it.
This gets to the heart of the problem - eveyryone has different lived experiences. Even if you were to get a demographically balanced set of people on these Citizens Assembelies, there will be questions on how demographically balanced they are as it will be as the determination of balance will by necessity have a finite number of parameters. 100 people may also be too small to be 'balanced'. But probably too large to be anything but a talking shop.
Even Adrian Ramsay opposes overhead power cables as it would affect his constituents but as co-leader of the Green Party he can surely appreciate the wider picture of the delivery of renewable power.
Delivery is potentially one of the benefits of FPTP as it results in strong government. Not particularly representative, but if a few of Starmers MPs rebel against something then he can ignore them or even expel them without worry as he has such a large majority. Its almost a 5 year dictatorship to let him get stuff done.
Effective politics sometimes entails crushing the saboteurs, however nicely formatted their PDFs are
Most enjoyable. As someone working in the coalmines of global infrastructure mega-projects, the double-edged sword of consultation in the environmental assessment process cuts me to ribbons. We need to get on with delivery and we welcome participation through consultation as it improves socio-economic project outcomes for the largest possible number of people while ensuring marginalised groups are not ignored. However, it's inevitably also a mechanism of complaint and delay for NIMBYs who will never be convinced and do not want to appreciate the greater good as the infrastructure project is adversely impacting *them*. It's better for democratically elected politicians to make pragmatic decisions early and stick with them so that we can deliver, rather than letting the consultation process cause the death of a project by a thousand cuts. Using a local example, a big chunk of HS2's cost increase and delay was caused by Tory MPs' constituents demanding extensive tunneling through the Chilterns that would not be needed for high-speed lines in France, Spain, or Germany. Consultation caused the cuts to HS2.
The bigger problem to me is that there will undoubtedly be a certain type of person engaged to run the citizens panels, and ensure that misinformation is kept away from them, which will result in them being entirely in line with that type of person's viewpoint.
There's an intellectual slight of hand here that is worth exposing.
Government does a lot of stuff, from building infrastructure to tackling drug abuse. Building infrastructure is an example of a "complicated" problem in that it is characterised by a lot of different parts, but those parts are knowable, as is the relationship between them, and the problem is bounded. Tackling drug abuse is an example of a "complex" problem in that there an unknown number of actors and factors that interact in ways that are difficult or impossible to fully describe, and the problem is essentially unbounded.
James argues against participatory approaches and for "just getting on with it" using infrastructure examples. That is picking the class of problems least suited to the participatory model. Tackling drug abuse is a completely different class of problem where, top-down, determinitic approaches usually fail, and fail spectacularly.
The philosopher James C. Scott wrote a book about this called Seeing Like A State. He labelled the top down, solutionist mindset exhibited by government as "high modernism". It is great, in certain specific circumstances, but deeply flawed when faced with the complex policy challenges or "wicked" problems that we now expect our governments to routinely solve.
We need to have a better conversation about what appraoches government should use when faced with complexity rather than doubling down on "delivery". At the moment, the state is holding a hammer, and treating every policy problem like a nail. That is dumb, the results are predictably bad, and that is ultimately why people's trust is in freefall.
Yep and this is where citizens assemblies have proven themselves, wicked subjects like abortion in Ireland. The UK one on climate had some more sensible decisions made than politicians themselves often would agree to too.
An excellent post, as ever. And it's right that delivery will matter. One thing I'd add to boost trust in politics is that sometimes politicians have to simply have and win the argument, as well as be honest about trade-offs. To take housing and immigration, one reason we get so bogged down is that voters have an instinctive preference for their status quo - not to like their community changing much and keeping their lot intact thank you very much - that politicians tell them is cost free or beneficial. To take an example, there are some lovely market towns and villages that if I lived there I'd personally want left untouched and to live in a 1950s rural idyll. But within a generation or two they will wither as young people move away to find work that better matches living costs and the old die and sell up to wealthy newcomers who can afford the premium to live there or have a second home. Explain to people that it's either build the solar farm or new affordable homes or become a Potemkin village for Humphreys and Jemimas (apologies to any Humphreys or Jemimas - sure you're lovely), and they might be more inclined to support them. Or on immigration, that it's fine to want it down to next to nothing, we're not going to shout at you and call you racist but your tax bill is going up and your kids are going to pay even more to go to university. People may then understand why government acts as it does beyond believing it's because are useless and/or corrupt.
If you treat people like adults and level with them about the wider costs of not doing x or doing y, then even if they dislike what you're doing, they'll tend to understand, and you may just change the conversation to one that's healthier and can win those arguments.
My view of the Irish experience is that Citizens Assemblies have given politicians cover where they know public opinion has changed but powerful voices remain keen on the status quo e.g. divorce, but rubbish at informing the hard choices inherent in governing. The environmental enquiry came up with 150 recommendations with no indication how they would be paid for, or what would have to be sacrificed to deliver them.
Consensus and coalition building is important - compare the success of auto-enrolment into pensions with the failure to reform social care - but it's not something that takes a one-size-fits-all approach.
I was involved in organizing the French Citizens Assembly on Doctor Assisted End of Life. Something Macron promised during his 2022 election. Even by the end of 2023 it was clear he'd gone off the idea, so we were holding these discussions and writing up our reports in the knowledge nothing would happen
And then he called a legislative election...
If he'd just done something at the legislative level in 2022 then we wouldn't have wasted a lot of people's time
“I’m sure Demos would disagree with my characterisation of added layers of “participation” as analogous veto points they want to add to politics more broadly”
Sorry but I disagree with this, they don’t want to ‘add to politics’ all these calls for citizens assembly’s and the like come from the same place, a desire to ‘get the politics out of politics’ it’s why well intentioned fools like Rory Stewart like them so much
It doesn't happen that often but I don't agree with how you're framing trust here. I think there's a lot more going on that needs to be dealt with.
I started to argue that in a comment but it started to get far too long so now it's a blog post in response instead - https://bm.wel.by/nh
Is recent US economic performance potentially a counter-argument here? By most measures, the US has had great post pandemic economic recovery that has probably been spread around quite a bit across the income spectrum. But I don't think that's resulted in an uptick in political trust...
Government decisions are too beholden to what corporations and HNW donors think.
There already is consultation periods between the stage of 'we need to do something to increase X' and actually implementing but individuals generally don't have the headspace to respond. Citizens assemblies seem like they can be a great way of bringing the view of actual citizens to something without adding 'new' veto points so much as providing a more balanced consultation response. Particularly on thorny issues where there's no agreed 'right' answer like abortion, climate action, both of which previous citizens assemblies have been pretty good on
(Regarding footnote 3, pls could you reply with the ChatGPT query? I'm fascinated, time-poor, and keen to learn.)
Literally just said "This is data from the British Social Attitudes survey that has been split on a portrait page and stacked up. Reassemble it into a csv dataset" and attached two screenshots of the data! It was amazing. (Might try and make a little video and embed into a future newsletter.)
That is incredible. It's also the second "holy cow, we're living in THE FUTURE" moment I've had this week, the first being the discovery that you can now get exoskeletons for construction workers: https://www.festool.co.uk/campaigns/microsites/exoactive#Startpage
Amazing! And thank you. My conclusion from your query is that LLMs really should be treated like humans - don't underestimate, just ask, see what results you get, and they'll surely tell you if they can't/won't do it 😉
I'm very much not an expert, but isn't the problem that veto points on building infrastructure are already 'baked in' in that sense that Government legislation has required climate impacts/equality impscts/wildlife impacts etc to be 'considered' by the Civil Service which then invites legal challenge(s) about whether this has been 'considered' properly? The whole point of the consultation might be to demonstrate that these things have been considered...
Saying "crack on" is fine but if cracking on means deciding X is more important than Y then all the people that think Y is vital will fight you to the death and have ample routes to so. What then?
I think that's part of the game of politics. Instead of endlessly dithering and consulting different interest groups, politicians should do politics, and take calculated risks that their decisions will pay off in the longer run. (Like Starmer is barrelling ahead of planning - which is a risk, and it might fuck up and lose the next election, but better to deliver it now and get it moving.)
True, but I suspect barreling on with planning (details tbc) isn't going to say 'to hell with "considering" X, democratically elected politicians can do what they like", so as long as X has to be considered then deliberation with friends of X is necessary in some form