“This is not a passing phase,” warned Keir Starmer yesterday, as behind him Range Rover after Range Rover rolled off their West Midlands production line, no longer destined to be sold in the USA after President Trump imposed 25% tariffs on imported British cars. We are, the Prime Minister said, in “a changing and completely new world. An era where old assumptions, long taken for granted, simply no longer apply.”
And the Prime Minister is right. From the last few months alone we have stark images of how the world has changed in defence and security terms (Ukrainian President Zelenskyy being dressed down in the Oval Office) and now in trade and economic terms (Trump brandishing his board of tariffs in the Rose Garden; stock markets plummeting in response). These are the visual symptoms of much deeper shifts in the tectonic plates of the global political economy, combining with less visible but equally critical trends such as the radical transformations taking place in the fields of technology and energy.
We are indeed in a new world, faced with new challenges. If the Prime Minister and his government are to rise to those challenges, he will need the best possible operation available to him at the centre of the state.
As things stand, he does not have anything like that. The UK has lacked a purposeful, instructive centre of government for some time: some of the necessary structures, skills and culture have atrophied, and those that are still in place are the products of a previous age and not fit for the current moment. To put it bluntly, the powers that the Prime Minister should have at hand to drive through his overall programme – let alone to respond to crises on the scale of those we now face – are either ineffective or entirely absent.
Disrupt and create
This criticism of ‘the state of the state’ is one made by left and right alike. The challenge for progressive administrations is how to demonstrate that government really can be made to work better for people, without falling into the trap of appearing to defend a status quo that is so clearly failing.
Starmer and his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney have argued that the Labour government must be “disruptors”. That rightly articulates the need for radical reform of the state. But such reform needs to be constructive: rather than the “disrupt and destroy” narratives of Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage or Elon Musk, Starmer and his team need to “disrupt and create”.
That means dismantling those parts of the state that don’t work today, and building something better in their place, but it does not mean toning down the radicalism of the reform agenda. The new ways of working that the Prime Minister has said he wants to see – most notably the shift to ‘mission-driven government’ – are counter-cultural for Whitehall and they will not stick in a system which has not been sufficiently changed.
The system as it is seeks to operate government in separate silos, imagining that there is a “transport” policy and a skills policy and a housing policy and that all of these are separate and in competition. It remains stuck in old ways, with old means and old ends, sidelining national missions to the aggregation of marginal gains. Such a system is never going to meet the ambitions on which Labour campaigned and was elected last year, much less what is now required in light of the dramatic shifts taking place around the globe. To realise those ambitions, the Prime Minister is going to need more sophisticated, and expansive, strategic capabilities to hand.
Lead with purpose
Reforming the centre has to start at the very top: with a clearly-defined articulation of the government’s overall purpose, and the strategic capabilities to support its development and delivery.
Without those capabilities, then – in this age of permacrisis – the government risks being blown off course or drawn into endless short-term tactical judgement calls that become internally contradictory or add up to less than the sum of their parts. Purpose and strategy provide a north star towards which the government can navigate.
But they will not emerge organically or by accident. They require dedicated capacity at the centre to think long-term, set the purpose and then test all subsequent decisions – proactive and reactive – against how they contribute to delivery of the overall strategy. The Prime Minister’s team needs to be given the permission and space to think in 3-5 year time horizons, and to run all shorter term decisions against that medium term vision and strategy. This is what will allow the centre to operate in a mode other than political firefighting.
Yesterday the Prime Minister argued that while this is a moment for “urgency” it is also one that requires “cool heads”. Carving out strategic capacity is what will allow the Prime Minister and his team to keep those cool heads.
A coalition of the willing on home turf
FGF has long argued that the new mode of statecraft we need for the 21st century – mission-driven government – requires the government to lead with purpose, but then govern in partnership. The most complex or seemingly intractable challenges (and we have no shortage of those at present) are often also the most energising, creating a call to action through a vision for a better future that can only be achieved by multiple actors – within and beyond government – working together.
In the first few months of 2025 the UK government has more than proved that it is capable of operating in this mode on the international scene, building a ‘coalition of the willing’ among like-minded nations in support of Ukraine and in defence of multilateralism and liberal democratic values. The Prime Minister has rightly been lauded around the world for his leadership.
What is needed now is to apply the lessons of that approach to domestic challenges, such as those articulated in the government’s missions: reshaping the economy and returning it to sustainable growth, reforming our public services so they are fit for purpose, rebuilding trust in politics. That requires the government to be confident in areas where only the state can act, and humble about what it cannot do alone.
We need a coalition of the willing at home too. Such a coalition needs to be expansive, encompassing not just government and the public sector, but a more holistic partnership between state, businesses and civil society which grasps that pursuit of the common good can lead to the sustainable economic growth the government is so urgently pursuing.
Turning government inside out
If all of this sounds daunting to the point of impossibility, the Prime Minister and his team should take courage from the fact that they have risen to similar challenges before. Five years ago, few people believed it would be possible for newly-elected Labour leader Keir Starmer to return his party to power in a single parliament, let alone at the head of a government with a parliamentary majority of over 150 seats.
Yet that is precisely what they did, and in no small part by “turning the party inside out”: radically reforming an inward-looking and outdated institution that was at its lowest point in 85 years and relentlessly focusing it on the voters, their wants and needs.
That is the logic that now must be applied to the state: Starmer and his team need to turn government inside out. That means thinking creatively and radically about how to get the right powers into the right places, giving licence to the smartest and most motivated people within Whitehall and beyond it to innovate and experiment, taking on shibboleths about what is and isn’t possible and building a new system in place of the old one. And just as they ensured that the Labour Party never lost sight of the needs of voters, so this reformed centre of government must never lose sight of the people it exists to serve: disrupting those parts of the state which are failing in that aim, and creating something better in their place.
Meeting the challenges of the new era is an enormous task. It is not just possible but essential: it is the only way that the government, and in turn the UK as a country, can fulfil the Prime Minister’s ambition to “take our future into our own hands”.
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The Future Governance Forum is undertaking a wider project on how to reform the centre of government so that it is fit for purpose and can rise to the challenges of the current moment. We will publish our work later in the summer but before then please do reach out if you want to collaborate with us on this project:[email protected]
