Good morning everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today, and a massive thank you to Lara for chairing this event, The Future Governance Forum’s inaugural Addison Lecture: ‘Nation-building from the rubble: politics, purpose, and the transformation of the British state.’ It’s great to have her back in London after her successful tour of duty for The Sunday Times in Washington DC – and I’m sure you will all join me in congratulating her on her recent promotion as the paper’s Deputy Political Editor. Any briefers in the room, you can form an orderly queue once we’ve finished the Q&A!
I would also like to thank my friend Oliver Ryan, the Labour MP for Burnley, and his staff for sponsoring this event, and to the House of Commons catering and events team for their patience as we batted our requirements back and forth like a game of parliamentary ping pong.
For those of you unfamiliar with The Future Governance Forum, we were founded in 2022, and launched the following year, as a progressive, non-partisan think tank concentrating on the HOW as much as the WHAT of policy design, development and implementation. Over the last three years, I like to think that we have built a reputation based on a combination of smart politics, original thinking and a commitment to practical delivery. Where others have played a vital role flying kites or mapping out political strategies, up until this point we have focused on the mechanics of getting things done. In this context, our mission is to help build a state that works for everyone. Delivering tangible results that people can actually feel and appreciate should be one of the most basic promises a government can make to its citizens, or that a council or Mayor can make to their residents.
To this end, we have taken a range of important concepts, questions or problems and sought to explain, answer and untangle them in practical and hopefully straightforward terms. Some of the more notable projects have included: the reform and reorganisation of Downing Street; setting Great British Railways up for success; frameworks for greater economic devolution and for model strategic authorities; the principles and practices of mission-driven government (which really should still be one of the the main shows in town, I hasten to add!); new models of public private partnerships; changes to the fiscal rules; reform of UK pension systems; and reform of UK asylum procedures.
Today’s event marks something of a departure from our normal line work, providing a public forum to air and discuss some more abstract political and policy-related matters that we’ve tended to shy away from thus far. In future years, I want to develop this series as an opportunity for politicians, policymakers and practitioners to test and debate the thinking that underpins their various schemes, strategies and solutions, and the wider intellectual context they’re operating in.
We have named this lecture series after Dr. Christopher Addison, later Viscount Addison of Stallingborough, one of the more compelling, if now sadly obscure, progressive politicians operating across the first half of the Twentieth Century. After a distinguished career as an anatomist and member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he entered politics at the age of 40 as the Liberal MP for Hoxton in the General Election of January 1910 and served variously in New Liberal, Coalition and Labour governments led by Asquith, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee.
As Minister of Munitions and then the first Minister of Reconstruction, he spent most of the First World War thinking about, and executing on a truly unprecedented scale, the mobilisation of the burgeoning British state, for the twin purposes of total war and peacetime planning. Appointed as the first ever Minister of Health in January 1919, he became the leading advocate for social reform and innovation in Lloyd George’s post-war government, extending the scope of National Health Insurance, and driving forward the Coalition’s ambitious housing programme, known to posterity as ‘homes fit for heroes.’ The austerity-driven abandonment of this latter commitment led to Addison’s resignation in 1922 and his eventual shift away from Liberal to Labour politics. In 1945, he became Attlee’s Leader of the House of Lords, where he was responsible for securing their lordships’ consent for Labour’s even more ambitious programme of post-war reconstruction and domestic reform – the like of which had ultimately eluded him, and the country, a quarter of a century before.
I don’t have time today to give Addison’s work sufficient justice, although as an aside, I am tempted to return to this topic in the future, in particular to the relative successes of reconstruction efforts after 1918 and 1945 – and the comparative failure of modern governments to deliver on similar rhetoric employed during the Covid-19 pandemic: the most recent, perhaps the most appropriate, and certainly the most critical social crisis to hit the country since Addison’s death in 1951. For the context of this lecture series, there are three reasons that make him a fitting honorand for FGF, all of which, I think, resonate with our mission, our work, and the times we’re living through. The first is his particular progressive perch, embodying, as he does, the churning, kaleidoscopic nature of liberal, labourist and social democratic politics in the early Twentieth Century. The second is his career-long dedication to testing the genius of the state in pursuit of ever more sophisticated economic, political and social goals, in particular in response to fast-moving demographic, financial and technological pressures. And the third is the suite of domestic policies that animated him, including housing, land reform, national defence, productivity and welfare – all of which sit as easily on a list of priorities in 2026 as they did in 1946 or 1916.
Moving to the substance of this lecture, and where it fits within the broader sweep of FGF’s work. Just over two months ago, we published our new three-year strategy – Transforming the state to renew the nation – setting out our priorities, approaches and preferred programmes of work for the rest of this parliament, thinking about how we repair, reinvigorate or create the institutions, services and markets that help shape and support the rhythms of national life.
This morning, I want to take a step sideways, and then a stride upstream, to talk you through the purpose behind our preoccupation with the transformation of the state, something that I think has rapidly become one of the most pressing causes in contemporary British politics, namely the goal of renewing the British nation. After a sustained period of political instability and continuing socioeconomic stagnation, it is time for progressive politicians to come together with policymakers and practitioners to create a new, shared vision for the country – essentially, to build and then sustain a positive and optimistic idea of the nation as a political and socioeconomic unit, fit to meet the rigours of the mid 21st Century.
To make my case, I am going to break this lecture down into three parts. In the first part, I will sketch out shifting concepts and definitions of the nation, before giving my reflections on what the current state of British politics tells us about the increasingly threadbare rendition of the nation we’re clinging to. In the second part, I will set out a series of principles and provocations for a positive and optimistic vision of the nation that I think we need to grapple with and promote. In what has become a truncated third and final part, I will set out some themes that have emerged from FGF’s work over the past three years, linking them together to form the beginning of some practical principles to aid the transformation of the state as we fix our eyes on 2029 and beyond.
Before I start, I want to set out what this lecture is and what it is not. It began life as the germ of an idea for a blog in response to an op-ed by Maurice Glasman, published in The Times last Christmas, extolling the historic virtues, and what he saw as the contemporary travails, of the Church of England and the inherent righteousness of a religious, as opposed to a secular, polity. My original aim to sally forth, taking gentle aim at his seeming hymn to theocracy, was quickly sidelined as my thoughts turned more generally towards the future of the state, the state of the nation, and the need for a new form of more muscular progressivism to meet the geopolitical challenges facing us. As the composition process dragged on, and I pushed back the delivery of this lecture notionally from March to April and now to June, I have, inevitably, been overtaken by events. Although not conceived as a commentary on Sir Keir Starmer and his government, nor, indeed, as a commentary on the recent commentaries of Sir Tony Blair and others, I’m struck by the need for all progressive actors – be they liberal, labourist, social democratic, democratic capitalist – to raise the their sights, and raise their game, for the challenges to come.
And with that:
PART ONE: definitions and diagnosis
I am going to start by defining what I mean when I speak of ‘the nation’, hopefully in clear language, as the danger of scampering down philosophical and terminological rabbit holes is quite high. ‘The nation’ is distinct from ‘the country’, which refers to a specific geographic territory with defined borders and its own political system. This, in turn, is distinct from ‘the state’, which is the legally recognised and sovereign manifestation of that political system. ‘The nation’ is the large community of people that lives within our clearly defined, specific territory or country, united by a shared culture or language, common values and shared citizenship, with a common past and a common project for the future. A general awareness and, crucially, acceptance of these attributes and qualities help bind the community together, supporting the creation of shared consciousness, a prerequisite, however intangible, of nationhood. More tangibly, the general integrity and wellbeing of the nation is the evolving expression of the political and economic choices made by politicians, through the auspices of the state, for the benefit of the country.
It is important to recognise that the nation is not an immutable concept. It is eminently changeable, if slow to turn. It is shaped by ideological and other intellectual and social forces, as translated by prevailing political economies and projects that have real and lasting consequences for the pattern of national life, long after the departure of ‘here-today, gone-tomorrow’ politicians.
In 2018, the historian David Edgerton published The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, acclaimed by The Guardian as a ‘fierce and dazzling account’ of Twentieth Century British history that prompted many of its readers – me included – to reassess our collective sense of ourselves as a nation. His central thesis is that the Imperial Nation that reached its apotheosis during the Edwardian era – a very distinctive entity that was liberal and capitalist, with a genuinely global outlook and economic reach – began to change in the early 1930s with the move away from free trade towards economic protection. It was undermined with the advent of war in 1940 and utterly transformed by the new post-war global settlement and the election of a socialist government in 1945.
To quote Edgerton, this new British nation:
Emerged out of the British Empire, and out of the cosmopolitan economy, after the Second World War. Leaving behind empire entailed the rejection of imperial citizenship and imperialism and the development of a peculiar kind of nationalism. Leaving behind economic liberalism meant creating not just an economic border but increasingly a culture of national self-supply. None of this was a product by choice by the British elites, who favoured free-trading and/or imperialism projects, but they were thwarted by many brute realities… The national moment was the time of what might be called the developmental state… (and not the nineteenth century) when the United Kingdom was at its most industrial. It was also the moment when it was refashioned by the state to look much more like its continental neighbours, with conscription and development of national agriculture, and protected industry.
Rising out of the wreckage of the Second World War, this was the British nation of the emerging post-war consensus, where politicians like Attlee and Addison strove to ensure that the failures of post-1918 politics were not repeated after 1945. Theirs was a vision built upon a commitment to the Western Alliance, the formation of the modern welfare state, and the creation of new, consensual, national frameworks. All of this was underpinned by a Keynesian political economy that helped remake the postwar British nation through the principles of collectivism and universalism.
This conception of the nation began to buckle under a mixture of social and economic pressures in the 1970s and was systematically deconstructed and then reconstructed across the course of the 1980s. The collectivist national frameworks that had defined Britain in the postwar era were upended, replacing, in the words of historian Jon Wilson, ‘a society of institutions and interests with a single homogenous people which shared her moral and economic convictions, enforced by the state.’ Markets were increasingly liberalised, national industries and manufacturing competencies were broken up and privatised, and greater financialisation was promoted in the design and delivery of public services.
The election of New Labour did not lead to any structural counter-reset. The governments of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown operated within the prevailing economic, social and, indeed, contemporary historiographical systems they inherited, as did other social democratic and progressive governments around the world, although with a series of important measures and interventions that tempered and took the sharper edges off Thatcher’s reforms and ameliorated the social disruption they left in their wake.
My contention is that this phase of the country’s story and the concept of the nation collapsed and came to an end with the Global Financial Crash in 2008 – but that repeated attempts to reassert those dominant political and economic systems have led to increasingly perverse, if not pathological consequences for people and places across the country. Slowing growth and productivity meant repeated government’s attempted to preserve or re-form an economic settlement whose fundamentals no longer existed. The result was a series of profound dislocations that have fundamentally shifted the political, social, and ideological landscape of this country. Austerity gutted public services in more or less direct ways, and the consequent public dissatisfaction found increasingly disruptive and self-sabotaging expressions. Jeremy Corbyn, a Brexit vote whose champions are still unable to accept as pyrrhic, the abandonment of pandemic promises and Levelling Up, the steady rise of separatist politics in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and on the right an increasingly intense push to replace political and cultural pluralism with an authoritarian, divisive religious (and too often racial) nationalism.
In this context, the challenge for progressives is to recognise that these disruptions reflect real and very often legitimate grievances that cannot be willed away. If they are not channelled into a narrative that’s equally compelling, and tangible actions, these grievances will continue to snowball. To quote Professor Diane Coyle, co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, who wrote recently in the Financial Times:
The inequalities characterising modern Britain… are unsustainable. The strains are showing in a previously stable political system, in the tensions among the four nations that make up the UK or indeed within England, and above all in the generational divides in attitudes and expectations. The global economy may be set for another crisis that enables or triggers political ruptures, as in the 1970s or in 2008. The unsustainable will not be sustained.
That means going beyond diagnoses of the failing today, and articulating a vision of a fixed tomorrow. For progressives, the defining challenge ahead of the next general election is how to do this; how to rebuild Britain from the rubble.
PART TWO: principles for a new progressive nation
In the face of this, progressive politicians need to develop a more compelling vision of the nation they want to create. For too long, they have forgotten, on lost faith in, their ability to set the political weather, rather than simply respond to it. Instead of just relying on polling and focus groups to scoop up voters in strategically significant seats, they must lead with a confident, long-term vision of the country’s future political economy and make a values-driven case for it. I think there are five touchstones that can help build the foundations of a new progressive conception of the nation.
The first of these touchstones, and perhaps the most critical, is the recasting of the progressive cause, once and for all, as the primary patriotic political cause in the UK today. Despite their noisy claims to this mantle, the populist right risks being seriously compromised, seemingly enmeshed in, and sustained by, a growing global network of nativist, Orbanist and MAGA-inspired political, intellectual and online movements that make a mockery of their claims to put Britain first. In April, Last year’s conviction of former Farage ally and UKIP and Brexit Party leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, on pro-Russian bribery charges, serves to highlight the ever present threat of Russian interference on behalf of right-wing and other social authoritarian causes. Reform UK’s acceptance of cryptocurrency and other donations from non-dom millionaires raise serious questions about who is ultimately calling the shots in Farage’s current political vehicle, and to what end.
On the other end of the political spectrum, the leadership and much of the membership of the Green Party has taken a Corbynite turn, making Gaza and Palestinian liberation central to their political identity, to the detriment of both domestic political concerns and long-held ecological policy positions.
The second touchstone must be commitment to the security of the nation, in its many forms, but crucially: national security, social security and the emerging priority of epistemic security.
The second touchstone must be the primacy of national, social and increasingly epistemic security:
- War in Ukraine and the actions of hostile nations such as Russia and Iran must be paramount in our minds – the current government is right to push for higher defence spending – we need to think critically about who we integrate this into economic revival. As MP Liam Byrne wrote over the weekend: Defence spending can strengthen domestic industry. It can support advanced manufacturing. It can create skilled jobs. It can deepen alliances. It can deter adversaries. It can help rebuild national confidence.’
- The current social contract – particularly around welfare, health and pensions is unsustainable we must work together to map out a new contract that speaks to the context of the mid-21st Century and not the mid-20th Century.
- Epistemic security – rational public discourse must be central to progressive politics. The UK is transiting from British-managed media with public service values to algorithmic media run to America and Chinese corporate and political values. The corporate values of these algorithmic media have little regard nor motivation for rational discourse – sensational and untrue media deliver higher returns. Foreign political actors can and do twist the algorithms to their own agenda, impossible under the old media. The net effect is the death of rational public discourse and perhaps the death of progressive politics. We need to be ready to take muscular action in protecting and expanding our epistemic security in this context.
The third touchstone is a commitment to a revived, and sustainable political economy. The task here is huge, and whilst a better way is possible, there is no simple rhetorical cure. However, we have a huge amount to be optimistic about, including our continuing strengths in further and higher education, world-class research, tech and innovation, highly skilled professional services, and unrivalled reputation for the rule of law. The challenge is to build a new political economy that turns these inputs into real and widespread beneficial outcomes for society.
The way to do this is by shifting the UK from an extraction-based economy to a more productive one. The state must become more proactive in shaping and directing markets, rather than simply responding to their failures. It must be strong enough to deliver major projects effectively to increase the supply of things people need. And it must actively direct capital from pensions and institutional investors towards productive investment such as infrastructure, skills, housing, and energy systems. This capital should also be channelled into supporting successful startups so they can scale domestically and remain part of the UK’s long-term economic success, rather than being acquired overseas for short-term financial gains. And finally incentives, planning, and regulation should be designed to encourage productive work and investment rather than the management of scarcity. It is only through this controlled capitalism that society can benefit from the power of the market.
The fourth touchstone is is a commitment to rebuilding the bonds of our national community, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, balancing the collective needs of our local communities, and by association wider British society, with our personal goals and aspirations. I’ve always been taken with this quote from the New York Times journalist David Brooks back in 2018:
It could be that the neighbourhood [or the place], not the individual, is the essential unit of social change. If you’re trying to improve lives, maybe you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighbourhood, in a systematic way, at a steady pace… One of the signature facts of the internet age is that distance is not dead. Place matters as much as ever, and much more than we ever knew.
Whilst we might attempt to ruthlessly engineer the nation from the top down, the reality is that we must give more attention building it from the bottom up. Giving people the power and tools to build their own communities would reground the concept of the nation in everyday places and the neighbourhoods we construct and commit to together.
The final touchstone must be an attempt to galvanise the public in the great mission of national renewal – to re-enchant the political process. To do this, progressives must encourage and nurture a revivalist spirit in British politics, restore public faith in the ability of the public process to deliver outcomes that can genuinely benefit them and their communities, and rebuild trust in elected representatives and the potential of the country they seek to govern. I’ve always been struck by the following quote from US President Lyndon B Johnson, taken from a graduation speech he gave at the University of Michigan in May 1964, referring to his ambitious social programmes and his aspirations for America in the 1960s: ‘The Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us towards a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.’
Much like Johson’s undimmable belief in the promise of the United States, it’s time to start believing in ourselves and the possibilities of a progressive political nation, fit for the challenges of the 21st Century.
PART THREE: early principles for the transforming the state
In the time I have left, I am going to sketch out a further six principles that have emerged over the course of FGF’s work that I think should underpin serious thinking – and action – about how we transform the state in pursuit of our goal of renewing the nation.
The first is the concept of government as orchestrator and storyteller. This is based on the need for the central state to act as strategic coordinator, actively orchestrating national activity whilst at the same time crafting and promoting a compelling public narrative that gives the country forward momentum, sustains wider legitimacy and encourages public participation. This stands opposed to the continuing model of central government as direct controller or active deliverer of strategies and services. Our research has shown time and time again that contemporary policy challenges are too complex for central government to solve alone. The centre of government needs to coordinate much better across Whitehall departments, whilst simultaneously aiming to galvanise and mobilise across sectors and society in pursuit of national goals.
The second is the suggestion that government should seek to purposefully and pragmatically disrupt policy and the workings of the state when necessary. Ministers and senior civil servants must break with incrementalism and entrenched ways of working, whilst avoiding the temptation to disrupt existing policy and ways of working as an end in itself. The scorched-earth, ‘disrupt and destroy’ approach piloted in the US by Elon Musk at the so-called Department for Government Efficiency, should be avoided at all costs. Instead, we would suggest that government adopts the precepts of ‘disrupt and deliver’: rolling out models of reform that are bold, experimental, iterative and accepting of risk, characterised by testing policies in real-world conditions, continuous learning and a willingness to act under uncertainty.
The third is the belief that successful institutional design must be downstream of institutional function, i.e., we must better align the machinery and mechanics of the state with the policy outcomes they are trying to achieve. We have found that when institutions are misaligned with purpose, or have had too many extra responsibilities added onto their mandate, they actively undermine delivery, slow down decision-making and contribute towards the erosion of trust. Many legacy arrangements – at the centre, in departments, hidden away in arms length bodies – were set up for past, not current, challenges, let alone future ones.
The fourth is the truism that crystal clarity is necessary for effective government. By this, I mean not just clarity of communication – although this, obviously is vitally important – but also clarity about the ways in which responsibility, accountability and intent are understood across government systems. On the other hand, ambiguity (of which there is far, far too much) encourages drift, inefficiency, weak accountability and, ultimately, failure to deliver. Across too many manifestations of the state, at all levels and in all geographies, responsibilities are often unclear and overlapping, with multiple actors being involved in discussions without owning any outcomes.
The fifth is the continuing imperative to reform cultures and behaviours at the centre of government. The work we did last year on Transforming Downing Street really brought home to me that HOW different layers and arms of government behave internally – behind their big, black doors – can be as important as structures and policy goals. Even well-designed institutions and picth-perfect strategies will fail if the underlying culture discourages collaboration, experimentation and respect for delivery. At present, the culture at the centre is too often too closed. In practical terms, this means there’s an over-reliance on familiar voices, and weak engagement with external expertise – although it would be remiss of me if I didn’t acknowledge the frustration of senior political and official leaders at this state of affairs.
Across the span of FGF’s work, we have found that culture also underpins other themes: coordination fails without collaborative norms; innovation fails without openness to risk and learning; institutional reform fails if behaviours are too cemented; clarity fails if accountability is culturally avoided.
The sixth is that well-trodden theme of long-termism: increasingly reactive decision making – fed by short-term imperatives and enabled by out-of-sync institutions and behaviours – has harmed service delivery; nor can the UK’s most pressing challenges be solved within short political / fiscal cycles. This requires shifting how the state is organised, how resources are allocated, and how success is evaluated. Without this, political pressures and funding cycles will continue to reinforce piecemeal responses to hard problems, creating a system in which creative solutions and innovation are discouraged, and non-governmental actors face uncertainty.
The challenge I would set to everyone in this room, politicians, policymakers or practitioners alike, is to think seriously about the nation we want to live in, and the values and institutions that are needed to sustain that vision. It is the great collective effort for our generation – and I look forward to seeing what we can create and sustain together.
