The Future Governance Forum (FGF) has today urged the Prime Minister to push ahead with his plans to reform the state and pursue his mission-driven approach to government, arguing that ongoing political and economic crises make reform efforts more urgent, not less.
Speaking in Oxford this afternoon, FGF Executive Director Nathan Yeowell called on Keir Starmer to ‘turn government inside out’, taking the same approach he used to return the Labour Party to power in a single term and applying it to the state as a whole.
Yeowell’s speech, delivered at a Ruskin College seminar about ‘How can Labour achieve its opportunity mission’, drew on FGF’s considerable body of work on mission-driven government as a new form of statecraft. Urging the Prime Minister and his team to double down on the approach they have begun since taking office last year, Yeowell posed questions in four areas where FGF believes the government needs to focus:
- Leading with purpose: What more can be done to define and articulate the overarching vision for the country, redefining the five missions where necessary to reflect the dramatically changed world we are in?
- Thinking long-term: How can the centre of government carve out space to think in at least three- to five-year time horizons and ensure day-to-day decisions are connected to broader strategy rather than taken purely tactically?
- Building capabilities: How can the civil service and public sector more broadly be set up to think and behave more innovatively, to experiment with means in pursuit of ambitious ends?
- Communicating strategically: How can government align communications, policy and delivery functions with its overall strategic vision so that the five missions are seen as a collective national endeavour in which everyone has a stake?
FGF is a think tank dedicated to reforming the state to renew the nation. Since its public launch in 2023, FGF has developed a series of principles and practical recommendations for turning mission-driven government from ambition into action as part of its Mission Critical workstream. The first paper in the series, Mission Critical 01: Statecraft for the 21st century, was written in partnership with University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Before founding FGF, Nathan Yeowell was Director of the Labour-linked political organisation Progress, and its successor Progressive Britain, between 2019 and 2023.
Nathan Yeowell, FGF Executive Director, said, Keir Starmer’s essential prescription is right: we need a fundamentally new way of governing to rise to the challenges of the 2020s and beyond. The precariousness of the current moment makes that more urgent, not less. The very functions of the state have been worn down and degraded by the near constant crises of the last two decades. As a result, the powers the Prime Minister needs to deliver his political vision and the five national missions are either ineffective or entirely absent.
“The scale of the task is enormous, but Starmer has been here before. He needs to ‘turn government inside out’ – making it purpose-driven, long-term in outlook, innovative and collaborative in approach – just as he did with the Labour Party in opposition. The job is bigger, and the stakes are higher, but the principles are the same. Reforming the state is not a luxury to be set aside in the face of new geopolitical and economic crises; it is the way to respond to those crises and in doing so renew the nation. Now is the time to double down.”
