‘Keir Starmer Must Ditch the Politics of Deliverism and Put the People Back in Charge’

The issue with Keir Starmer’s Plan for Change speech is not the nature of the targets he’s set, but the very use of targets as a measure of governmental success. 

What we’ve been witnessing for decades is the breakdown of an old form of government by delivery. And perhaps with it the centrality of representative democracy.

It goes like this. The party promises a manifesto of policy deliverables in a carefully constructed way designed to secure sufficient support to win office and pull the levers of the state.  Government is seen as something that is largely done to people, who are then grateful for what is done for them and vote for that Government’s re-election.

However, as the world got increasingly more complex and chaotic in the post war era, governments first tried to outsource delivery to the market, and then in addition set more and more targets for the public sector.  The 1997 pledge card epitomised this approach, alongside New Labour’s fabled new public management, which deployed a mix of targets and league tables to up the performance of the state. 

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This form of politics reached its high point during the 2015 General Election with the infamous ‘Ed Stone’ Commitments. At the time one member of Ed Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet, when pressed on how to deliver the commitments exclaimed “just because we carved it in stone, doesn’t mean to say we’re going to do it”.

Devoid of newer thinking about 21st century forms of participatory and networked governance, Labour is relying on warmed-up and recycled versions of this old mechanical delivery politics, minus the money but with a dash of AI.  The very term ‘missions’ speaks to a centralised command and control model, that may be necessary to put a person on the moon, but isn’t fit for the chaotic and complex challenges, society, the economy, and the planet face now.

The very notion of targets suggests a linear and predictable world in which events can happen in isolation. However, in the real world the achievement of one target always has unexpected impacts in adjacent areas. For instance, setting a target to reduce waiting lists for surgeries can see waiting times for A&E rocket. Telling a manager that they will be rewarded for hitting target A, will result in outcomes B, C and D falling by the wayside. This is a big part of why the Soviet Union failed.  On paper its targets for tractor production were met, but the tractors never worked and there were never any spare parts to fix them. 

Social democratic politics is in a doom loop everywhere.  It is locked into an old industrial mindset that operates more like a factory, than Facebook.  A Kodak politics in an Instagram world. It is further hemmed in by the compromises it made with neo-liberalism in the 1990s. There is no Social Democratic Party on the front foot anywhere in the world. Keir Starmer is showing why. 

Trust in politics is it an all-time low, and the only card that Social Democrats seem able to play is the promise of even more targets on issues that are largely out of their control.

Marshall Ganz, the famed USA social organiser has said that, “leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty”. Beyond the era of Fordism, in which workers knew their place as robotic cogs in a wheel, today there is no Mission Control that can successfully order society.

The right are on to this.  Kemi Badenoch is developing a critique of the ‘bureaucratic state’ which could well chime with voters’ feelings in the absence of an alternative more participatory model of change. 

If the Government wants targets then maybe they should stick to just two – how equal is the country and what is the extent of people’s participation in making it more equal still?

Any plan for change which does not put the citizen at the heart of that plan is almost bound to fail.

In all of this you can begin to see what might be called a ‘systems consciousness’, the recognition amongst more and more activists, thinkers and organisations that what is required is not just the ‘rewiring of the state’ as suggested by the Prime Minister when announcing his appointment of a new Permanent secretary, but the structural and cultural transformation of how we govern in a world of engaged and enabled citizens.

It starts with proportional representation as the way to break the hold of the political elite. It is then followed by radical devolution and the systematic co-production of public services by workers and users. 

The future we want, and need will not be imposed, it won’t be a number or target, it won’t be secured through the language of relentless toughness, instead it will be negotiated. 

There will always be a place for the technocrat, but in all Labour’s talk of rolling up their sleeves and hitting the ground running, they’re taking on an impossible task of trying to fix everything for us.

The future of the nation shouldn’t be based on our politicians, but on its people and what they can and will achieve with the backing of a Government that believes in them and puts their genius first.

We’re not cogs in wheels to be incentivised, rewarded or punished as some remote bureaucrat sees fit. We are complex, creative and infinitely resourceful citizens doing our best in an equally complex and unpredictable world. The only way trust will be rebuilt in politics is when politicians first decide that they are willing to put their trust in us.