Great piece esp on political activism from the great reform act to the Aberdonian dejection in '55 (Haddo an underrated character). I can not begin to imagine how, politically, Reform will sell significant debt reduction (which matters above all else; but then I'm in the neolib faction of supporters) to that part of its support base that currently, mostly for non-fraudulent reasons, relies on benefits. But political geniuses have cropped up before in our history. Before coming a cropper, of course.
There are two main reasons to bring business people in: they haven't become institutionalised in the (often bad) government ways of doing things (and have experience of operating in a better way) and they are a source of high IQ/drive/human capital people. The second is more important than in the past, where it feels like the gap has grown between senior civil service/politics and business in terms of quality. It is also particularly relevant for Reform who don't have a deep bench of high quality people, will get little enthusiasm from the senior civil service and are trying to fix (rather than just tinker with) the British state. So even if you thought business experience was almost irrelevant to government, business people could play a fairly important role just as a source of smart people for Reform.
But would see business experience as useful - in particular would disagree that the profit motive as a day-to-day goal is what really distinguishes businesses vs government. It's a lagging indicator and there's typically a bunch of things you can do to juice short term profit to the long term detriment of the business. More typically you're focusing on a bunch of other metrics (customer satisfaction, product usage rates etc) which in the longer term will lead to profit. Often times these are very hard to measure (e.g. the design of Apple's products), in a similar way to the goals of many government departments.
From talking to friends in the civil service, seems more like the big differences are ruthlessness (and risk taking) in pursuing goals (vs gov approach of aiming for everything at once e.g. military procurement being about getting good weapons, EDI, investment in poorer areas, international relations, skills development, climate, employment etc) and competition creating pressure on businesses to stop doing dumb stuff (whilst the gov can keep doing really dumb stuff forever). Often businesses protected from competition/highly regulated can have a lot of the issues of government (e.g. a retail bank or insurer).
The ruthlessness is to a certain extent a fundamental difference and a problem as outlined in the article - governments only have so much political capital. But this is pathologised by a civil service that hates making judgements, prioritising or accepting risks and you could bring in people with a much higher tolerance for this. The legislative laws and regulations that help drive it could also be fixed.
The government doing dumb stuff is more of an operational issue that much more progress can be made on. E.g. whilst when outsourcing the gov can chose to exclude providers who have performed poorly in the past on government contracts this is very rarely done, so providers can only really be managed to contract rather than through the relationship - which is almost impossible to do well for anything that isn't very simple. There's loads of examples of this but it requires a lot of hard work to fix.
There are also some quite big differences in business people that might enter government - in the UK the main groups would be people from the city, people who have built businesses and leaders/senior figures in large businesses. Generally the ones from the city are smart and strong analytically (and good at sales in IB), but don't actually have much operational experience. Can imagine some will particularly struggle with political communication - have spent their whole career surrounded by smart analytical people. Those who have built businesses will generally be much stronger operationally but more likely to chafe at some of the restrictions and internal politics.
Running a large business is probably the most similar to working in government - you can't just do whatever you want, lots of internal and external stakeholders you have to appease, quite a lot of communication involved in getting the whole business aligned etc. However they are less likely to be interested - they are generally a bit risk averse and a being a former Reform gov figure would likely be a hinderance for future roles. The natural approach would be to use leaders of large businesses for bits of the gov/departments that are in the least bad shape and will just get some moderate reforms done and operational improvements whilst startup founders and business owners would be better suited to building new organisations to ultimately replace old ones or attempting to radically reform existing organisations.
Ideally you'd give them some time for preparation to help fill in the gaps - Farage should already have been appointing them by now. The main areas business people are missing is a detailed understanding of a certain area of government, tricks and tools for getting the bureaucracy to do what you want and political judgement/communication. The first (and to a lesser extent second) can be learnt with drive and time but the third is particularly difficult - needs lots of practice within the political arena and some people just don't have the knack for it. Ideally the the no.1 priority for Reform would be actively recruiting business people now, then they could give them an area / role and let them practice, build experience and filter for the ones who would be highly effective in government.
Excellent piece. The issue is not how to make a dysfunctional machine run faster, the issue is how to remove the dysfunction. That comes down to the interests which benefit from the current model. The line on "cuts that won't hurt anyone" is also key - find a way to make sensible cuts, which will disappoint people, but which need to be made. The key here is to force the blame onto a 3rd party. e.g. for PIP claimants, allow them to withdraw, if they don't their family become guarantors, and the penalty for a false claim is 3x all historic payments. I suspect a lot of families would lean on their fraudulent member to retract - and the government hands are clean. This type of problem solving is not the core skill of people from commerce.
Well written and interesting piece but it is based on what I think is common misconception that the UK state is functioning badly and need to be fixed. Instead it is working very well in pursuit of its political mission which was to make money for the constituencies of Thatcher and Blair.
Since Thatcher and Blair the "Middle England" voters and the upper-class "sponsors" of Conservatives, New Labour, LibDems have enjoyed booming asset prices and fat business incomes while benefiting from labor cost "moderation" which have redistributed upwards from the "lazy, uppity, overpaid" lower classes several trillions of pounds over 40 years.
State policy and implementation has been consistently very effective in facilitating and pushing that redistribution. The political outcome has been huge pluralities of voters have kept voting for more thatcherism/blairism for 40 year, being well satisfied with the efficacy of state policies and implementation. Only when property prices have faltered governing party defeated in general elections.
Up to 2021 inclusive the Conservatives were still winning cor mmons by-elections despite being in office as a reflection of the satisfaction of "England with the huge capital gains post-COVID.
In 2022 property prices went flat and "Middle England" voters were deprived of a large part of their income and so they switched to "protest" parties, primarily Reform UK. Reform UK has two problems that have nothing to do with reforming the state, as its voters care about making money with property a lot more than they care about the state:
* Most Reform UK voters just want their usual £30-50k of no-tax, no-work yearly property gains redistributed from the lower classes. They intend to vote Reform UK because Reform UK has not yet been tainted by a government record so it has never crashed prices like the Conservatives in the 1990s or New Labour in the 2000s, or failed to increase them as the Conservatives in 2022-2024 and New Labour in 2025-2026.
* Some Reform UK voters are among those from which trillions have been redistributed upwards since Thatcher and Blair and since they know that all main parties are thatcherite/blairite they just want to vote against "the system". They did this with Brexit (they did not care much about EU membership either way) and they are doing it now now by voting Green and Reform UK.
The two problems fuse into one: Reform UK cannot be for long a coalition between those who win from higher property incomes and lower labor costs and those who lose from higher property costs and lower labor incomes. New Labour tried and it did not last.
«Reform UK cannot be for long a coalition between those who win from higher property incomes and lower labor costs and those who lose from higher property costs and lower labor incomes.»
In particular about the famous issue of immigration: Reform UK's natural constituency of ex-Conservative voters have been making a lot of money from immigration, even if they do grumble about it, but the ex-Labour voters have lost a lot of money from its social effects, so it is not a mere grumble.
The easiest way for Reform UK to consolidate their support among ex-Conservative voters would be to increase immigration a lot to boost property prices and "moderate" the labor costs of deliveries, cleaning, gardening, nursing, etc. but that would lose them their ex-Labour voters.
Great piece esp on political activism from the great reform act to the Aberdonian dejection in '55 (Haddo an underrated character). I can not begin to imagine how, politically, Reform will sell significant debt reduction (which matters above all else; but then I'm in the neolib faction of supporters) to that part of its support base that currently, mostly for non-fraudulent reasons, relies on benefits. But political geniuses have cropped up before in our history. Before coming a cropper, of course.
There are two main reasons to bring business people in: they haven't become institutionalised in the (often bad) government ways of doing things (and have experience of operating in a better way) and they are a source of high IQ/drive/human capital people. The second is more important than in the past, where it feels like the gap has grown between senior civil service/politics and business in terms of quality. It is also particularly relevant for Reform who don't have a deep bench of high quality people, will get little enthusiasm from the senior civil service and are trying to fix (rather than just tinker with) the British state. So even if you thought business experience was almost irrelevant to government, business people could play a fairly important role just as a source of smart people for Reform.
But would see business experience as useful - in particular would disagree that the profit motive as a day-to-day goal is what really distinguishes businesses vs government. It's a lagging indicator and there's typically a bunch of things you can do to juice short term profit to the long term detriment of the business. More typically you're focusing on a bunch of other metrics (customer satisfaction, product usage rates etc) which in the longer term will lead to profit. Often times these are very hard to measure (e.g. the design of Apple's products), in a similar way to the goals of many government departments.
From talking to friends in the civil service, seems more like the big differences are ruthlessness (and risk taking) in pursuing goals (vs gov approach of aiming for everything at once e.g. military procurement being about getting good weapons, EDI, investment in poorer areas, international relations, skills development, climate, employment etc) and competition creating pressure on businesses to stop doing dumb stuff (whilst the gov can keep doing really dumb stuff forever). Often businesses protected from competition/highly regulated can have a lot of the issues of government (e.g. a retail bank or insurer).
The ruthlessness is to a certain extent a fundamental difference and a problem as outlined in the article - governments only have so much political capital. But this is pathologised by a civil service that hates making judgements, prioritising or accepting risks and you could bring in people with a much higher tolerance for this. The legislative laws and regulations that help drive it could also be fixed.
The government doing dumb stuff is more of an operational issue that much more progress can be made on. E.g. whilst when outsourcing the gov can chose to exclude providers who have performed poorly in the past on government contracts this is very rarely done, so providers can only really be managed to contract rather than through the relationship - which is almost impossible to do well for anything that isn't very simple. There's loads of examples of this but it requires a lot of hard work to fix.
There are also some quite big differences in business people that might enter government - in the UK the main groups would be people from the city, people who have built businesses and leaders/senior figures in large businesses. Generally the ones from the city are smart and strong analytically (and good at sales in IB), but don't actually have much operational experience. Can imagine some will particularly struggle with political communication - have spent their whole career surrounded by smart analytical people. Those who have built businesses will generally be much stronger operationally but more likely to chafe at some of the restrictions and internal politics.
Running a large business is probably the most similar to working in government - you can't just do whatever you want, lots of internal and external stakeholders you have to appease, quite a lot of communication involved in getting the whole business aligned etc. However they are less likely to be interested - they are generally a bit risk averse and a being a former Reform gov figure would likely be a hinderance for future roles. The natural approach would be to use leaders of large businesses for bits of the gov/departments that are in the least bad shape and will just get some moderate reforms done and operational improvements whilst startup founders and business owners would be better suited to building new organisations to ultimately replace old ones or attempting to radically reform existing organisations.
Ideally you'd give them some time for preparation to help fill in the gaps - Farage should already have been appointing them by now. The main areas business people are missing is a detailed understanding of a certain area of government, tricks and tools for getting the bureaucracy to do what you want and political judgement/communication. The first (and to a lesser extent second) can be learnt with drive and time but the third is particularly difficult - needs lots of practice within the political arena and some people just don't have the knack for it. Ideally the the no.1 priority for Reform would be actively recruiting business people now, then they could give them an area / role and let them practice, build experience and filter for the ones who would be highly effective in government.
Excellent piece. The issue is not how to make a dysfunctional machine run faster, the issue is how to remove the dysfunction. That comes down to the interests which benefit from the current model. The line on "cuts that won't hurt anyone" is also key - find a way to make sensible cuts, which will disappoint people, but which need to be made. The key here is to force the blame onto a 3rd party. e.g. for PIP claimants, allow them to withdraw, if they don't their family become guarantors, and the penalty for a false claim is 3x all historic payments. I suspect a lot of families would lean on their fraudulent member to retract - and the government hands are clean. This type of problem solving is not the core skill of people from commerce.
Well written and interesting piece but it is based on what I think is common misconception that the UK state is functioning badly and need to be fixed. Instead it is working very well in pursuit of its political mission which was to make money for the constituencies of Thatcher and Blair.
Since Thatcher and Blair the "Middle England" voters and the upper-class "sponsors" of Conservatives, New Labour, LibDems have enjoyed booming asset prices and fat business incomes while benefiting from labor cost "moderation" which have redistributed upwards from the "lazy, uppity, overpaid" lower classes several trillions of pounds over 40 years.
State policy and implementation has been consistently very effective in facilitating and pushing that redistribution. The political outcome has been huge pluralities of voters have kept voting for more thatcherism/blairism for 40 year, being well satisfied with the efficacy of state policies and implementation. Only when property prices have faltered governing party defeated in general elections.
Up to 2021 inclusive the Conservatives were still winning cor mmons by-elections despite being in office as a reflection of the satisfaction of "England with the huge capital gains post-COVID.
In 2022 property prices went flat and "Middle England" voters were deprived of a large part of their income and so they switched to "protest" parties, primarily Reform UK. Reform UK has two problems that have nothing to do with reforming the state, as its voters care about making money with property a lot more than they care about the state:
* Most Reform UK voters just want their usual £30-50k of no-tax, no-work yearly property gains redistributed from the lower classes. They intend to vote Reform UK because Reform UK has not yet been tainted by a government record so it has never crashed prices like the Conservatives in the 1990s or New Labour in the 2000s, or failed to increase them as the Conservatives in 2022-2024 and New Labour in 2025-2026.
* Some Reform UK voters are among those from which trillions have been redistributed upwards since Thatcher and Blair and since they know that all main parties are thatcherite/blairite they just want to vote against "the system". They did this with Brexit (they did not care much about EU membership either way) and they are doing it now now by voting Green and Reform UK.
The two problems fuse into one: Reform UK cannot be for long a coalition between those who win from higher property incomes and lower labor costs and those who lose from higher property costs and lower labor incomes. New Labour tried and it did not last.
«Reform UK cannot be for long a coalition between those who win from higher property incomes and lower labor costs and those who lose from higher property costs and lower labor incomes.»
In particular about the famous issue of immigration: Reform UK's natural constituency of ex-Conservative voters have been making a lot of money from immigration, even if they do grumble about it, but the ex-Labour voters have lost a lot of money from its social effects, so it is not a mere grumble.
The easiest way for Reform UK to consolidate their support among ex-Conservative voters would be to increase immigration a lot to boost property prices and "moderate" the labor costs of deliveries, cleaning, gardening, nursing, etc. but that would lose them their ex-Labour voters.