Re:View 1 August 2025
Director of Policy and Research
Quote of the week
“Thank you for your letter of 29 July inviting me to get back to the negotiation table, which is ironic because I never left. I am ready to continue the conversation from where you left it.”
Wes Streeting MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, writing to the BMA this week
Welcome back to the Re:View! This is our last one before we take a break for August – needless to say, we’ll be back in September. Given the end-of-term vibes, I hope you won’t mind a slightly off-piste reflection from me today.
This week, two shrewd commentators – Janan Ganesh in the FT and Sam Freedman in his Substack – made near-identical arguments: that the political narrative of “broken Britain” has gone too far. Britain may be struggling with sluggish growth and overloaded public services, but… come on, it’s not the 1970s, it’s not feudal Japan. Crime is lower than it was in the 90s. There are no blackouts, there’s no three-day week, no counter-insurgency on the mainland.
All of which is, in its own way, a useful correction. As both argue, catastrophism can be self-fulfilling. It can also distract us or depress us too much, so we don’t sort out the issues that are in front of us, and which policy can in fact address.
But I also think they’re both missing something important. For all the rhetorical excess out there, this isn’t just a story about hysteria or media distortion. It's also a story about how a huge number of people actually feel about the system. That perception, grounded in the everyday experience of interacting with a State that too often frustrates us or fails us, off the back of an economic model that doesn’t feel like it’s been working for us for a couple of decades, matters at least as much as any historical comparison.
The truth is, we’re likely not at the peak of the relevant underlying trends here. The deeper, underlying pressures shaping our politics and institutions are things like the reconfiguration of our global economy, climate transformation, demographic shifts, geopolitical instability, accelerating technological disruption, a changing public ethos, and collapsing institutional trust. There’s good reason to think that some of these trends are just getting started. There’s absolutely no reason to imagine that ‘normal service’ will ever resume.
This means that the best time to have a conversation about completely changing the foundations – questioning the deepest and longest-held assumptions about how the State should work – is now. Arguing that something truly radical will be needed is not, in my view, an overreaction.
This is the right time for more radical thinking. Not out of despair, but because this is how you leverage optimism into something more than complacency. Not because everything is falling apart, but because the world is changing fast, and we have the opportunity to build something much better – if we can harness this moment to bring about truly fundamental change.
Read of the week
I’m going to cheekily recommend something from our own stable this week. Joe Martin, who works on our Whitehall programme, wrote this piece looking at some of the more interesting findings from the latest round of civil service workforce statistics. The part that really made me stop and pause for thought is the finding that only around 13% of senior civil servants are aged under 40. This is not the age split that you would see in most large organisations (from the quick bit of research I just did, around 36% of senior managers are aged under 40 in the private sector) – and I think it tells us something subtle about how Whitehall attaches value to institutional familiarity and ‘time served’, and how that might connect to a certain homogeneity or path dependency in how potential leaders are identified and developed.