Policy for Campaigns 16: More policy for more campaigns

Articles that won't get written on Policy for Campaigns, at least for now...

Mar 06, 2023

You may have noticed that this blog has been fairly quiet since December. Mostly this has been because I was busy with client work, and had used up my stock of articles that were either ready to be published, or partly drafted and available to be finished off quickly. However, as I am now moving back into a permanent role, normal service will not be resumed.

Sadly this leaves Policy for Campaigns as a bit of unfinished business: I had a good number of further articles in mind, and once I’d worked my way through those I had half an idea to pull them together into an e-book or similar, probably revising them and updating them fairly extensively, and presenting them in a more coherent structure. That certainly won’t be happening for the foreseeable future, but who knows, maybe one day…

For now, here’s a selection of notes and thoughts I’d jotted down for future articles. Hopefully they can still be helpful to you if you’re devising policy as part of a campaign.

Planned articles in outline

The best policy for the campaign

How do you deal with the dilemma of what policy to advocate: the best one to solve the problem, or the one you’re most likely to be able to secure? You may have to consider a range of possible trade-offs.

Party political considerations: do you develop an option more palatable to the party in power, which might be the only positive outcome you can secure? What if it’s one that won’t work well?
Pre-existing, bad policy: do you continue to advocate change, or recommend a policy within the existing flawed framework that will at least solve some of the problems? Or do you even advocate to your sector or beneficiaries that they should find ways to adapt to the current settlement, however unwelcome it is?
Cost: do you recommend a cheap and less effective option, or the Rolls Royce solution that comes with a Rolls Royce price tag, which decision-makers might be reluctant to meet?
Options of limited immediate use: do you advocate for permissive solutions such as, say, new powers for local authorities which they mostly won’t have the resources to use right now, but could do in the future?

Policy and strategy

A strategy is a framework for making decisions, and a policy is an agreed plan or course of action. Clearly the one relates closely to the other, but what does that mean for a campaigning organisation? Previous articles have discussed how external policy recommendations must at least be compatible with an organisation’s internal policies, and likewise they must align with its strategy. Indeed, they should very often flow from it: your policy asks must be of a piece with what your organisation is trying to achieve overall.

Categorising policy proposals by likely success

It’s possible to identify a range of outcomes for different policies: they can often succeed or fail in similar ways, and to different degrees but still in similar patterns. I wonder if it might be feasible to develop a rough framework that could be used to categorise policies, possibly as part of their development process. For example:

A policy that is highly likely to fail and need reversal in the short to medium term, or will be reversed when the minister next changes (a Grayling policy?)
A policy that is likely to fail so badly and so quickly as to require a ministerial resignation (a Kwarteng policy?)
A policy that is likely to be partially successful, but require another round of reform to realise its potential (a Shapps policy?)
A policy that will cause an unintended but predictable problem, possibly soon but possibly far into the future (a Clegg policy?)
A policy that is likely to meet its unstated objective, but unlikely to meet its purported one (an Osborne policy?)
A policy that will require long term and expensive implementation, and is therefore likely to be watered down, retreated from or even ditched before it is fully implemented (a Duncan Smith policy?)
A policy that may have some success, but can’t be readily entrenched and is vulnerable to repeal after a change of government (a Blair policy?)
A policy that is likely to achieve some, but probably only a few, of its aims (a Brown policy?)
A policy that can be implemented, is unlikely to bring either major benefits or major failures, but will require the expenditure of a lot of political capital (a Lansley policy?)
A policy that is likely to fail in a way that will cause a scandal and/or public disaster (a Pickles policy?)
A policy that is likely to fail so badly it could bring down the Prime Minister (a Waldegrave policy?)
A policy that is likely to prove both successful and enduring (a… nope, I’m drawing a blank on this one).

How to do policy when the government is ideologically opposed to you

Whatever the party composition of the government, there will be areas of policy where the politicians in power are uncomfortable with what some campaigning organisations want to achieve, or ever downright hostile to it. Conservative politicians are generally not supportive of the aims of trade unions, and not naturally comfortable with welfare benefits or universal healthcare as policy solutions. Labour politicians are not generally hostile to business interests in the way that some stereotypes would have you believe, but can certainly be suspicious and unsupportive of the self-employed. An incoming Labour government in 2024 may well also be hostile to business interests working in public service delivery, and probably to independent schools also; Labour can also be surprisingly incomprehending of the voluntary sector at times as well.

So, how do you approach policy and campaigning work for these interests when an unsupportive party is in power? Truthfully I’ve never worked out a sure-fire answer to that: it does make your position much more difficult, and limit what you can achieve. But it’s important to avoid falling into the trap of assuming progress cannot be made and resorting to mere protest. By determination and persistence, you can probably achieve at least some success: focusing on specific and more narrowly-defined, practical problems can also be the best route to finding common ground and solutions. A major risk can be your supporter base becoming ever-more agitated by the government’s wider lack of support or understanding, and calling for a more hostile, protest-driven posture that would in turn make it hard for government to work constructively with you. (See the first pitfall here.)

What if your policy is just to stop something?

What if your objective is just to “stop the bad thing”? That’s not the same as arguing for something to happen, so what’s the best policy approach when your central recommendation is “don’t do it”?

It’s probably no immediate help to say it, but if you find yourself in this situation something has probably gone wrong with your organisation or sector at an earlier stage, and you’re now in a weak position. Particularly if you’re facing a firm proposal that has been thoroughly developed, there has probably been a lack of vigilance on the part of people who might be adversely affected. This may reflect a lack of a representative body that would have kept an eye on developments. Indeed, such shocks can often prompt the formation of new ones, such as IR35 did for freelance contractors, with the creation of PCG (now IPSE). By the time the Agency Workers Directive rolled around in the second half of the 2000s, the sector was sufficiently well represented that government officials actually reached out to PCG for advice on ensuring its implementation didn’t accidentally clobber the sector all over again.

But suppose it’s all gone wrong for some reason and you’re fighting a rear-guard action. What are your options? First, don’t despair: you may succeed, or mitigate the worst effects, even if it seems hopeless (I again offer the Family Business Tax as an example). You have a limited range of tools available: you’ll probably have to agitate using parliamentary channels, and maybe consider a judicial review if you’re in good time for that. In policy terms, try to quantify the harm you believe will be caused, and provide as credible a base of evidence as you can. If you possibly can, try to put forward a positive vision for the policy area in question, even if there doesn’t seem to be an appetite for it among decision-makers: it will enable you to position your organisation more credibly, rather than being seen as merely self-interested.

Policy for Campaigns