Missions need mobilisations?
‘Missions’ are the ‘in thing’ in Government at the moment. And not just the new Labour government in Whitehall. Even our local Police & Crime Commissioner has adopted a “mission-driven” approach for his police and crime plan.
The idea of ‘missions’ is in one sense nothing new in government. There have been numerous examples in the past, even if they didn’t use exactly the same terminology. The one most often called in aid of the current fashion for missions is the 1960s US NASA Apollo program launched by a President Kennedy. From which we get the term ‘moonshot’, also fashionable amongst the missionaries.
But the Apollo program is a poor example for today’s missions. The race to land a human on the Moon and return them safely to Earth was a very narrow and specific mission. Yes it was technically challenging, involved mobilising public and private resources – but within a fairly narrow segment of society.
Probably more useful to look back at missions that involved much bigger, more complex and wider societal efforts. The obvious examples here are the New Deal in 1930s America and the war efforts of the UK and USA during World War II.
Recovering from the Great Depression in the 1930s and fighting for survival against the Axis powers in the 1940s required above all a societal level mobilisation of resources of unprecedented scales. It required workers, families and communities to make huge sacrifices and to work together in novel ways to achieve the missions of economic recovery and later winning the war.
Isn’t it a bit over the top to draw on such dramatic episodes from history in 21st century Britain? Well, yes and no. We don’t face the same immediate and acute existential threat as we did in 1939-45 but the range and scale of our problems are pretty dire.
We have faced a series of economic and social shocks to our systems over the past couple of decades. Starting with the global financial crisis in 2007/8, through austerity, Brexit, Covid and a surge in mass migration many of our social structures have faced challenges and pressures. And inadequate responses to each of these by earlier governments has added to the growing sense, and reality, of things for most of us getting worse rather than better. This in turn undermines trust in society and institutions, which also compounds some of the problems.
Above all our health care system is buckling, as is social care. Criminal justice is on the verge of collapse while housing and utilities (especially water and sewage) are in crisis. Prolonged under investment is a key issue. And looming over all of this, and making each one of them worse, is the challenge of climate change.
The answer is not to do more government TO people (or to do less as the rump Tories claim to want). It’s to do more ‘governing’ WITH people. Mobilising for Labour’s Missions cannot be a solely top-down, command and control, even if that is appropriate in some contexts.
First and foremost it needs the Labour government and ministers to spell out in clear terms the nature of the challenge and crucially what public sector workers, users and communities can do to advance towards these goals. And have a say refining and defining them.
Second it needs Government to give away more power from Whitehall to devolved and local governments and front-line public servants.
Third it needs some radical restructuring of public service work. To empower public service workers through self-management, co-operatives and other more democratic forms of organisation. And to draw in users and their friends and families as co-producers.
Finally it needs some investment in the capital infrastructure of public services. Compared to running costs, the investment needed is small. Most public services are, and remain, labour intensive. But investment is needed in some areas, and without it other aspects of improvement will be hamstrung. Therefore, it shouldn’t be constrained by ‘fiscal rules’ that throttle innovation and productivity growth.
If there was one lesson we ought to draw from the Covid pandemic it was the huge swell of popular support for action to overcome that crisis. Hundreds of thousands volunteered, millions changed their behaviour, in pursuit of a common purpose.
Having clear purposes – Missions – is all very good. But without mobilising popular support for them they will fail.
Image source: Labour Party X account