The History of Bad Ideas: Deliverism

Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Pass Present Future, the history of ideas podcast. Today, in our series on the history of bad ideas, I'm talking to the political historian, David Clempra, about an idea with a very recent history, but a real purchase on contemporary politics. We're talking about what's called "deliverism". Where does it come from? Who invented it? What does it mean? What's wrong with it? And why do people persist in believing in it? David, we're talking about an ism, deliverism, but before we go on to the ism, I want to ask you about delivery, because I associate that in recent British political history with figures like Tony Blair created the delivery unit in Downing Street that then was passed on to conservative administrations, men like Michael Barber who worked with Tony Blair and was all about delivery. And it's not for me a particularly distinctive idea and certainly I don't think I could get an ism out of it. So my first question to you before we get down to the ism is, does it have its origins in just that pragmatic trend, almost third way trend in politics, not just British politics, towards, to quote Tony Blair, what works? Is it something more specific than that? I think they're actually too quite distinct phenomena. So what you're talking about in terms of Blair is the delivery unit that was set up in Blair's second term to drive through changes to public services and to ensure that they were getting the kind of technocratic outcomes they wanted. And the man in charge of the delivery unit, Michael Barber, coined the term deliverology to refer to the techniques he used to try and get the outcomes that he wanted. And that involved having a sort of centralized team in Downing Street that would go out with troubleshoot, would set targets, would check things were on track. But that is essentially a set of technocratic techniques. What deliver ism is it's a theory of electoral politics and a strategy for political parties to use to win elections. And it is essentially a very sort of simple claim, which is if you deliver good outcomes, you will be reelected. And so the deliverist argument is that you can achieve political success as a government by delivering effectively for the vote groups you're interested in winning the support of. Interesting. So it's an ism not anology. I'd forgotten there was anology associated with it too. You could do your GCSE and deliverology. You can't do a GCSE and an ism. And to be clear to people I'm joking, you can't actually do a GCSE and deliverology. Yeah. So deliverology is a kind of technocratic thing. Whereas deliver ism is an argument about electoral politics and what drives electoral outcomes and the relationship between technocratic outcomes and electoral outcomes. And I think I'm right saying, therefore, deliver ism ism or recent phenomenon, but just to track it back through British politics because that's where we can focus some of this argument, we will talk about the United States as well. Was Blair a deliverist at all in the sense that do you think that politics of that era also may be assumed, maybe even took for granted that one of the ways to get elected is to deliver for the voters or were they delivering for the voters because that's what they believe the job of government was and you got elected by doing other maybe more old fashioned things like telling a story and mobilizing your base. And whatever else it is that people have always done to win elections was Blair a deliverist or was he just a deliverologist. So I think one of the difficult things with deliver ism is that because it's such a kind of intuitive idea, it's something that has always been present to an extent before we had the term in that it's a fairly conventional way of understanding politics to some extent. And so I think you can point to politicians in all different places in the past and argue that they were doing a kind of deliver asm but the term itself comes out of a much more specific set of debates about how to deal with the politics of the era that we're in. So in the broadest sense, I think you could argue that Blair was a deliverist but you could probably also have to say that that was a deliverist in that sense in that they had outcomes they wanted to achieve and that they believed that delivering on those outcomes would help secure their reelection. So in the broad sense, I think you can point to lots of examples of deliver asm in the past and I don't think it would just necessarily be a kind of third way technocratic phenomenon. But in the more specific sense, I think that when we're talking about the debates over deliver asm and the concept itself of deliver them, we're talking about something really in the last few years. So is it in that sense a reaction to another ism which is populism? So there's a lot of thinking, argument, disagreement about the appeal of populism and how populist politicians achieve their electoral successes is also often an assumption that what will catch populism out is its inability to deliver on its promises and we might come back to that. But is deliverism something that's juxtaposed with populism? The populists tell fantastical stories, that's how they win elections, but actually what we and I guess we hear mean something more like the conventional political parties. What we need to do is deliver outcomes for the voters. Is it an anti-populous idea? Yes, so it is an anti-populous idea and very confusingly, it is also an idea that emerges in reaction to a very similar word which is popularism. So it's both an anti-populous idea in that it is an argument that will populists might be very good at the rhetoric, the emotion, the political side of things, but we can beat them by our own kind of technocratic skill because in government we'll deliver the good outcomes and that will work. But it was also a response to and very specifically we can trace the term to a response to something called popularism which was a approach being developed in America by people close to the democratic party in response to what they saw as the democratic party's failures. And they said popularism isn't about populism, but it is about shifting your positions to adopt policy positions that are popular with the public. And in practice that meant the democrat shifting away from some of their bolder, more radical ideas. And the deliberate response was to say, well it doesn't matter if an idea is popular or unpopular in the abstract. If we get into government and we do good things, even if they might sound like unpopular ideas, if they actually deliver good outcomes for people, then we'll benefit from them. So it was a response to the kind of triangulating idea of politics by some people on the American left who said the political difficulties of certain ideas that we support can be overcome by the reality of the positive outcomes they'll actually deliver. So one of the confusing things here before we get on with what's right or more importantly what might be wrong with deliverism is those two things that you've described, deliver ism and popularism sound a little banal. And also they sound a little like the sort of thing that you would expect most politicians at some point or another to embrace both of those in the sense that you probably do want to do things that are popular. It sounds like in a democracy, that would be something that you would maybe do without even having to think about it. If the public's attitude changes, if the public expresses preferences, that suggests that the public would now like this rather than that, you might shift in that direction. And at the same time in order to get reelected, you have to have a record on which to get reelected. And that may involve showing people that they are, for instance, better off than they were four or five years ago. So if this is an argument that is coming originally out of Biden's America, so this is a 2020's argument, is it really distinct from the sorts of arguments that people have always had in democratic systems? Is it, for instance, a function of the fact that our politics in the 2020's actually that contrast is more sharp than it used to be? There's a clearer and starker division between these positions than maybe there was in, I don't know, the 1950's. So I think, as you say, the basic ideas here are not particularly radical revolutionary or innovative. They're fairly intuitive and natural ways of understanding politics. But I think what's specific is that they got elevated into quite prescriptive creeds that claimed to be able to sort of overcome the other difficulties. There's kind of one simple trick. And the popularists were saying, it's very simple. We just have to look at the polls, move to where the polls say we should be, and we'll win. And the deliverists, on the other hand, were saying, no, no, it's very simple. If we do good things, if we deliver outcomes for voters, then we will win. And in both cases, the problem is not the basic idea. It's the way in which it becomes an attempt to kind of avoid all other aspects of politics and to pretend that there is one root through. I think what is notable about the current moment is the delivererism, I think, is in part, as you say, an attempt to overcome the problems of populism, at a moment when a lot of centre-left democratic progressive politicians, the Democrats in the US, the Labour in the UK, feel like they are on the backfoot on politics, feel like there are new political forces that they don't necessarily fully understand that they don't have to navigate. Deliverism offers something kind of quite simple and reassuring that, oh no, if we just govern well, we can ride out these populist forces. We can defeat them. People will start voting for us again. Is it a centre-left phenomenon? Are these arguments happening? on the centre right as well, or is this Biden-democrat's labour? I mean, I don't think it has to be a centre left phenomenon, but I think in terms of where we're seeing these debates unfold, it very much is a centre left phenomenon, because it originates, as I say, on the kind of progressive wing of the Democrats in America. It was then adopted by the Biden administration in practice, and then was very influential on the Labour Party under Keir Starmer. So that's where the debate is actually happening. And I think what's worth noting about sort of all three of those groups is that these three different groups of people who embraced the idea of 'deliverism', a three different groups of people who in some sense or another were struggling with politics and were struggling with political argument. The faction within the Democrats, who were really pushing 'deliverism', were in part pushing it because their ideas were seen as not being very popular, and this was a way of overcoming that, dealing with the fact that it was difficult to win a straightforward argument for what they wanted. Then in terms of the Biden administration, well, if your president is Joe Biden, someone who is old, who's physically declining, who can't go out and make a big political argument, then 'deliverism' is a very appealing strategy, because it's actually what matters is not the argument. It's just the governing, it's just doing the policies that you want to do. And likewise, Keir Starmer, a political leader who I think was quite temperamentally disinclined to go out and make an argument. So I think the thing that you see is that for parts of the left or centre left that are struggling politically, 'deliverism' seem to offer a kind of technocratic escape from the political challenges they faced. We'll come onto where Andy Burnham might or might not fit into these arguments, but just to tell the history, the very recent history of this, can you flesh out in the American case what they were arguing about? So what were the kinds of popular policies the Democrats were saying? If we want to defeat Trump, we have to look at the polls. People seem to like this or that. This is what we have to do. And the Biden people were saying no, we have to deliver. But deliver on what? Is this just economic growth? After all, in the Starmer case, that was the mantra. Is it delivery for your typical voters? Maybe for your traditional voters? How do these things get cashed out? So I think the first thing I'd say is that as of 'deliverism' has gotten hardened into a kind of mantra, one of the things that sometimes gets lost, I think, is that key question of what are you delivering and who are you delivering it for? Initially, in the case the Democrats, it was essentially, I think, an argument about the kind of scope of the policies. I think the popularists wanted to shrink the democratic offer, focus on a few key smaller policies that have a lot of support behind them, whereas 'deliverists' wanted to go bigger. They wanted to say, 'Okay, on health care, we should do something big, on expanding the welfare state, we should do something big.' And if we do it, people will feel the difference and that will be helpful. If we build it, they will come. Is that what delivers them? There was a political science literature that a lot of the deliverers built on, which was this idea of policy feedback. If you do a big policy and the policy has beneficiaries, the policy generates its own support. And so they'd point to the great society when Lyndon Johnson introduced a whole range of welfare programs, or they'd point to the New Deal and Social Security, and these new programs benefit a whole lot of people who become very politically supportive of the verse programs and will vote to defend them. So in the Biden case, there was an initial Biden agenda that did include very substantive expansions of the American welfare state, the bill back better agenda it was called, coming in the aftermath of COVID. Now that got whittled down in Congress, and the result was the Inflation Reduction Act, which included one part of this broad strategy, very much focused on industrial strategy to drive economic growth, to boost jobs, to do big climate investments, and often to help a lot of manufacturing workers often in Republican states. And part of the idea here was we'll put these good new industrial jobs in Republican states and the people who benefit from those jobs will remain supportive of us of these policies. The policy will build its own support. And at the same time, this was combined with a set of labor market measures that produced a very hot labor market, so people, especially at the lower end of the income distribution, were having big wage increases. So the Biden administration felt we're really delivering, especially for working class voters, the kind of working class voters were trying to win back from Trump, because we've delivered jobs, economic growth, and wage increases. But obviously, in the end, it wasn't enough to enable Kamala Harris to then defeat Trump. So my question is why wasn't it enough? As you said, one of the things that happened is it got whittled down. So presumably, if we're talking about the things that might be wrong with deliverism as anism, it's insufficiently sensitive to political context. The great society, Lyndon Johnson, Johnson among other things, the master of congressional politics, and the ability to pass legislation, which is much harder to do anyway in the contemporary American political climate. So it's all very well to say, if we go big and go bold and do all these things, the voters will notice. But in order to do those things, there may be barriers that you can't overcome within the political system, or it may be that in order to overcome those barriers in the political system, you have to have something more than deliverism. You have to have a story to tell. So it's not just about convincing the voters, is it? I mean, in the American system, the president's got to convince members of Congress that there is a political story here worth supporting. Or was it simply that they just didn't deliver? What was it that went wrong in the Biden case? So I think that's a really interesting question. And my view is that that's one that we don't yet have a clear enough answer to. But I think there are a number of different things that we can think about as potential factors. So one argument would be that the Biden administration simply wasn't able to deliver the right thing. So on the one hand, there was no unemployment in high growth. But on the other hand, there was very high inflation. So there's one argument that the outcome that really matters is inflation and that Biden failed to deliver on the things that voters actually cared about. And you can link that to the argument that suggests that actually this relates to the question of what do people give government credit for? When people get a pay rise, they don't necessarily think, "Oh, thank you, Joe Biden." They think, "Well, that's because I worked really hard." When people get a job, they don't necessarily think that is the result of the government. Whereas on the other hand, when people go to the shop and the price is high, they might think, "Well, that's not my fault. That's the fault of the government." So there's this question of what outcomes actually do people thank the government for or blame the government for? And there's an argument that Biden went wrong by delivering for people as workers but failing to deliver for them as consumers. And especially in a country like America, what mattered more was delivering for people as consumers. But just to interject there, it is harder to deliver for people as consumers. I mean, in the sense that inflation, as a problem, is a harder nut to crack than building stuff. And so there's something a little simplistic about deliverism. It's almost like anism that says, "We will deliver in the places where it's easier to deliver than in other places." But what if the other places of the places where the voters notice what you're doing? Yes, exactly. I think that's very much one of the issues. And then I think the other argument is simply this question of, "Will our voters actually voting primarily on material issues?" A lot of the Democratic base wasn't voting because of the economy. They are voting because of values. And the Democratic party defends their values and Trump revolts their values. Likewise, a lot of Republican voters who voted for Trump were voting on values issues. So there is this question of how much are economic issues really what are going to move people? And then there's also the question of and I think this is the kind of key question that's interesting to think about and where I think deliverism potentially faces real challenges, which is what actually determines how people feel about how things are going economically. Is it their lived experience? Is it what's actually happening? Or is it something else? So in the case of America, there was something that economic commentators started to refer to as a vibe session, which is all the traditional economic indicators looked quite good. And this was a point even when it wasn't a case that inflation was really, really hurting people. All the traditional indicators looked good. But when you asked people how they felt about the state of the economy, they said it was really bad. And so there was a disconnect there between almost the material reality and how people felt about it. And that disconnect became even more striking if you there were some surveys that would ask people how are things going for you personally? And often the answers would be fairly well. But then when those same people are asked and how are things going for the economy in general, they would say, oh, it's going very badly. So I think that some commentators started to point to a disconnect between the actual economy, the actual outcomes that were being delivered, and how people felt about them, and then how that translated into how people thought about politics. And I think that is really one of the central problems that Deliverism has is that it is an attempt to avoid this question of mediation. This question of what actually is the link between outcomes on the ground and how people think and feel about politics. And I think Deliverism assumes a kind of straightforward linear relationship that one determines the other. Whereas in fact, I think there's a lot of evidence that it's a lot more complex. And to succeed at politics, you have to have some kind of idea of what is that set of factors that shave that relationship and how can you navigate them as a politician. So I want to ask you a bit more about what might explain this disconnect, but one more thing that feels like Deliverism misses in that example of Biden. maybe he did this and he did this but he failed to tackle that. So first of all, it's what's easy and what's hard, but secondly, there's timeframes. I mean, electoral timeframes are tight and building stuff can be slow. The effects can be slow to be noticed. They can be slow to feed through into people's lived experience. And maybe the great society's an exception to this. You know, all of these things have their own idiosyncrasies. But one of the things that instinctively feels a little wishful about the liverism is that the electric, 'cause as you said, it's an electoral strategy. That's what makes it different from deliverology, which doesn't have to be electoral and the delivery unit can be handed on from a Labour government to a Conservative government. Deliverism is a way of winning elections. The assumption that the delivery time table and the electoral time table mesh up seems instinctively implausible that they would. And I think that is a challenge that governments that set out to deliverism will and arguably do face. And there's an argument that that has been one of Keir Starmer's problems. There was a very good essay about sort of Starmer's approach published in the LRB by Will Davies, shortly after Starmer took office, that pointed out the disconnect between what Starmer said he was trying to do, which was a decade of national renewal in policy terms and the political challenge that would result from the lack of any kind of immediate improvement and Starmer became very unpopular in his now set to leave office. And even if we think, and I think there are reasons to doubt it, that his plans were, that there was a kind of big plan there that was going to pay off in 10 years, it's very unclear why something paying off in 10 years would actually generate the necessary political support not only in five years, but also to retain a kind of political strength in the run-up to that. And I think the other thing is that if you do take as a politician, the electoral cycle as determining what you're delivering, well, that is actually going to really limit the scope for any meaningful political ambition. If all you can focus on trying to do is things that will pay off now, then I think you're unlikely to be the kind of radical reforming politician that I think a lot of politicians would like to see themselves as trying to be. - And just one more question, because I'm very intrigued that the great society in 1960s example is somewhere in the back of people's minds that here's a grand policy program that galvanized a part of the electorate because they could see the immediate benefits. It also depends on, as it were, where the thresholds are for this and how disadvantaged the people are. But also the point about the great society program is it did coincide with a civil rights program as well. And one thing about deliverism is it feels because of its material emphasis quite thin on the other things that could be called delivery. So I'm gonna come on and sort of moving around between how we link this all together and then I come on to Andy Burnham, who is after we're talking about constitutional reform, devolution and other things, which are also things that either will or won't be delivered. Now they can be judged by, but it's not quite as straightforwardly material as material benefits to hard up working families, which feels like a slightly thin understanding of what people might think can be delivered within an electoral cycle. And the 1960s example, yeah, it was big, it was bold, but there was a lot else going on. I mean, it didn't exist in a vacuum and it was delivering for people who after all in some cases, black Americans, had suffered a hundred years of discrimination. So deliverism feels too technocratic to me. I mean, just gonna say it out front. It never mind the storytelling aspect of it. It feels too focused on narrow material benefits and maybe even measurable benefits. And I think that if you look at the '60s or the New Deal or other examples that the sort of advocates deliver as a point to, there's often a kind of big moral story there and there's a moral logic and there's a sense that this is part of a qualitative argument about what society should be like. And deliverism I think attempts to take one part of that, which is delivering tangible material outcomes that benefit people and reduce it to that. And so it's a very thin conception of politics that basically sees political outcomes as straightforwardly downstream of socioeconomic outcomes. And so it's just a question of changing one set of outcomes to change another set of outcomes without any sense of the broader factors that fit into how people think about this and why certain policies might resonate in the way they do. It's not just because people go, oh yes, I've benefited from that. The NHS in the UK, it wasn't just, oh I've been treated by a doctor, that's really good. It's also that that said something about their status as citizens and what was owed to them as a citizen it made them feel socially included. It reflected an idea of who we were as a country and what was owed to citizens of that country. And so I think that any successful politics needs to grapple with those issues in a way that deliverism tries to avoid or in its crudest form as tries to avoid. I want to ask whether deliverism has a bias towards the measurable over the somewhat more intangible but presumably the popularism that you described also has a bias towards the measurable just depends what you think are the important measurements. The popularism measurement is polling evidence that this percentage of the electorate prefer this over that. Deliverism might be economic data or other forms of evidence that these outcomes will improve. I mean maybe there's just a bias towards the measurable in our politics because so much can now be measured in so many different ways. It's very hard for politicians to resist the thought, particularly they don't know what to do that they're going to pick a measurable target and try to achieve it. But do you think deliverism falls down on the fact that in the end it will look for things where it can measure discernible improvement? Regardless of the question whether the people feel it that it is also a thinner conception of politics than one that might say there are some things that in the long run will produce measurably beneficial outcomes but in the medium to short term actually have to be defended in other terms than that. So I want to be careful of constructing too much of a straw man here of a kind of ultra-deliveress who is constantly looking for new metrics to chase. But I do think you'll write that what popularism and deliverism both share is a focus on quantifiable metrics and a belief in chasing those metrics and their electoral success is achieved in that way. And I think what is really striking to me is the similarity that both share is they share an aversion to political argument. The popularist isn't interested in changing someone's mind through arguing about why a given policy is right. The popularist says, well, they don't like that policy but they do like that policy. So we'll shift to the one that they like and then they'll vote for us. They're not interested in having a political argument about why you should back a particular policy or why you should believe in a particular way that society should be structured? Likewise, the deliverist goes, okay, but this thing they don't seem to like it. But if we do it and it works, then they'll like it. You don't have to have the argument because the idea is that results speak for themselves. And so because the results speak for themselves, you don't have to speak for it. - It is hard to change people's minds in I think ever. In politics, it's one of the hardest things but it may be particularly hard in the current information environment. But that's also one of the things that maybe deliverism falls down on too. So I want to talk about this question of the mediation and what it is that stands between material, measurable, outcomes and benefits and people's experience of politics. Is this primarily in the arguments that we're talking about here, a digital information age story? Is it even more recent than that? A social media digital information age story? Is it about the fact that, as you said, very interestingly, if you ask people are you better off, they might say yes, but it's kind of generally worse. Is that because there is just so much more readily available, lived experience being lived by other people, maybe amplified, maybe being distorted, maybe being turned into memes and stories. So that say 50 years ago, if you were in a part of the United States and things were getting better for you, you might assume that this scaled up. And now you think you're an outlier because you are getting so much more information about other people's experience. Is this, is this a 21st century phenomenon, the importance of the mediation? So I don't think the importance of mediation is a 21st century phenomenon because there is always some level of mediation going on. But what I do think we have as a specifically 21st century story of how mediation is changing in a very, very substantial and dramatic way. And I think this is fundamentally a story of the fragmentation of media and of news sources. In somewhere like Britain or America, historically, there's a limited number of television channels. There are newspapers, newspapers, there might be a wide variety of different newspapers, but they have quite high editorial standards, quite probably. There are incentives for the newspapers to behave in particular ways. And the result is that there will probably be some level of consensus in the media about particular kinds of outcomes. There won't be total consensus. And I think we should avoid a kind of nostalgic idea of society in the 20th century as totally consensual and non-conflictual. But I do think there was a relative centralization of how news was created and distributed. What we have in the 21st century and in the social media age is much less of that centralization. It is much easier for people to create their own narratives for different conflicting narratives from a merge that people may intentionally don't even really see the other narrative. And I think that has meant there's less of a kind of centralized consensus in a country like America about things like how the economy is going. And it makes it-- easier for rival narratives to emerge and harder for a straightforward thing, like the level of economic growth, to translate into a single clear narrative about how the economy is going. So I do think that there is a change here in media that is shaping the relationship between economic outcomes and how people respond to them politically. I've often found myself wondering whether, because it is, it's been a long-standing mystery in a way why frustration, dissatisfaction, anger have been rising. And it doesn't obviously track economic or other measures of how, say, the economy is doing or how well off people are. There are ways in which it does track that, stagnant wages, a squeeze, middle-price, rising prices. But for me, anyway, I'm sure for lots of people, there's felt like a bit of a disconnect. And I've sometimes wondered whether it also has something to do with the fact that ours is a less material world, in the sense that so much of our experiences are mediated by this technology. And this technology for all of its wonderful benefits is incredibly irritating and frustrating. And a lot of things are pushed onto us. We have to work hard with this technology. It's quite hard work navigating healthcare systems, bringing a pension sorted out, buying a parking ticket, whatever it is. Maybe particularly for older voters, but maybe I am an older voter now, for all of us. It's quite a challenging environment in which to experience things. And so it's not merely that there's the mediation of the information about the economy, but the fact that so much of our experiences are filtered through a technology, which is, frankly, quite alienating. I mean, I think a lot of people feel a little dehumanized by this technology. Even if they're sort of aware, they're a bit better off. Some of these things are free. So much of this technology gives us material benefits, eventually material benefits, for free. And yet, you kind of feel like shit when you're using it. And I just have wandered off and whether actually not enough attention is just paid to what's happened to the experience of being a human being in this machine age. I'm very sympathetic to that argument. I do think that so much of our lives now are lived online and mediated through social media, but I think that probably is shaping our perceptions of things to a very substantial extent. It's difficult to unpack these things. One of my friends, a sociologist pointed out that one of the sort of big challenges in her work is that austerity and the smartphone hit at the same time. So when trying to look at the effects on society and Britain, it's actually quite hard to unpack two different things. Why are people spending so much time inside looking at screens? Is it because the youth club closed or because they have an iPhone, it's probably some combination of both. I think that it is notable that these social media platforms often are designed to make you angry and unhappy because that's what holds your attention. If you look at Twitter, TikTok, these apps often paint very negative ideas of the place you literally are because they know that that will grab you, that will enrage you, that will give you the kind of emotional response that will make you actually engage with the platform. And I think this is one of the problems that sort of deliver us to have. If you make someone's local area nicer, that will only really work if they're actually spending enough time out in the local area. If they are in fact staying in their house on their computer, looking at, you know, hundreds of TikTok videos about how, let's say, London is a is a crime-ridden household. It won't matter if you've really revamped the high street just a few hundred meters away because that's not necessarily what they're seeing. So there is this question of what actually is people's lived experience? Is it, is it their area or is it just what they're seeing on the screen in front of them? And I think that for a deliverist, you have to hope that there still is enough engagement with the outside world, but what you do to that can cut through. And I think that, you know, to some extent, there will always will be because people are rarely not engaging at all with the world around them. But I think the extent to which people are now consuming news and just engaging socially through social media does mean that that is going to be increasingly important in shaping people's perceptions of the world and that traditional things like what people at work say or what it's like to be out and about in a particular place will become less significant. I guess I was also thinking not just of social media and TikTok, but actually how people interface with government itself, because after all the other feature of this world is that government bureaucracy, some of them are getting better at it, some bits of government are better at this than other bits. But this technology is the interface between our experience and what government may be trying to give us better healthcare, better transport systems, whatever it is. It's a very frustrating and alienating technology. It can be particularly when it's a government bureaucratic version of it. And often it stands in contrast. TikTok is horrible and makes people angry and makes you feel sick, but it's also smooth. It's quite frictionless. There's an awful lot of friction. It's not like building a bridge so that now it's easier to get to the other town. If you're trying to deliver within a welfare state, a complicated, already very bureaucratic or already highly differentiated welfare state, just the conduit through which the money gets hosed at the people. It's not the helicopter dropping cash. And I often, again, wonder whether that is part of this frustration. I do think governments are getting better at it. The British state is much better in some areas than others. And there are lots of interesting case studies of why the British state, DVLA for people who aren't British, the transport bit, does it better than say some of the healthcare systems and even within healthcare, some of it is much better than others. And there's a big argument going on at the moment about Palantir and the ways in which maybe you have to get into bed with the devil in order just to deliver better versions of these technologies. But these technologies as well as making us angry because we're being kind of hyped up to mind about things that we wouldn't have known about in the past. It's just like a sludgy barrier in the way of the delivery kind of reaching us. And that must be a challenge for deliverers. So I think there's always the challenge of how you actually deliver and how you deliver in a way that is really felt. And I agree that there can often be problems of visibility. You can change, you can tinker with the welfare state in a complex bureaucratic system it won't necessarily be clear to people what the outcome of that actually is. Or if they even if they experience the outcome, it won't be necessarily clear to them that that is the result of something happening in Parliament. Whether I think that's exacerbated by technology itself, I'm less sure. I mean, I think that what we're talking about here is a problem of bureaucracy. And sometimes I think technology can be very helpful in smoothing out the bureaucracy and in other times I agree it can maybe make the experience of bureaucracy more dehumanizing and more alienating. But I'm not sure it always necessarily goes one way or the other. Yeah, and I don't want to sound like one of those rose tinted spectacle people. I'm completely aware that going to a 1980s job centre, even if there was another human being on the other side of the desk behind a plastic piece of glass was not necessarily a particularly human enriching experience, bureaucracy is a challenge in itself. Is it also the case? I know some people have written about this in the literature around deliveries and that there's beginning to be a suspicion that different bits of the electorate have a very different experience of the ups and downs of the economic cycle, the ups and downs of the distributions within welfare systems and that the big divide here is generational in the sense that for younger people who may have to put in 300 job applications just to get an interview, who are dealing with student debt, for whom housing is a nightmare, it might have to apply multiple times just to get, you know, a tendency somewhere. These things have felt very immediately, but all of those frustrations that you talk about are there. For people with a comfortable pension who own their own home, older voters, maybe whatever government is delivering doesn't actually matter that much to them. Of course, we do know that those people vote, the younger ones don't, so that deliverers might be targeting the people who would feel it, but not the people who turn out. I think this comes back to the question we raised earlier of what are you delivering and who are you delivering it for? If deliverers are simply about jobs in growth, then I think it is going to struggle in a country like Britain where a large proportion of the actual electorate, the people who actually vote, are older, more secure voters who own their own homes, who have pensions, who have a level of economic security, that means that the level of unemployment or employment doesn't necessarily particularly affect their day-to-day circumstances. But I think you can actually link this to a sort of bigger and more long-running set of changes, which is that since the 1960s, political scientists have argued that the way people think about the world, the way people engage with the world, the way people engage with politics is increasingly post-material. As societies have become more affluent, there is less of a need for people to shake their political identity around purely their material interests, and we see the rise of more sort of values-based politics and values-based interests. We can link this as well back to the media story, which is that there's a lot of evidence that cultural politics in America was reinforced when television crannons found that cultural stories got more viewers than traditional economic coverage. So I think that there's an argument that increasing sections of the electorate are motivated by post-material factors, more than material factors. And then as you say, there is the question of differentiation of different kinds of economic outcomes affecting different people. I think if you did something big to house prices, that possibly would effect those older voters who are very invested in the value of the assets that they own. If you did something to inheritance, I imagine that would also motivate those voters, which means there isn't simply a case that there is a neutral set of outcomes that you can deliver that will ensure your popularity, because what people care about and what motivates people and what shapes their experience of the economy day today is going to be a very different set of things. And I think also the Biden example of producers versus consumers is an interesting way to think about it. There's an argument that one thing that has happened in America is that the rise of things like delivery apps has meant that people are actually engaging with the economy in a very different way. And a lot of people almost have the experience of almost having servants, because you have the people who deliver things to you. And that that means that a lot more people actually have a material economic interest in the lower end of the labor market, not having very good wages. And that a lot of Biden's wage growth for the people at the very bottom of the labor market. That was great for them. But if you were someone in a middle income who's getting a lot of Amazon deliveries or delivery orders, that is actually really hitting your bottom line. So there's an argument that too much of the American electorate are now experiencing the economy not just as consumers, but almost as employers. And that's shaping the kind of economic outcomes that they care about. And I think this poses a real challenge to people on the sort of central left in particular, which is if you are primarily interested in boosting wages at the bottom in prioritising employment over inflation, perhaps that's become much more laterally difficult than it would have been in the 1960s when you had governments that were able to survive considerably higher levels of inflation than we've had recently. You said that delivery is one of their problems as well as popularists is an aversion to political argument or at least a reluctance to think that that's the way that you're going to change people's minds. Is it also true that deliverists have a slight aversion to trade-offs, really big chunky political trade-offs, so identifying losers as well as winners? So deliverism is a positive idea. It sounds like what you're in the business of doing is delivering things to people, but it may be that in order say to deliver things to younger people, you've actually got to take things away from older people. And that might be, as he said, inheritance tax, wealth taxes, property taxes, whatever it is, whatever the things that older people are hoarding, you might have to price it out of their fingers and hand it over to another part of the electorate. And even the word deliverism doesn't sound like it's particularly grappling with that question because it sounds like it's only on one side of the equation. And therefore in that respect to it's a little wishful. So I think I'm once again wary of constructing too much of a straw man. I mean, there are relatively few people who would say, yes, I'm a deliverist. I believe that nothing matters except delivering on a neutral set of outcomes. And there aren't any trade-offs here. And I think there are plenty of people who would describe themselves as broadly speaking, interested in doing deliverism, who would say, yes, I know who I'm delivering for. I'm delivering for, you know, the working class, not the upper class, or I'm delivering for people who use public services, rather than people who rich enough to not have to do that. But just to be clear, are they saying, so I'm delivering for these people, I'm not trying to deliver for these people, or are they saying, I'm delivering for these people, therefore I am taking from these people. I think that there are different versions of deliverism. And I think there's a version of deliverism that sees itself as pursuing a fairly neutral set of indicators like growth and that therefore doesn't have a particular sort of distributive politics. But I think there is another version of deliverism that is almost quite zero salmon that does go, this is my constituency, I serve them, I will be delivering for these voters at the expense of other voters. So I want to finish by focusing on British politics, we told the origin story of this, which is the United States, it moved across the Atlantic in the same way in a way that some Clinton era politics moved across the Atlantic to Blair era politics. I've got really just two questions for you. One is, do you think it is fair to say that the failure of the style of administration was a failure of politician and a politics that was self-consciously deliberate. And if so, is it because he didn't tell a good enough story? He wasn't sensitive enough to the post-material aspects of our politics. So he just wasn't very good at it or the time frames were wrong. So really two questions there. Is it a deliberate failure? And if so, where was the failure? And of course, if you say it wasn't a deliberate failure, we'll move on to the next question. I think it probably is fair to say that starmer's failure is a failure of deliberism. Now, I wouldn't want to say that is everyone in the government and I wouldn't want to say that starmer was always doing pure deliberism. I think there are plenty of points you can identify where the Labour government has been pursuing or did pursue policies that were more about short-term popularity, but more popularist in a sense than they were necessarily deliberate. But I think in general, part of starmer's problem was that he was averse to making arguments. He didn't have a clear moral case or a clear political case about what he was for and why and did believe that if he simply governed well and delivered on a fairly neutral set of indicators that that would generate political and electoral success. And I think in the case of starmer, he very explicitly said this. When he first came to office, he said that his government was going to do delivery as the antidote to popular snake oil and that delivery would be the antidote to that kind of politics, clearly means Nigel Frager reform UK. And when his government first started getting into trouble, his big reset was focused on, as he said, delivery, delivery delivery. So I think if we can take starmer at his word, I think we can say that he was a deliverist politician. I imagine many people might say he wasn't very good at being a deliverist politician, but I do think we can describe starmerism as a kind of failed deliverism. So then is the coming replacement to care starmer and Andy Burnham administration, a rejection of deliverism. So there are different ways of phrasing that question. One of the things that sometimes contrasted with deliverism is what's called a politics of place, which is the idea that one of the values that really matters to people is the place that they live. And even if you are delivering, you have to be very sensitive to the ways in which people might not feel the thing that you think that you're delivering to them because it's not attuned enough to the differences between people's experiences in different places. Places also generate a lot of just inherent value for the people who live there. They have a kind of local patriotism and other things. Andy Burnham, for instance, has used the phrase good growth in every postcode. Now I can't tell if that's deliverist or not. In one sense, it sounds a bit like it is. It's just we're going to make sure that we are aware of the ways in which we've got to check it is felt here and here and here and here and here. But it's also very much a politics of place idea. Is it a sort of post-deliverist politics? Is it a rejection of deliverism? Is it just deliverism under another name? I can't tell. You didn't have to tell me. I have no idea, actually. I think on the politics of place, the politics of place is I think a response to this problem of mediation. And it is an answer that says well actually how people feel about things is shaped by the place that they are, their experience of the place they are. That is what determines whether they feel like the economy is going well or badly. Does the high street look nice? Do people around them seem like they're getting on well? That's good to tell me how they feel about things, not headline rates of economic growth for the employment rate. And I think there's a lot of strength to that argument. And I think that's clearly very influential on Burnham. Now I don't think that necessarily amounts to a kind of wholesale rejection of deliverism. And I think the number of people who would fully reject deliverism and say well actually outcomes don't matter at all. All that matters is being good at being good at argument, being good at messaging, being good at communication. In the same way that the extreme deliverance position is held by relatively few people. I think the extreme anti-deliverance position is held by relatively few people. I think what Burnham has the potential to be is someone who has outcomes they want to deliver, but is very attuned to the emotional affective side of politics, to the importance of identity, of narrative, of storytelling, and of finding ways to enable people to sort of buy into his political project. I think someone it's possibly useful to look at here is Zora and Mamdani, who I think has been very effective at a kind of, you know, what I call show and tell politics. Zora Mamdani is doing lots of things. He's trying to deliver different outcomes, but he is consistently going to great lengths to show people exactly what he's doing and to tell a story about it. I think a really good example was something relatively small, which is that there was a company called Hungry Panda that had scammed a number of small businesses. And Zora Mamdani did a video explaining the fine that he was levying on this company, but he did it standing in front of a panda in the New York Zoo. And so it created this very kind of memorable image that meant that he was delivering an outcome, but also had a way of talking about it that showed it to people that made it grab attention and that really cut through to use that horrible phrase. And I think Burnham has the potential to be a similar kind of politician who can have a governing agenda, but who understands the new media environment and how to talk about it and show it and make an argument about what it's about and using the new forms of social media. You know, forms of social media, I personally would be very, I don't think I'd be happy at all to use it. I'm very sympathetic to politicians who don't feel comfortable using social media in that sort of constant way that some are able to, but I think Burnham so far has shown himself to be quite adept at that. So I think Burnham is the potential to be someone who delivers while also being a kind of show and tell politician. So of course the thing that he and mandani having common is they are and burn them. soon was mayors and they are mayors of places in Burnham's case. Greater Manchester not just Manchester but still a very clearly identified place in New York. There's a lot to talk about delivering for the people of the place and an ability to be filmed on social media outside of local landmarks that people will recognise and they will feel a connection to those places. And the scale of it is just about right for this. These are big places. Greater Manchester's big New York is even bigger but nonetheless they are also concentrated places. A national leadership the trade-offs the scale of problems that you face the range of different challenges on a day-to-day basis memoirs of prime ministers are all full of the culture shock. I mean Gordon Brown's the one I most remember just his description of the difference even being chance of the exchequer and being prime minister. And so that kind of let's call it post-deliverist politics which is both deliberate and also sensitive to narrative and place feels like both location and scale matter and I'm a little skeptical about how easy or even possible it is to deliver that kind of politics on a national stage but that would be my reservation. I don't necessarily disagree I think it is going to be a huge challenge and I think we should never underestimate the challenge of delivering isn't an enormous challenge. Burnham has an agenda we don't fully know its contours yet but I think that whatever it is he will find it difficult to actually deliver it and he will have to deliver it because I think that the deliverers are right that you can't escape having to deliver outcomes for your voters but they're wrong in thinking that that in itself is enough. Results do not speak for themselves you have to speak for them you have to link it to a broader narrative a broader agenda a broader politics and the challenge that Burnham has I think will be delivering the kind of outcomes necessary to go along with the kind of political arguments he seems very adamant to making. Very last question is the problem with deliverers and the ism I mean we've more or less agreed politics without delivery is a very weird kind of politics and it's probably not sustainable but this is a recently coined ism comes out of a particular set of debates but by making it an ism it gives it a kind of jargon-y plausibility but actually when you look at it there isn't really certainly there's not an ideology there I don't think and it sounds oversold delivery fine maybe even deliverrology fine but deliver ism sounds to me like a step too far. I think that's right I think the problem comes not with the idea that delivery is important or that delivery can benefit you electorally the problem comes with the idea that it isn't enough on its own that it is the bill and end all and I think the problem partly came in because the concept was developed in the context of leading centre left politicians Biden and Stammer who were in quite different ways unsuited to actually doing politics and so deliver ism became a kind of alternative to the parts of politics that they were unable to do physically in the case of Biden temperamentally in the case of Stammer. I think we've grown quite well to have that entire conversation without Trump's name coming up once so I'll say to listeners if you think that the question of how to deal with Donald Trump is somewhere in the background you can insert his name as and where you think appropriate. A reminder that a new bonus episode to accompany this series is out now on ppf+ it's me talking about something that I think is a really bad idea. I'm talking about what's wrong with the news if you would like to get that episode and all of our bonus episodes plus add free listening automatic sign up to our newsletter you know what to do click on the link in the show description go to our website ppfideers.com and sign up now next time in our regular slot something a little bit different I'm talking to the historian and broadcaster Greg Jenner about an idea that is everywhere in our culture but has a really interesting history and lots of quite unusual things wrong with it we are going to be talking about the idea of celebrity do join us for that this has been past present future