Governing for Change - Re-thinking Labour's statecraft

Transcript- Governing for Change - Re-thinking Labour’s Statecraft

First of all, thank you for joining us. It's really good to be here. I'm really pleased to be here for this discussion about, I guess, Labour's approach to governance and statecraft. So my name is Emily Robinson. I'm an academic at the University of Sussex and I'm going to be discussing a paper we're discussing beforehand whether or not it's the official launch of the paper. We think maybe it is governing for change, written by John Wilson and John Denham, who I was just in a moment. So, I mean, they will introduce the paper, but basically it's it's a sort of the outcome of discussions I think I have about the past year affiliated with but but not necessarily entirely coming out of the Labour Together discussions, which is also being sort of launched this week. And so I think, you know, they'll say a little bit more about the paper in a moment. But first, I'll just introduce them and also our other two speakers or respondents. So, I mean, you probably already know, but John Wilson is professor of modern history at King's College London. John Denham is director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton. I'm also former Labour minister and we have two great respondents Jessica Stoddart, Deputy Chief Executive of New Local. And Philip Roycroft, who until very recently was the Cabinet official responsible for intra union relations. So I think we'll have a really great perspective on some of the things we're going to hear about. So I'm going to hand over to us because now John and John will speak for about 15 minutes, maybe up to 20 minutes between them. And then I'm going to give Jessica and Philip about 10 minutes each, which will leave us about half an hour to discussion questions afterwards. I'm going to have to sneak up to the end of that because I'm teaching shortly, but hopefully we get lots of questions on that. Okay. So without further ado, over to you, John. Thank you and thanks, everyone. And I'm going to share my screen if I can. I'm having problem showing my screen. 1/2. Oops. I'm having. Sorry, I'm having problems checking my screen. Sophie, would you mind. If I can share and said. Okay, sorry about that. My everything was working closely. So. Um. Thanks to, thanks to everybody for being here and thanks to Emily for so kind of introducing us to Philip and Jessica for their comments in a moment. And it's been a real pleasure to work with John. I'm kind of putting together the ideas that we're going to be talking about, you know, sort of over the next half an hour or so. Just to say that this is, as you said, this has been work that John and I have developed out of a broader discussion with about ten or so people on a sort of steering group that Philip has been part of, and that has been an interlocutor with, you know, kind of thinking of thinking about, you know, kind of how we govern Britain and how it how how labour approaches governing Britain. And it's extremely great grateful to that kind of broad a group of people who include sort of former Labour, former Labour politicians, academics as best say, former bureaucrats as a big word. But yeah, so for most members of the civil service, I must not use the word bureaucrat. So I'm going to kind of kick off sort of introducing the paper and then John is going to going to continue in 10 minutes or so. And I would just start. By the kind of first flights are going to have to that you know to say that we don't we don't need now. Given where we are politically to talk about the problems and if you like the failures of modern Britain, we live in an in an unequal society, one of the most unequal developed countries. There are a society in which there is poverty on a scale that I think many of us would have not expected, you know, kind of when we were much younger, a society which has public services which seem to be very good delivering vaccines but nothing else. And the vaccination has been a success story. But, you know, kind of this is a state that's been incapable of organising people. It's been a state that's been thinking of COVID and capable of protecting people in care homes, you know, is incapable of coordinating the economy in a way that leads to kind of productive outcomes for all sections of the country. We relatively to other countries where society that has kind of low productivity. And some of the and what's important is many of these problems kind of map themselves territorially. I think we live in a political culture that is marked by grievance inequality, sense of injustice mapped onto place. In particular, we talk about left left behind areas, red wall seats. There's the politics of nationalism in Wales and Scotland. And Northern Ireland is kind of driven, driven by that sense of grievance. But it's, you know, across across the UK. Right. And those kind of grievances kind of threaten to undo our policy and kind of lead to the abolition of UK. And of course there's a lack of trust in institutions and leadership now. From a Labour perspective in a sense. Now it's not easy to find to find people to blame in the voters are beginning to. If you look at the opinion polls kind of to share the sense within that the labour has had for a while about where one might lay laid the blame. Next slide. If that's okay. So, you know, and obviously we have we have kind of prime minister and government kind of is increasing is decreasing popular. The next slide. But in a sense, what our argument is, is that things are things are more complicated and that in a sense, there's a danger. I mean, this is something that perhaps a year ago, six months ago, when one might not imagine oneself saying, but there's a danger in the kind of current collapse of a conservative party supporting it allows Labour to simply think that it can carry on as it has been. We can sort of move in, if you like, to this sort of government and state as it is. And we just need better people, you know, kind of people, politic political leaders who are more serious and less absurd than Boris Johnson and, you know, kind of and there's a danger that the possibility of electoral success over the next six months here leads to a refusal and a failure to kind of really think hard about about why why Britain is in such a mess and why what the problems in in not just the kind of characters who our current system of government leads to a ruling our politics. But in that system of government itself. Our argument is we need a better analysis and a better answer to the problem of government in the U.K. The next slide, if that's okay. So let's kind of summarise where we are in terms of the system of government that we live in since the Second World War. There was a British state that coordinated what was seen at the time as a kind of relatively homogenous British nation, that there's a sense of a kind of national economy that was ruled particular, consisted of sort of large scale enterprise. That was the sort of normative, you know, big factories, big, big companies, state or private sector. And that was kind of what the post-war state was built to to manage, but it failed to kind of sort of to to to deal with the kind of tensions that grew from the 1960s and the 1970s. We can debate about and debate in all sorts of ways. But it was a decade of tension, industrial strife, social, social, social tension and so forth. And if you like, the kind of the answer that emerged, emerged to the crisis of the British state in the 1980s was was in the 1970s. So it was too for the state to focus on, much less. And we ended up with a but but in a sense too, to be centralised or to continue being centralised or to be more centralised. And so since, you know, since the since the nineties, we've had an essential state that is good to good for some of the things it was concerned. It was interested in doing financialization, privatisation, you know, kind of sort of managing the relationship with what was seen as a benign global economy and sort of and not that much, much more than that, you know, sort of redistributing the proceeds of growth, if anything. Post, crash, post, Brexit, post, you know, kind of many the many crises that have occurred globally and nationally in the last in the last decade or more, it's become apparent that we need we need, you know, the state as it is, doesn't doesn't work. It hasn't been able to meet the needs that that that certainly a Labour government would would have for it and in particular the challenges for to have institutions that exist across the UK. And by institutions I mean schools, hospitals, health, health institutions kind of businesses, you know, kind of public and private sector and so on. And also local government and and governments more broadly, but that are empowered because we're not going to be able to kind of to meet the enormous social challenges that Britain faces, unless there's a sense of, of institutions throughout the UK having their own agenda, being able to kind of solve problems, being resourceful and and being able to and responsive and based against their own constituencies, but at the same time coordinate. There needs to be coordinated coordination across the different scales of the UK because some of the challenges that we face, many of the challenges that we we face face in Britain and will globally require a connexion, whether it's climate change, whether it's engaging with the global economy and so forth. And our argument is that kind of central government today is just kind of incredibly ill suited to to kind of lead a state, to lead a polity that consists of empowered local institutions that are effectively coordinated across the UK to meet the challenges that we need to face. Next slide. So right now we have, you know, very weak, limited local government capacity. Local government wants to do more, but is limited. You know, it's over dependent on property based growth. Most of the time, whether that's going to, you know, Greenwich, where I live, or Manchester and places that are not capable of leading property based growth and don't have resources, there's a lack of clarity about what kind of powers the places have. You know, nations and nations, regions, localities that kind of the government's approach to devolution is just doing a whole series of deals rather than any kind of clarity, any broader holistic approach. And it's poor, poor coordination and confusion in the relationship between centre nations and localities. And, you know, in England, in one of our four nations, there's no machinery of government. I'm. The problem and head over to John in a moment. But the problem, in a sense, is because in our argument is that we we failed to recognise the kind of polity that the UK actually is now. Next slide. That, you know, we imagine that we live in this sort of central government. Government imagines it lives in this homogenous, unitary nation state in which you don't need to distinguish between powers that exist at different in different places. But that's not the reality of how actually most people, like citizens, experience life. The UK is a is a union of multiple places. You could have both. Whether that's localities, towns or nations. Scotland, Wales. Northern Ireland. And it's a union based upon the common interest and consent, kind of rather than simply kind of the centre effectively being able to tell everybody else what to do. It's so this is a polity that's made up of. The central point is it's made up of many different centres of power and authority, which each have their own forms of democratic legitimacy and accountability. We forget about local elections, important national elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, etc.. And the role of central government there needs to be to lead out, to empower, to lead, to co-ordinate and to broker relations between the kind of constituent parts of, of, of the polity at different scales. But it doesn't it's not effective if it simply imposes its will against them all the time. There needs to be leadership. There needs to be coordination. But simply not imagining that those kind of local centres of power, national centres of power don't exist, is is just leads continually to failure. And that's where we are now. Was I going to hand over to you, John Thero. Is it next? The next. I can take over if you want, John. I've lost count of which labour. Okay. Sophie, can you carry around to the size? That's great. Save me. Okay, so let me talk now about how Labour responds to these points. And thank you for that, John, and everybody else who's on this call. The first thing is Labour organises across the nations on the Isle of Britain. It ought to have consistent principles. If you think for a moment though, that Scottish Labour is Scottish unionist, that does not play that much to ideas of Scottish nationhood. Welsh Labour is distinctly Welsh. Playing very strongly is the idea of Welsh labour that Welsh nationhood, Scottish labour is in favour of the union. Welsh Labour says the union cannot carry on as it is at the moment. And in England, where the Labour Party is called UK Labour, it barely mentions England as a nation or engages in any discussion about the union whatsoever. Labour can't actually continue, I think is a party that has such different approaches to nationhood, national democracy, the union and identity as we have at the moment. And we need a way of approaching our politics and the statecraft, the weaves together, the fact that the people live in places, have a sense of belonging, that state power needs to be distributed, and that we have a multi we all have a level at which we belong to a place to a nation and the union as a whole. Next slide, please, Sophie. What we draw out in our paper is that once you recognise the power is dispersed across lots of institutions and lots of places, you have to be committed to political pluralism. You can't avoid it. This is not an argument in this instance about electoral reform or electoral justice, but simply a recognition that power is going to be legitimately held by different people in different places. To put it simply. What Labour's Andy Burnham might want for Greater Manchester has to be something that the Conservatives Andy Street is entitled to for the West Midlands as well. And without dispersing power, it will be impossible truly to reform economic and social policy across the union. But as John has said, reform cannot simply be about devolution without effective coordination between devolved institutions, national government and the UK government. Challenges like the zero carbon economy, the post-Brexit economy will be impossible. And pluralism that is essential. A respect for all those who hold power is key to building a shared story about renewal. And in part, this is a very appropriate it's winner takes all mindset when Labour says the road to power lies through Scotland. It not only conjures up the unfortunate idea that the historic role of Scottish Labour is to put Labour into the Scottish voters, is to put Labour into power in Westminster, but also the idea that power really should lie in London and in Westminster. So politics will continue around real differences of values and opinion. But government also needs to work with all those who win. But next slide, please. Structures also matter, and there's a long way to go to create the empowered national and local institutions we need. This is going to be a big challenge for an incoming Labour government. It would inherit deep economic and social policies. It will want to tackle them as quickly as possible. New ministers, most of whom have never held office before, will sit in their offices unaware that the most of the levers they want to pull are not really attached to anything that is going to respond. And the whole of the union stage will say to ministers, you want to get on with things don't be diverted by devolving power or constitutional change. It's not important. And that way, of course, lies no change at all. On the other hand, what a new government could not spend years on constitutional reflection. It needs to do things from day one. So what John and I propose is what we call strategic incrementalism, a series of institutional reforms that takes the UK steadily towards a new settlement. And at the heart of that, picking up on what John said, is understanding that we're in a transition from the post-war unitary British state towards something much more like a union of nations sustained with consent by common interests. Once we understand that's the journey we are on, then we can see New Labour's devolution. Not in the end in itself that Labour imagined, but as a step in the journey towards a union of nations. And we need to understand the radicalism of what is needed. The mindset of the Central Union state that government is best done from London by people who know what they're doing. The local government cannot be trusted and is a bit rubbish and the devolved governments and impertinent inconvenient to the proper management of the UK. That mindset is very deeply rooted and has been absorbed internalised by the major political parties. So what we present as a series of manageable reforms do amount to a fundamental challenge to the culture of the Central Union's state. Some people have argued for Scottish independence and for the break up of the Union have argued it on the basis that the Central Union state cannot be reformed from within. So this is an attempt to have a strategy to prove that wrong. Now you can. You can discuss the order of reform. But for example, I'd suggest that three initial changes would be to delineate the government of England from that of the Union. Many of our current problems stemmed from the fact that the Union, government and the government of England are one and the same. And the confusion between the two in England and outside is manifold. You'd create a machinery of government for England, a civil service level with an English secretary of State. Secondly, you'd create initially a consultative senate of the UK in which all four nations and local government from all four nations are represented. Not note a Senate of the devolved nations with the Union and the English regions. And then you would need to put next slide, please, the rights of national governments to make policy and shape union policy on a statutory basis with new mechanisms for intergovernmental and national union relations. There have been some proposals in the last. Few days from the government to strengthen the current system. But fundamentally, they still rely on everybody playing by essentially unwritten rules. Next slide, please, at local level. And this is admittedly a very English perspective. John and I are both from England. We need to have constitutional powers for local democracy. We would argue the same principles should apply in the other nations. But the right to draw down powers and resources should be a statutory basis. Local governments should be reflect should reflect areas that have an identity and belonging, not be centrally imposed structures, suiting a Whitehall idea of neatness. We need to enable localities to create the subregional and regional structures. They need to tackle larger area problems like perhaps transport and energy. We need to create new partnerships between English local government and the English government, and we also need short term action to tackle regional underfunding. Next slide, please. The point about these changes that they will evolve over time, which is why we call it strategic incrementalism. So as you develop an English machinery of government, you then develop Westminster into a dual mandate parliament so that English MPs can properly make English domestic legislation. English ministers will become accountable to English MPs in that Westminster Parliament. You would move from a consultative UK Senate to a UK Cabinet in which the first ministers of the devolved nations and the English Secretary of State would be represented. Embodying the pluralism we're talking about earlier and longer term, and I don't under us underestimate the difficulties. The move towards a new UK wide replacement fair funding formula to replace Barnett, which has both winners and losers. And of course, continuing with civil service reform. And I think we would argue from a Labour Party point of view, if we believe in the devolution of power and accountable institutions, then perhaps as a party, Labour should be based on those local government units of power rather than just own Westminster constituencies to which the final slides. Just one example of I suppose how we envisage the difference if you look at decarbonising. Our current model is essentially command and control policy made in Westminster, delivered through a small number of central civil servants. In that model, when you come to, for example, look at onshore wind, you find that some MPs from the governing party don't like windfarms and so no one can have an onshore wind farm. The system obstructs the possibility of local ownership and income from renewable energy that might make such developments more palatable and more popular. So you don't get any you want to have electric charging points? Well, that's obviously a national issue, isn't it? So we should run policy from a national level. But that's where the Treasury intervenes and prevents the funding being available. So you end up with an inadequate network. The alternative approach with empowered institutions actually enables us to run things as a ship between empowered local institutions, working on local knowledge and local leadership to identify how to make policy change popular, how to make it work, and see the challenge of resourcing as a shared national challenge rather than something that is either decided yes or no at the centre. I'm going to leave it there. I hope I've done enough to sketch out the sort of changes that we want to see and the really fundamental mindset that is needed about how Labour imagines power and how it believes it should be handled. If we want to deliver the social and economic reforms that the Labour Party advocates, back to you. I mean.  Thank you. Thank you, both of you. That's a very ambitious paper and I'm looking forward to discussing it. I'm going to pass over to Jessica in just a moment. I can see somebody has to hand a can of Gilchrest. I'm just going to explain now that we've got a Q&A button at the bottom so people can post their questions in there, then we'll gather them all up and and ask them at the end if that's okay. You can also comment on other people or upvote other people's questions so we can see which ones are the most pertinent to everybody. Okay. So I'm going to now pass over to Jessica for 10 minutes commenting on that. Thank you. Thank you so much, and thanks very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be part of this discussion. It's a great discussion to be having. It's impossible to do the paper justice in 10 minutes. I'm just going to try and give a few thoughts of being English myself from a kind of more local perspective and the kind of local democracy elements in the paper. Just to start off with a note of caution, it is very easy to be a radical the evolutionary when you are the party of opposition and it is much harder to see such an agenda when you are in power. So this is absolutely the right time for Labour to be having such a discussion because if if this is to be reality, then whenever it is that Labour does hold power, they need to enter office with a very clear agenda for change and a real determination to understand the ends that you're working towards and to to see to see that through sometimes discussions about devolution or constitutional reform, when led by people who are passionate about those issues, can be presented as an end in themselves. Rather then I think what this is, which is a means to an end, it is a governing is a means to achieving change in the country. It's not that we want to do constitutional reform for the sake of it. And sometimes arguments like that potentially don't capture the public's imagination if they are presented in terms that that themselves. So is absolutely right to anchor this in an account of future challenges, where the world is, where we know the world will be going in the next decades, the big, serious challenges that we we have to tackle as a nation and how the system needs to shift in order to achieve that. That also does need to be based on a serious account of what has gone right and wrong in the past and how things need to change to achieve that. So an understanding of that history is important, but equally an awareness of what the challenges of the future. And I like the example of decarbonising that John gave at the end of that presentation. It's it's clearly our climate goals are beyond any single person, any single institution, any single nations ability to achieve on their own. But certainly it's an issue that governing institutions need to not do to people. They do. They don't need just people's consent to act, but they also need people to be active and positive participants themselves. So we need to think through how our governing institutions are able to kind of leverage people's action and activity and consent. And that new local we talk a lot about the concept of community power, which I think is a really important concept in this regard, is basically refers to the understanding that people themselves have assets, capabilities and insights into their own situations. And if institutions like public services work with them as equals rather than as professionals that do to them, but actually rivals kind of leverage that the aspirations and insights you could get more sustainable outcomes. So some of the things that are at the back of this presentation that the shift from a kind of more paternalistic state model that seeks to do to rather than work with people for a more I guess what's characterised as governance of that possibly since the 1980s, that more kind of market transactional approach where where it's a kind of deal or a thing that you get, you give this and you get that. But it's quite a narrow, kind of narrow kind of approach. I think what we've been saying, we've been seeing lots of different approaches over the last few years from different local government institutions, different public services, trying to find opportunities to leverage people's participation and deliberation and much more and much different ways that does try to understand what they want to get out of the situation, what with the grain of that much more. So I think a lot of that is at the back of this. Fundamentally, how can you work with people as equals and how can you do that? By building trust in the institutions. An important thing for Labour to consider is what a future Labour government would inherit from from an outgoing Conservative government. It's certainly fair to say that the concept of place has grown in recognition over the last few years, but there's no clear view of today from Whitehall. Different Whitehall departments have different definitions of places. So while you might see that there is seem to be a way to levelling up what people that may or may not perceive similar devolution. That's that's one part of what holds the approach to place. You have another approach coming from health, for example, where you have a system reform that's not at all aligned with local democracies, give pace and local government, which is creating different factions in different areas. And then, for example, you have left, which is a whole about the geography. So we have much more of a recognised concept of life, a very kind of distorted and complex view of it, which means that when you are in the place, your view of the system creates complications in getting over it. Of course, we've gone through a decade of austerity, but there are also features of how like there is a resource. The presentation touched on fiscal powers. We are an absolute outlier of advanced Western countries in the amount of the lack of fiscal revenue, rising power that legislators have, and the ability, Frank, just just to kind of match investment to made locally, which does need which does need addressing. We have a very complicated system for reducing arrears, which makes it incredibly difficult to channel funding where it's needed and to get maximum impact for that funding. I just wanted to touch on a couple of couple of strands of thought or kind of habits of argument within Labour that I think are a challenge to this concept of pluralism, which I think is a very good principle to be talking about and becoming comfortable with. But I think it does go against the grain of some labour thought or some kind of natural over thought, which I think we need to be cognisant of and challenge and understand that this is why a pluralist approach and a cheap labour. And the first is that labour tends to see that standardised uniform approaches are the best approaches to tackling things like poverty and inequality. But inequality is so complex and so entrenched and is deepening in our country, which is happens to also be one of the most centralised countries in the advanced Western world. So I think if any Labour future government in the 2020s or beyond needs to understand how to tackle inequality. By definition, it will be starting differently in different areas, such as the extent of inequality and its links to geographic inequality. So it needs to be much more recognised. I think within like whether you would have principles of universalism and a kind of macro society approach, actually, if you're going to effectively tackle inequality as you find it, you absolutely need a pluralist approach to governance and statecraft. And that's not to that's not to kind of mess around with principles about what everybody gets and everybody should should go and seek the same outcomes in order to achieve those outcomes. And you might need different outputs. And the kind of postcode lottery argument is often deployed within Labour as a reason why you do need a one size fits all approach. I would argue that we have the biggest postcode lottery of life. Chances with where you are born has an impact on your life expectancy. And this has happened despite the centralised states and I think Labour needs to be much more, much more appreciative of that a pluralist approach to some of those social justice ends. Another habit. The second one is that I think just over the last decade of austerity does become a bit of a habit of having a quite zero sum argument about price. I think this is probably characterised by the fact that within austerity you are arguing about scarce resources and where they are best invested. John and John were hinting at it. But I think when you are talking about this kind of divisive grievance politics, it's very easy for anyone, but it's certainly very easy for the Labour Party to start talking in terms of north versus south or London versus Manchester or the north towns versus cities. This place needs this investment more and I think that that can become quite damaging and populist potentially. Quite. It's quite easy to make those arguments of the other areas and why this area has done worse needs more. But I think the challenge with this agenda is to foster a sense of common purpose while still acknowledging and value pluralism. I think that's quite hard, it's quite easy and I think Labour would need to be quite clear that it would be challenging itself to slip into that kind of rhetoric. And then finally, that is a strand of labour thoughts around this I think, which would just seek to resurrect everything that was dismantled. In 2010. So there's kind of a strand of the old regionalism is just what we need to kind of recreate. And actually it was the dismantling of that that is the root of all our challenges on. And I would just caution against that particular kind of strong argument, although clearly there were some institutions that were kind of got rid of. I think the fact that there was very little public outcry at the end of the old days really shows that they weren't anchored into people's identity and sense of place. The great example is Northwest. Did I think they are in Northwest? You're a school sort of mancunian you know that to some extent we might have critiques of it, but to some extent the devolution architecture that has emerged over the last ten years potentially does capture people's sense of their identity and place. And I think it would be harder for some for future government to dismantle them. And that's that's kind of the test. So one of the tests for a future Labour government is to create institutions and attachment institutions that endures beyond the life cycle of the government. And I think for now having a good account of what works and what what less well in the past is a really good place to start for the future. So I really welcome this discussion. There's lots more to say, but looking forward to getting into some questions of that. Great. Thanks, Jessica. And there are lots of questions already coming through on the Q&A. I'm sort of trying to gather some of them up into groups, but yet you keep doing that. And I'm going to pass over to Philip now.  Thank you very much. And and thank you for inviting me to comment on the paper. Sir John and John, it's been a pleasure to be involved in the seminars over the last few months. And as part of this process, I'm just to pick up on the comments made earlier on. I suppose I would describe myself as a reformed bureaucrat. John I don't mind being called a bureaucrats, but that's what I was maybe now a reforming bureaucracy or an excuse across. So I spent a good part of my career in a devolved context in Scotland, which last ten years of my career in Whitehall and actually one of my jobs early on in that, in that work was administering the queue to to the RDA currently the lapsed game. But for the last seven years of my time in Whitehall as opposed to Brexit, I was responsible for constitutional and devolution issues. So I witnessed the the Coalition attempts to reform the Constitution, House of Lords and the rest of it, as well as the stuttering of the whole concept of intergovernmental relations under pressure of Brexit. I thought I could most usefully add to this conversation by looking at this the suite of ideas from the perspective of how do you get them to happen and to pay them the respect as a serious threat to not just an incoming Labour government may seek to implement. So what are the issues and challenges going to be to in order to get these reforms into place and delivered? And I relatively briefly pick up on the four points, the coherence of a package of reform, winning public support, the geography of dispersed power come back to that just because we mentioned that, but also handling and dealing with Whitehall, it starts off on the coherence of the reform package. So much of constitutional reform, if we're allowed to call it that in this country over the years, has been done effectively in a piecemeal fashion. I say that was true even of the 1997 reforms in coming Labour government. Then, despite the fact a lot went on, there was a lack of coherence in that package and just one example of that, obviously very, very big changes in the governance of the United Kingdom in terms of devolution, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but no real change to the way in which the centre of governance in Whitehall went about its business. And to some extent we've been dealing with the consequences of that ever since. So the importance of seeing the whole and to be able to demonstrate how each part builds to a coherent whole, and also the way in which different parts of this agenda reinforce each other. So John, as mentioned, the reforms to intergovernmental relations that this government has introduced just over the last week or so welcome in their own right. This is progress, in my view. But those reforms will only really be effective if there is greater accountability for the way in which they're managed. If you just leave it to the system to to to operate, those reforms are written on paper. They will not make much of a difference. And I can say that having had over seven years of managing the intergovernmental relations process in Whitehall, so how do you build in accountability? I would argue, for example, that you give some of that accountability via a reformed second chamber just in terms of this experience of this programme as well. Just the I like the idea of incremental change, but incremental though there is always a risk. When you hear the word incremental, that means slow. And this sort of programme, if it's going to work, needs to to be done quickly and early in administration. It's the sort of thing, if left to you three, it'll probably never happen. And certainly if it's left to the second administration or the administration, it will not happen. So getting started early, establishing the principles, it seems to me is absolutely critical and then allowing the implementation to play out over the lifetime of an administration. So that's point one parent package and implement early public support. This does need support about reforms of this nature will be politically controversial for some for many perhaps there will be many vested interests and who will seek to put obstacles in the road and the more that public support. Can be demonstrated that more momentum will build up around such a programme and you can see examples of this happening. The changes that came in Scotland in the late nineties built on all that was done by the Constitutional Convention and where Labour politicians could claim that the devolution was the second will of the people of Scotland. And that programme advances really with really very little opposition to it because it could demonstrate that popular support. Contrast what happened in the north east in 2004, or even in Wales in 1997, when relatively half baked proposals never garnered and that not popular support fell over in one instance and in the other instances in Wales just got over the line. But it was only just so building that popular support system is absolutely critical and people always say, well, constitutional change doesn't ring peoples bells. I don't agree with that. If you can make it relevant to things that matter in their lives. I think Jessica made some interesting comments on that. But one thing that is worth thinking about is what is the role of referendums in all of this and the balance between representative and direct democracy? Do you go? Do you do you see to to introduce referendums to confirm these changes? I would argue on some quite big things like House of Lords reform, which has been and proper reform. We're a century overdue for reform in the House of Lords that a clear proposal in the manifesto could be implemented rapidly without a referendum. I think, by contrast, some of the more local changes, if there's establishments of new tiers of accountability, confirmatory referendums could be quite helpful to establish that credibility. But that, I think, does need to go through and geography would disperse. Just very, very briefly to say, I agree with the the risks in this. There will be a messy geography that is absolutely clear. But the approach of the paper to say the principles that underpin that needs to be clear, I think is the right way to go. And also the working through the postcode lottery thing, as Jessica's already mentioned, it seems to me, is is critical. Finally, in a way, what you might call my specialist subject, some of is dealing with Whitehall. This will be a big upheaval Whitehall, no doubt about it. The centre of our system of government still gravitates more around the UK's place in the world than it does about the territorial governance of the United Kingdom itself. Whitehall, I would argue, has never done UK territorial governance well. The Treasury will be a particular public resistance and will only let go of, for example, meaningful fiscal powers to the regions of England with great reluctance. So this will require a big shift in both the culture and structures of Whitehall. No time to gain a lot of detail about that, but some points to make about dealing with that. One is this needs to be done very quickly. There's no point to come in and say when you think about this. You are waste a huge amount of time that is coming in with a prescription ready to go. Need to think as part of that shift in incentives for both civil service and ministers as well. But for civil servants, for example, in my book, nobody should be promoted to senior civil service unless they've had experience outside of Whitehall, the local government, devolved government. OBI-WAN It may be that you shift incentives, you shift the thought processes. And final point, it's the it's the changing of the culture to emphasise that you only get things done and done well by partnership work. And that is a partnership that is cross-departmental within Whitehall that's difficult enough and but also with the entities that hold political power outside of Whitehall, devolved administrations, regional governance, local government. And that becomes, if you like, the, the abiding culture of Whitehall are moving swiftly to put in place, that in place will be essential to achieve the impacts of these changes. Thank you then. I hope that's some help in thinking through how you might make this happen. Thanks for that and thanks for sticking to time. Okay. So we've got a little while for questions. As I say, the lots have come through and I've also. Yes. So I've been trying to sort of some some of those up. I guess we should go back to the to John's now to think about some of the things that that Jessica and Philip write. So I think, you know, basically how to implement this and how to gain public political and kind of bureaucratic institutional support. And I think also this question about sort of how to embedded in kind of public culture, public kind of affections as well as institutional ways and and about sort of devolving further down. So that is that's a kind of summing up of some of the things we've just heard. But some of the things I've come through on the discussion, I think beautiful and said to maybe kind of fall kind of category. So one about policy politics, you know, what do we do if there are divisions between different parties being represented in different areas of the U.K., particularly mentions of the SNP and Sinn Fein, questions about kind of units and scale. So does England and Wales make sense as a unit? Is England itself too big? And how can we push down below this to people? Is it a kind of citizen level, not just elites? And quite a few questions about Labour. Labour's ends, you know, is this a means to which we could achieve kind of nationalisation at a local level? How does it fit with labour values about sort of uniformity and and uniform outcomes and how, if at all, does it help in times of challenging concepts of government? And then I think the final set of questions with you about consent. So, you know, how do you again consent how how do you gain sort of interest for this within a Labour Party which hasn't previously shown any inclination to do any of this kind of thing? And then about, you know, whether there's an opportunity represented by the current sort of breakdown of governance by convention, is there a chance to push for a kind of written constitution? Now, there were some questions I've come through as I've been speaking, so I haven't summarise those, but I think that's probably enough for you to be going on with. Do you want to take just a couple of minutes each, see what you can get to out of that, and then we'll maybe take another round? Okay, let me let me try, Emily. I'll just pick up a couple of points, then you drag us back onto that. One question comes up, you know what, if you have the SNP in Holyrood where Labour in Wales, maybe Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, and somebody said under the Conservatives in England, let's just remember that's what we've got. I mean it's the DUP in Northern Ireland, not Sinn Fein. The Conservative government of the United Kingdom exists entirely on a majority of the seats. It doesn't win in any other parts of the United Kingdom. And part of our problem that we've got here is precisely that our geography and our size and our our electoral system forces an English elected government onto the whole of the United Kingdom. Now, the reality is we've got to find a way of. Try if you want the country, the union together in which you say it is legitimate for different parts of the union to elect different political parties if they wish to do so, we absolutely need to stop an English elected government simply saying, as the current government does with its muscular unionism, Well, we've won because there are more seats in England, so we get to tell everybody else what to do. That's what's tearing the union apart at the moment. But the aim of this proposal is to, as far as you can build in the principle of respect for people winning elections. And the idea in a sense, I mean, Northern Ireland, we may need to do some more work because the Northern Ireland system actually produces a bipartisan leadership in Northern Ireland necessary great effectiveness all of the time. And maybe our proposal proposals are oversimplified, but trying to prevent Northern Ireland being represented within our proposed UK Cabinet or even a Senate before that because they elect the wrong people is not a way that's going to keep the union together. The second point related to that is the question debating that. I think it's this delineating the English government machinery of government from the union government is essential because this confusion between a government with a majority in England and the governments of the Union is a real problem. The argument for England is not that England just needs to operate at national level, but it does have separate policy across the whole range of domestic policy implemented not by English institutions but by a union institution. Separating the two is the key to getting the devolution within England, which is necessary. One of the reasons we don't get devolution in England is there's nothing at the centre which is an English government to devolve power from. So actually the two go hand in hand, creating an English machinery of government and ultimately representation in parliament and devolving power with England. Within England are to two sides of the same coin. They're not separate challenges. John, did you want to come in on anything? Yes. Sorry. There's a comment from sort of, I guess, the kind of hardest opposition to what we're talking about came from Putin in the comments. You know, talking about, you know, the idea of sort of Labour as a party committed to sort of place less uniformity, equality, let's say, and that kind of examples of societies where there is sort of, you know, seemingly kind of a devolution of power. Bosnia or wherever, which are kind of sort of continually in deadlock. And I just wanted to sort of, you know, confront those sort of arguments, which have a really strong resonance within the kind of labour movement kind of head on in two ways. Firstly, you know I don't think Labour's ever been committed to, let's put it this way, Labour's never been non-national. The nation has always been part of what Labour. Labour's been out. Labour's been about whether it's a British nation at some moment or all kind of, you know, or England, Scotland, Wales etc. you know. So this is a constant, you know, sort of relationship between these forms of national belonging at different levels and the Labour and the Labour Party. And, you know, so there's never been the kind of disavowal of place that kind of is important for various kind of communist traditions or whatever, which within, within, within the labour movement other than anything a kind of sort of minority of places. So. So in kind of talking about place and in talking about locality and in talking about nation, where we're kind of connecting to a really rich vein of sort of thinking on the left, you know, and we're arguing that you can talk about locality and nation without that necessarily being conservative, without necessarily it being, you know, kind of something that is sort of nationalistic in the traditional way we use that term and is compatible with pluralism. A very early argument that, you know, sort of labour, you know, kind of nationalists made in the early 20th century was in favour of anti-colonial independence for parts of empire, saying that we're England, we're Britain, we're self-governing in other parts of the world, should have the same rights as nations that we do. So I just kind of that that sort of politics of place is always been a part of it has been powerful within Labour's tradition at various places. And I don't see that deadlock happens where you have the idea of absolute power, where there is a kind of winner takes all approach to power, and that's where you have deadlock. Because the reality of course is the winner can never take there's always countervailing forces. And so what we're talking about is moving from a scenario in which Scotland imagines it can get it, get what it wants, or Scottish nationalists think they can get what they want from independence. You know, British muscular unionists in the Tory party think that they can get what they want by simply annihilating Scotland, you know, Scottish autonomy, if you like. And we're saying actually and that's what leads to deadlock, that's what leads to chaos. And what we're saying is actually no, if you recognise the multiplicity of the centres of power within the UK, which is just wrecking our communities, you reckon this is reality? This is actually how most people see themselves, how Britain really is. Then we can get things done because we recognise that we need to have a conversation, we need to have a discussion and we need to have a dialogue. And that's so, so, so that connects just quickly to a second point, which is how are intelligence and other other questions about how do we get this to happen? This is not something that Labour, within its kind of tradition has has recently is really kind of seen as seen as important. And I think the kind of Jessica mentioned, you know, sometimes devolution and the like you mentioned the word devolution doesn't exist within within our people or at least within the slides. And that's deliberate. You know, when we people who support that kind of sort of radical constitutional reform in terms of kind of localising power, said to, you know, it becomes an end in itself, it becomes an obsession. And also it's often seen as reform in Britain. And I think our point is that actually this is about how you can catch this in terms of getting things done, you can couch it in terms of actually being more effective, just simply, you know, and that's about running with the grain, if you like, of what the UK is now, which is, you know, a highly unequal, geographically dispersed society in which people have very strong sense of local and national belonging, and our politics needs to reflect kind of that reality. So I think, you know, the final element of how do we get Labour to make this happen is we at, you know, actually, to be honest, is too is that it's the hard work of politics that, you know, if if there's enough of us you think this is this is needed, then, you know, we need to be making the case in a kind of labour friendly language, you know, kind of not doing so in saying this is an end in itself, but connecting it to broader labour goals and just, you know, do what anyone does when they try and get any kind of political objective to do to achieve any kind of political objective. But the point is, I think Jessica pointed out, is to connect this not not to this is not, in a sense, a. End in itself, but it's linked to how do we create an effective policy and a socially just policy. Thank you both. So there were quite a few more questions, a few really kind of about this question about place and people's kind of attachment to place and how that is difficult to kind of align with it with a plan, however kind of laudable coming up from the middle. So lots of questions about different parts of England, a question about whether we should be promoting more into places like West Mercia. I'm going to leave you to to to think about those. As I said, I'm going to have to cut it off in a minute. But what I thought we might do is ask maybe Philip first and then Jessica answer come back on some of the points that you've heard and then pass back to the two authors for a final word if that's suitable for everybody. Thank you so much. It's been great and I'm sorry to have to leave before the end. Thanks, Emily. Thanks. And just to pick up the baton and then briefly on some of those comments. Clearly, any shift of this sort of scale and magnitude will require more political lapses from different political backgrounds working together. This happens more than we sometimes recognise in Senate level. We've also had people forget this. We've had Coalition government in this country and we might look back to the last Coalition government five years of relative political stability in many ways. But if you look at opinion polls, I know these best from the Scottish context where I live, but they if you look at what people want, they want the governments that represent them to work together. If you look at what happens behind the scenes, if you look through Cambridge, for example, despite all of the of the political Bernie at the top political level, there is a huge amount of day to day collaboration between administrations because it is necessary to get things done. So I absolutely agree with what John Wilson said about the importance of this for the effects of delivery policy. And it is about challenging the political process to be grown up enough to be able to to work together to deliver those outcomes. Recognising, of course, that there will always be differences of view on what the direction of travel is. Just to pick up a couple of other points on this vexed question of of how do you manage the dispersal of power within England? Is that someone you've got from my accent. Wasn't didn't grow up in Scotland and and have wondered about independence for Yorkshire from time to time as a good Yorkshire born lad. But the that that, that responding to people's sense of identity, it seems to me, is absolutely critical. And that's why the bureaucrats got it wrong in the past, because they've gone with economic or or administrative geographies. They've not gone with geographies about identity. That's why it gets messy, because English identity around regions is obviously varies from place to place. But this is doable if you follow the principles that John and John have set out of having that sort of coherent, underpinning set of principles. And finally, just on England itself, the reality is, as John Denham described, is of a Whitehall where a good number of departments, in effect departments for England, they have very little to do with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And the failure of our mechanisms to recognise that I think is part cause of the discontent in England about governance, the United Kingdom. But it is also a part cause of the incoherence in governance across the UK. And I think biting that bullet, recognising that that needs to be addressed, is essential if we are to get a more coherent system of government for the UK as a whole. Let's. Just just to pick up on a few points before heading back to you, John, if that's okay. It's it's been a great discussion. It's looking through the questions and it's impossible to kind of do justice to everything. But hopefully it's so it feels like this is a debate that's very much just kicking off now just to kind of reflects on a couple of a couple of points, I think. One word that you did use, which I don't often find used in these these discussions, is the word culture. And culture is so important, yet it is impossible to legislate for directly or kind of mandates. But it absolutely plays a role in enabling something to happen or blocking things to happen. I think understanding how our system works and the culture and behaviours that our system creates. I mean, you can look you can look currently at the kind of the effort today's news is bringing, but the culture of how Westminster operates, whether it's the whips offices or beyond, there's a much more scrutiny about how we are governed and much more, I think, public appetite for and understanding that that it kind of works on our side and an understanding that the culture is a healthy and non toxic culture. But I do think that that then kind of has manifestations in terms of how we think of what whole culture. We have a very top down centralised culture to the government. John Wilson was mentioning how the kind of winner takes all first past the post system means that we have a culture of within our political parties of kind of seeking power, then inhabiting it and then and then how you kind of then make decisions beyond that. It is is is is very oppositional, very binary. I think if we began to see democratic fare as more of a kind of process and an ongoing process, rather than I think probably the traditional representative democracy leads you to think that democracy is a one off event. It's a vote that you're kind of stuck with the effects of the next five year, five years of a referendum where you're stuck with the effects of however long afterwards this kind of a binary approach to how we do politics. We're seeing a lot of really interesting stuff going on in local government where councils are taking on citizens assemblies to try and look in a much more deliberative way, to try and involve people in a different way. In some of the big thorny issues that that that present themselves, we're seeing much more kind of participative opportunities for ongoing micro decisions that but on an ongoing basis. So I think part of this we need to think what's the ask of people, how we bringing government closer to people, how we think democracy as something that happens on an ongoing basis, it's a process rather than a one off event. And that requires people to participate in a very different way. And I think that's part of the background to all of this, is how you build trust in institutions and moving away from a model that just expects the experts inhabit institutions and they make the decisions on our behalf, I think is really important. Another thing that's the back of this is just our resilience as a state. We've obviously been through the pandemic, the effects that are ongoing. One of the things we've seen from experiencing the COVID crisis is there's a real lack of connectivity between different layers of government. That's one of the things I quite like about this paper that you're presenting is this is about spheres of influence and how they kind of interact with each other. It's not about just saying, Oh, there's a centralised country or devolve power locally and that it's one thing or the other. It's actually also about how these spheres of democracy and spheres of governance interact with each other and coordinate. And when you see something like a pandemic happening and then instant kind of response from the centre that's massively decoupled from the public health response in local areas, you can see how kind of resilient that makes us as a country. And I think one of the things to really to really kind of keep a hold of on this is what are the future threats that our country faces and how fit the purpose of our governing institutions to those ends, quite apart from what does Labour want to achieve in government. And I think is that that's that focus on what we know about future challenges and how and how we need to be fit for purpose. So I think we need to kind of keep coming back to an analysis. Thanks very much indeed, Jessica and Philip also for taking part. If I say a couple of things, then I'll pass back to John to disclose it. But thanks to everybody who's been on the call and for some great questions. If I could just pick up a few of those. Alan Finley's question about how you get the Labour Party to think like this. In part, it simply has to be challenging people to say how on earth they're going to deliver the reforms they want to deliver if they don't govern in this way. If Labour comes in with its ambitions of change and tries to govern with the existing machinery of government, it will fail might well fail to keep the union together. It will certainly fail to tackle inequality and poverty and the other problems that we have been talking about. The second thing is about Popularising, and I think that is partly about understanding where the public is. It's quite interesting to see the comments debating the English votes for English laws in the chat. Actually, there's this one constitutional reform policy that has always had a majority of English voters supporting it for 20 years in every single opinion poll, and that is that England's laws should be made by England's base. Every single poll was have been done and actually reform to the governance of England at a national level is always more popular than devolution of powers within England, whether we like that or not. And so actually the sort of things that we've talked about in the paper for England go with the flow of public opinion. The trick then is to enable institutions at local level to grow and build their popularity in the way that Philip was talking about, which is why we put the emphasis on the rights of local areas to draw down powers. It's a right to enable areas to build their own institutions, which reflect localities and popularity, and then govern in those much broader ways which we don't touch on the paper which Jessica has brought into the discussion about how you use that power if you're an empowered local institution. So I think if we think both about what Labour needs to do to be successful and how you go with the grain of public opinion, the elements are there. I just pick one slightly different point. It was raised by somebody who is asking, does this open the door to different approaches to nationalisation and so on? And to an extent, once you start like this, you do come up with different solutions. And I live in Winchester here, Southern Water Morris on a daily basis taps raw sewage into our rivers, the North Sea, and we pay for the privilege of doing that. I mean, a model where southern water came under in some way social control of the local authorities and people living in southern England is probably much more attractive to me than the idea of the old state nationalisation that we had previously not necessary parts of our paper. But once you start saying What are the powers that should lie with more local institutions, it certainly opens the door to that different way of approaching approaching questions. And a similar question was raised about who gets to control the health service in these models. Once you start thinking about the rights to devolve power, then different places might come up with different solutions to the problems that they have that meet local needs. But I'll leave it with that. And back to John. Thanks and thanks, everyone, for the for the question. The questions I just wanted to make a couple of comments and follow on really from from John, this discussion just there about growing growing powers that do equity exist. I think there's a danger and I think lots of discussion of the English regions fit into this kind of category. But not only just the discussion of English regions of a very incredibly abstract approach to government where, you know, sort of you get out a map and you kind of like sort of think about what the best kind of theoretical units of government are or whatever. And that's what governments have done. In fact, you know, kind of over the over the second half of the 20th century, we've had kind of a reorganisation of local government of various moments, you know, lots of debates about what the kind of sort of the most appropriate scale is to have different units and that kind of approach. I think in some ways is part of the problem that we're trying to to to critique is to say that, you know, kind of it's very top down, you know, and it forgets that, you know, I guess one of the central puzzles for me of what we're trying to say here, which is let's start with Britain as it is. Let's start with where people identify, but also where the institutions lie that actually do stuff. One of the real tragedies for me of COVID in the response to COVID was, and I think this is Labour's Labour Party, Keir Starmer was very critical of this and this is a very good point, was that the central government reinvented lots of institutional mechanisms for distributing PPE, for procuring stuff from, you know, to make to the Tories or whoever actually that there were powers that already existed, that could have been grown, that could have been connected, that could have been better funded. You know, we had had sort of local authority health, public health staff, etc., you know. And so for me, for us, it's it's a question of rather than, you know, kind of and this is sometimes the problem with the way in which we talk about reform and kind of the reform of our policy, rather than starting in the centre and saying, well, where is the best place for power to lie? We look at where power does lie and where where there is the greatest kind of support and the greatest sort of where communities are the strongest attached to particular bits of government or particular institutions. And then we kind of talk about empowering those kind of those, those places and connects to Jessica's point about community power rather than simply local government. I think it's important that you don't have a rhetoric of community power that is about undermining local government. I mean, in some quarters, there's a whole conversation about, well, you know, if you give power to councils, that's just giving power to another set of bureaucrats rather than central government. And, you know, local authorities are elected the democratic. And then what we have. So, you know, you can't just abolish the replacing with the voluntary sector, but, you know, kind of you need to acknowledge that, you know, kind of Paris dispersed and does live in all these different places. So our approach very much is about I mean, it's kind of to some degree, it's going to say small city conservative. It's it's at least it's about saying, well, where where does power lie, lie, lie that is accountable. And that is, you know, can be can be can be grown. And, you know, through time, those kind of powers that exist, you know, through the country, local authority, etc., you know, may decide to kind of to merge, to kind of share resources to and to grow. And that's where English English regions may grow, may or may, may come into existence. They are coming to existence to some degree already through a kind of, if you like, that kind of piecemeal bottom up approach. But if we simply trying kind of imagine the policy in this kind of abstract, bureaucratic way, it's almost as if, you know, I'm a historian of India, kind of like partition. We partition Britain in the same way that the bureaucrats did. They were bureaucrats, you know, in 1947. That's that's simply not going to work. So so I think that's kind of going back to another point that Jessica made, which is that culture is like the central kind of this is, you know, kind of it's about saying we need to map out institutional changes and have real policies and say, yes, we do need to Senate yes, we do need a cabinet. Is it it's constituted differently? And we do need kind of to to make this kind of distinction between English government and and UK white government and so forth. But culture and language is, is crucial and the kind of vocabulary that we use to talk about different parts of the policy and trying to persuade Labour people to use that different language and talking to more about partnership to, to talk about working with different parts of the country, to, to kind of talk about, you know, the UK as a, as a, as a, as a society, different places in a really tangible way rather than in an abstract way. That shift is, is important. I think the only way we can, you know, we need to kind of model that ourselves, I think, and then sort of try and get Labour politicians to kind of be using talking in a different way about how they get things done and then, you know, really sort of holding to account on, on or on that. Finally, the our moment now and there's a danger of being too optimistic about the kind of possibilities of crisis always, you know, moment. That you think of crises have a tendency not to lead to the kind of changes that we would hope them to lead to. We are living through a crisis, obviously, in terms of the government in every possible way. But I'm kind of optimistic. I'm optimistic about the kind of possibilities that exist within the current crisis of government more than other moments. And a couple of things. The moment we're actually kind of leading politicians, it's in the interests of leading politicians to do local properly and to kind of articulate their own position as local leaders or leaders of kind of city regions or whatever, rather than simply speaking on behalf of this kind of, you know, vaguely defined kind of nation. So Andy Burnham, who's an extremely ambitious politician, he was the leader of the Labour Party, wants to be prime minister. He made a I mean, made a move, you know, kind of to say I'm going to be of leader of Greater Manchester and kind of and then articulated locally, you know, kind of a sort of a local street regional kind of argument, you know, to to sort of buttress his kind of sense of power there. And and I'm sure he still has kind of ambitions to come back to Westminster. But he's sort of articulated all sorts of things that are about the need to kind of have a different way of thinking about the UK polity, that he would find it extremely hard to go back on even if even if he even if he was sort of, you know, inclined to inclined to do so. So there's I think there's a number of moments like that. We're actually kind of we live now in a political moment where actually it is in the interests of politicians to make the case for the pluralism of the U.K. polity. Kind of not Scottish labour yet, it seems, unfortunately, but at some point even that's going to have to happen and Scottish Labour will realise that they can actually win if they start talking about Scotland. And so and look at what's happened to the worst Labour Party, the worst Labour Party as you know late in the people on the call here, you know kind of the Welsh Labour Party is kind of making case for its kind of for itself as the leader of a Welsh nation but for place. And it's done well by doing so. So I think I'm kind of, you know, optimistic actually, that kind of, you know, that there are forces within labour that actually are meaning that because Britain is so dispersed and unequal geographically, you know, kind of it's in the interests of of of politicians to to kind of sort of make the kind of case for the kind of policy that we're talking about. So, yeah, I wanted to try to end on a moment of optimism, but I, I guess it's really left for me to say thank you to everybody. I suppose I'm so thanks to Philip Jessica of Emily for chairing for Sophie, for kind of putting things organising and doing slides and you know, and it's been a pleasure working with John and everybody else on this. And thanks to everybody. Thanks to such a great audience. It's a shame it's impossible to kind of see people and to sort of have a real conversation. But this is a real conversation. But, you know, it's all a little bit disembodied, but thanks for everyone's great questions and great engagement and we'll be in touch with the next steps on this because this obviously is not the end of this project. So thank you, everybody. Anything else to add from any of the panellists? Quickly. Next Wednesday, 2nd of February, James Meade. Meanwhile, the political economy of England. If you haven't been sent an invitation, look on the stands for English identity and politics.