Richard Reeves is keen to stress that his think-tank, Demos, is no New Labour ‘poodle’, and has been striving to engage with the Tories. He tells Matthew O’Toole why it’s worth listening to – and why Whitehall might resist
First impressions have an impact. And Demos’s stark headquarters near Tower Bridge – peopled by young, trendily-clad staff – certainly makes a distinct first impression. Where some more traditional think-tanks evoke a Radio Four sensibility and pace, Demos feels more like 6Music, the niche-but-fashionable station favoured by the cognoscenti – though Demos director Richard Reeves (pictured above) will be hoping the parallels with the doomed network end there.
If the organisation feels fashionable now– Reeves chooses to define it as “modernising” and “progressive” – it was probably even more so when it was founded in the mid-1990s by Geoff Mulgan, who went on to serve as one of Tony Blair’s most influential policy advisors. Reeves is himself not without ties to New Labour, but has also tried to build links with the opposition in the hope of inculcating “progressive” values in Tory policies. How has he been doing? And does he think that Whitehall is also receptive to Demos’s self-proclaimed radicalism?
Reeves’ CV reads like a roll-call of influential institutions on the British centre-left: researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research; journalist on both the Guardian and Observer; ‘director of futures’ at the Work Foundation. In the middle of all of this, he served as a special adviser to Frank Field during his brief stint as welfare reform minister during the first year of the Labour government. Reeves happily jokes that his background is “predictable” for the boss of a think-tank like Demos, and freely admits that the institution itself was long seen as the creature of New Labour. He doesn’t disown its Blairite past.
“If you go back, Demos was founded in 1993; Tony Blair became [Labour] leader in 1994,” he says. “If you were a modernising think-tank interested in reshaping public policy, doing things differently around government in an interesting and progressive way, Tony Blair was the only game in town.”
However, Reeves is now determined to shake off the tag of ‘New Labour think-tank’. That kind of identity, he says, is ultimately “debilitating” for organisations such as his. “If you work on the basis of being associated with a particular party – or indeed a faction within a party, which we’ve seen happening – everything you do is seen through the prism of that relationship,” he explains. “It’s very important that when we say something, people listen because it’s right and/or provocative; not because it’s written up as: ‘Abolish X, says Labour’s favourite think-tank’.” He points to the example of Policy Exchange – often previously described as David Cameron’s favourite think-tank – which was lambasted after publishing a pamphlet calling for southward migration from de-industrialised northern cities. “David Cameron had to go on television and denounce the report and the author. If that happens, you’ve got into a difficult relationship,” Reeves says.
Demos may not be planning to become the Tories’ favourite think-tank any time soon, but Reeves makes no bones about his efforts to build relationships with the liberal wing of the party. Last May George Osborne and resident shadow cabinet boffin David Willetts joined the advisory board, a few months after the launch of Demos’s ‘Progressive Conservatism’ project – which Cameron himself launched. Left-wing sceptics will sneer, but Reeves insists the links are a way to encourage liberal ideas among senior Tories without compromising the think-tank’s independence. “We come at it with a clear set of values which I would describe as liberal and progressive. If we think, for example, that lots of aspects of the Conservative education policy are very good, we say so. If we think they are bonkers on married tax allowance, we say so.”
This is all very rational and non-partisan, but the Demos boss admits to being unconvinced by the depth of the commitment to progressive values inside the opposition. Cameron himself is described by Reeves as “keeping his cards close to his chest”. “The progressive Conservatives in the party mean it and their attachment to fairness and equality is real,” he says. “The difficulty is that when I last counted, there were only seven of them.”
One area in which stated Tory policies do complement those of Demos is that of localisation. A commitment to decentralisation of power away from Whitehall and Westminster and towards individual citizens is, Reeves says, “part of the DNA” of Demos. It’s also indicative of his own classical-liberal instincts (he has written a biography of John Stuart Mill). The Tories’ Control Shift policy paper last year promised radical devolution of power away from the centre, but Reeves points out that most parties make similar noises until they get into office at Westminster and start to enjoy the power accrued at the centre.
“Giving more powers to local authorities was on the agenda of Margaret Thatcher’s first ever cabinet; look what happened there. And when Labour came in [in 1997], look what happened.” What happened, he suggests, was a long way from the kind of decentralisation favoured by Reeves.
It’s not just the politics of devolving more power that slows progress, Reeves says: senior Whitehall officials resist decentralisation. He isn’t shy about attributing blame for what he sees as the centre’s unwillingness to relinquish influence: top civil servants, he says, are “very talented people who’ve worked very hard to get where they are; know how to play the politics very well”.
“The truth is that the mandarins have seen localism come and go, and come and go,” he says. “If I’m a senior civil servant, am I worried? Do I really think there’s going to be a dramatic shift of power [if the Tories are elected]? I’m not too worried, because we’ve heard it all before.”
What’s more, he adds, centralisation is self-perpetuating because bright graduates are drawn towards the centre. “If you are a talented civil servant, what are you going to do? Are you going to go and work for the council? Or run a local job centre? Or are you going to be a policy adviser in Whitehall? There’s a talent issue there which is self-fulfilling, because people say: ‘We can’t decentralise because we don’t have the talent there.’ I wonder why that is!”
The instinct towards centralisation is only going to be made worse, Reeves argues, by the effort to reduce the deficit. Ministers of any party and officials – especially those in the Treasury – are much less likely to want to devolve power at a time when so much pressure is being placed on the Exchequer. Calls for large areas of spending responsibility to be devolved are likely, he says, to be greeted by a Treasury response of: “Not on your Nelly – bring it back and squeeze it!”
Demos: A short history
1993 Founded by Martin Jacques and Geoff Mulgan, its first research director is sociologist Perri 6 – who had changed his name from David Ashworth
1997 Mulgan enters Downing Street as an adviser to Tony Blair, and is replaced as director by Tom Bentley
2006 Madeleine Bunting is appointed director, only to resign one month later because her “vision was incompatible with that of the trustees”. She was replaced by her deputy, Catherine Fieschi
2006 John Reid gives a widely reported speech at Demos, saying UK citizens may have to “modify freedoms” in the battle to combat terrorism
2008 Richard Reeves appointed director
2009 Both Progressive Conservatism and Open Left projects launched