Think tanks are ruining politics for the rest of us

When think tank reports set government agendas, and the organisations that author those reports are missing a huge cross section of the population, policy will fail

After Boris and Brexit, politics in the UK is more beholden than at any time in living memory to a dangerous strain of populism. This movement is predicated on the simple idea that there is a large and growing group of people in our society who are utterly ignored by those in charge. Meanwhile, political discourse is also controlled to a staggering degree by the whims and hobby horses of partisan think tanks.

Both within government and throughout the opposition benches, a bunch of ideas thrashed out in a handful of Edwardian terraced offices in SW1 rather suddenly turn up as party policy, or – worse – within the statute books. Liz Truss, as Tory leader and PM, may be the perfect exemplar of this relationship. No set of economic policies has ever looked more detached from the lives of what policy wonks sickeningly call “real people”.

Why the complete disconnect? New research from the charity Reclaim has found a possible reason: working-class people are either missing or hidden inside the most influential think tanks and charities, with those whose job involves generating political ideas claiming they are unable to simply be themselves at work.

It’s only a very small study – 30 people inside think tanks and charities were interviewed, alongside 277 others who had worked with them – but given the relatively small size of the sector, the small number of working-class people working in it and it’s disproportionate influence over British life, it’s an important survey.

What they said is damaging, to put it tentatively. The overwhelming majority (94 per cent) of working-class people in think tanks confirm there is a lack of class diversity within the industry, and 59 per cent admitted they either don’t talk about their background at work, or only do so partially.

Respondents said that working-class people inside think tanks and charities would mean organisations might use different language about people on low incomes (according to 70 per cent) or would have different influencing priorities (more than half, 54 per cent, agreed). They also admitted that the socioeconomic make-up of these organisations – most of which fail to publish data on, despite having tough targets around racial diversity – meant that they were detached from the truth of some of the issues they work on.

Working-class staff described feeling unwilling to “break cover” at work, or only choosing to do so when they were sufficiently senior to do so without it affecting their career progression. What they are describing is snobbery. It’s also a huge waste of talent and resources, leading to perverse results such as designing a policy that members of the team within an organisation already know simply won’t work, because they’ve lived the reality.

Are you, by now, wondering why I’m writing about this? Why such a spoddy subject when there’s so much going on in the world just now? Technocratic as it may seem, it really matters. Policy and politics are a revolving door – of people, of ideas, of methods and habits of thinking. When think tank reports set government agendas, and the organisations that author those reports are missing a huge cross-section of the population, policy will fail.

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Already it’s a problem we’re seeing echoed in the new cabinet under prime minister Liz Truss. Her top team has been celebrated as the most racially diverse in British history. That’s true, and something to be celebrated. Look again, though: it’s also socioeconomically completely homogeneous. The cabinet today has the highest proportion of members who were privately educated of any recent government. It’s retrogressive.

With a lack of true diversity comes a lack of ideas – and a gap which can be cleverly abused by populists, particularly when those ideas are being funnelled, as if through a feeding tube, directly into Westminster. As Roger Harding, director of Reclaim, told me this week: “The political world has to get good at this. Some really dangerous forces are there ready to exploit that.

“We can’t have a decade ahead of us like we’ve had in the past, with division and with people’s living standards not rising or going backwards. If we don’t get this right, it’s really worrying where it could take us.”

A varied group of organisations, including the IPPR, Onward, Save the Children, the Centre for Global Prosperity, and the Economic Change Unit, have responded to the report by signing a commitment to improving working-class representation within their organisations. That’s good. But what they, and others, actually need to do is listen to working-class voices when they arrive. That might prove more of a challenge.