LONDON — A small army of people is trying to shape the Labour government’s brain. Fortunately for them, the government is here to help.
Downing Street and government departments, on the hunt for more policy thinking, have raised their engagement in recent months with mainly center-left and nonpartisan think tanks, several people involved in such talks say.
Through dinners, meetings, coffees, text messages, private policy papers and focus groups, those think tanks in turn jostle for primacy and to impress their own policy ideas on the government.
This symbiotic relationship is, of course, how Westminster has worked for decades. The Conservative government had its own mostly separate battalion of “friendly” think tanks that helped draft policies and strategy.
Plenty also doubt think tanks will actually end up driving more policy. “There’s ‘we need your help,’ and there’s ‘sure! We’re always glad to have your help!’” said one Labour member of parliament, rolling their eyes. “Those are two different things.”
All the same, Labour has every reason to ask. Almost a year into a five-year term, the government is fighting slow economic growth, a slump in opinion polls and the rise of the Nigel Farage’s populist, right-wing Reform UK. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has five broad “missions” and tighter “milestones” designed to prove long-term delivery to voters, yet some MPs say their arguments are simply not cutting through with the electorate.
POLITICO took a snapshot of the state of think tank-government relations, 10 months into Labour’s term. This article is based on conversations with more than two dozen think tank officials, government aides, ministers and other Labour figures, all granted anonymity to speak frankly.
Big cheeses
The think tanks who do the most talking to Labour can be split into three broad groups — a trio of big so-called friendlies, the young upstarts, and another circle of established groups less directly aligned to Labour’s aims.
The trio that is both established and enjoys the closest access to government is arguably the Institute for Public Policy Research, an independent charity focused on a “fairer, greener” society with long links to the center left; the Tony Blair Institute, the sprawling global nonprofit founded by the Labour former prime minister; and Labour Together, the Starmerite vehicle for an election victory that was built by now-No. 10 Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney.
Those who spoke to POLITICO said these three think tanks all send advice directly to ministers and government special advisers, including on some questions of policy on which they are commissioned directly by departments or No. 10. This was particularly true of Labour Together and the IPPR, but also includes the TBI, which pushes policies on artificial intelligence and tech. Labour Together holds fortnightly focus groups, the results of which are sent to Downing Street officials.
All three also host dinners with ministers and senior officials to discuss ideas away from the noise of daily life in Downing Street. Officials attending such dinners have ranged from McSweeney and his deputy Vidhya Alakeson to Louise Casey, the crossbench peer leading Labour’s review of social care, Starmer’s Director of Strategy Paul Ovenden and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Chief of Staff Katie Martin.
Links go way back, with alumni from each of the big three — and many other think tanks — now working in government. Ministers know many of the think tanks “better than they know the machine,” said one government official. “The [Conservatives] were there for 14 years. They’d built these relationships within the machine. For us, [the think tanks] are the people that did the sums for us. They did some of the graft for us.”
Connections are not limited between think tanks either. Senior figures at the trio — Labour Together’s Matt Upton, the IPPR’s Harry Quilter-Pinner and the TBI’s Ryan Wain — swap notes at a regular “Progressive CEOs’ breakfast” at Westminster’s Old Queen Street Cafe, an incongruous venue given its status as a base for the right. Joining them is Amanda Walters of the Centre for Progressive Change, a campaigning organization founded in 2020.
Upstarts
They’re not alone. The government is also working with a clutch of new Starmer-friendly upstart groups focused on the prime minister’s hot issues such as growth.
Among the more influential upstarts is the Future Governance Forum, which speaks regularly to No. 10 and the Treasury and is planning more policy work later this summer. Its director Nathan Yeowell, the former head of Blairite Labour group Progress, was McSweeney’s boss at the Local Government Association a decade and a half ago.
Others gaining influence within the government include the Good Growth Foundation, led by Praful Nargund, the Labour candidate defeated by the party’s ousted left-wing former Leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2024 election.
There is also the newly founded Centre for British Progress, which is aiming to generate more policy and is led by David Lawrence and Julia Garayo Willemyns, who founded the UK Day One think tank.
These upstarts are led by people close to some in No. 10, but their newfound status means they can make arguments others cannot. One senior person at a fledgling think tank said: “The government gets that we’re not always going to agree, and that’s allowed us to be a bit more bolshy and be a critical friend.”
Established outsiders
Then there’s a third circle — established think tanks that speak regularly to senior government figures behind the scenes, but are less directly aligned to its aims.
Perhaps the most eye-catching is Policy Exchange, a charity long associated with the Conservative right — yet which is hosting a project called “Future of the Left.” Run by Jonathan Rutherford, an academic who shaped the socially conservative “Blue Labour” school of thought, its events have been attended in person by McSweeney.
On the other side, the Resolution Foundation, an economic think tank that pushes to boost living standards for low and middle earners, is trying to work cross-party after its former CEO Torsten Bell became a Labour minister. Its new boss Ruth Curtice is a former Treasury official — so more used to working with Conservatives during her time in government.
The Reform think tank (no link to Farage’s Reform UK) ran a conference at the Treasury’s Darlington campus recently, and has fed into Labour’s work on abolishing quangos including NHS England, and getting rid of poorly performing Whitehall staff.
And the Institute for Government did the readiness for government training for all the political advisers in opposition. “They sort of wrote the textbook for a lot of people now in government on how to do it,” said a Labour official.
Welcome to Downing Street!
The view was the same from many of those who spoke to POLITICO: engagement from Downing Street and government departments has been ticking up as Labour settles in.
“They’re definitely more open” to ideas, a second think tank official said. A third added: “People are more willing to say ‘right, I don’t have an answer to this, this is what I need, this is what would be helpful’ compared to even six months ago.” A fourth recalled a specific meeting in which a department’s SpAds laid out the exact areas where they were and weren’t looking for policy solutions.
Think tanks and officials generally attribute the rise to McSweeney, who became No. 10 chief of staff in October after his predecessor Sue Gray — with her long commitment to the civil service way of working — was ousted. “It’s a Morgan thing. He’s interested in policy ideas,” said a fifth think tank official.
At the same time, Labour is watching Reform UK grab headlines on key issues from reindustrialization to immigration.
The second think tank official quoted above said: “I think there is a growing awareness, particularly with Morgan, that not only are progressives losing in polling, but they are also increasingly losing the battle of ideas, and that the terrain increasingly is being dominated, particularly since the Trump election, by right-wing populist ideas.”
Others have a less charitable view of Labour. “Their preparations for government were pretty dismal, frankly,” said a sixth think tank official.
But there is a broad view that — despite the long-term missions — the center of government is flat out with the day-to-day realities of power. The second think tank official quoted above said: “They are so taken over by the urgency of government that there isn’t much space, time, capacity for longer-term or bigger thinking. I think they know that, but they don’t know how to get out of it.”
Blame for this has at times been leveled at the No. 10 policy unit, which had a recent staffing shake-up under new Director of Policy, Delivery and Innovation Liz Lloyd, a veteran of Tony Blair’s government.
But the government official quoted above argued: “It is a criticism of the machine of the whole. What the departments are putting up to their seniors and their ministers is day-to-day and week-to-week, and therefore what feeds back into the center is day-to-day and week-to-week.”
Think tanks could even be a way to get around the niceties of government. A seventh think tank official added: “There are some things that are much better for think tanks to do than civil servants, for various reasons. We can be a little bit more political, we can often be quicker, we can explore things the government doesn’t necessarily want to be FOI’d.”
The think tanks themselves are also part of Labour’s bid — like the Tories in days gone by — to dislodge so-called civil service orthodoxy. An eighth think tank official said: “Ministers are using think tanks to help push the civil service — not just commissioning us or having conversations, but having us in for meetings with the civil servants there.”
Then there are those who argue Keir Starmer’s personality plays a part.
People who work with the former lawyer say he prizes efficiency and action points over lengthy discussions of ideas. “He doesn’t like having to mediate. He wants people to come to him with a decision,” one minister said.
This has shaped the government itself, argued the second think tank official quoted above. “New Labour was an intellectually curious project. Blair and [ex-Prime Minister Gordon] Brown would bring in their favorite thinkers to debate policy ideas,” they said. “They encouraged their staff to go out and find new ideas and bring them into government. That doesn’t seem to be happening enough in this Starmer government.”
This is seen by Starmer’s allies as his great positive; a government focused on tangible delivery. Others steeped in Labour’s long tradition of ideological battles are not so sure. One think tank official described Starmer as “gnomic in the middle.” The Labour official quoted above described No. 10’s outreach to think tanks even more bluntly: “It’s auditions for ideology. It’s crazy.”
Saying the right things
It is not all sweetness and light.
Several people described a tension within some think tanks nervous of falling out of the circle of access with the government. “They self-censor,” said a second Labour official. “The left-wing think tanks are tearing their hair out.”
People who are too punchy publicly have been known to receive blowback from contacts inside the machine, suggested a ninth think tank official, adding: “It’s not a healthy or constructive environment to be working in.” A 10th described No. 10’s operation as characterized by “a deep-seated distrust of others.”
The third think tank official quoted above added: “I’m not saying they [the friendly think tanks] are timid, but there is an issue around permission. People feel they need permission to do stuff or they want a license to do and say stuff. That’s a hangover from opposition.
“I think there’s a need for some organizations closer to various bits of No. 10 and the government to be a bit more vocal publicly. Because the reality is you end up with the likes of [Blue Labour architect] Maurice Glasman making hay.”
The second think tank official quoted above put self-censorship down to the think tanks themselves, and the lore that has been allowed to grow around McSweeney. “It’s what happens whenever you have a very powerful single figure and the myth of what that person believes or doesn’t believe grows and grows, but the actual knowledge … is fairly limited,” they said. “People make assumptions and change what they are pitching, or don’t say things, because they are worried about their access or the perception from that person.”
Of course, think tanks don’t always toe the line. The TBI hit headlines — and frustrated some in No. 10 — last month after releasing a report on net zero policy days before the local elections, where Labour fared badly at the hands of Reform. One person with knowledge of the report said it was “more cock-up than conspiracy … no one had genuinely anticipated the impact.”
Labour Together’s struggles
Labour Together was the loyal Starmerite machine before the election. Focusing on ruthless campaign strategy, it drew millions of pounds in donations, some of which it passed on to rising Labour stars in the form of donations and seconded staff.
But its CEO Jonathan Ashworth, a former Labour shadow Cabinet minister who lost his seat to a pro-Palestinian independent last year, is due to leave in July and there are widespread mutterings about its direction. Labour figures echo reporting in The Times that the think tank has struggled to retain donors and staff.
One person with knowledge of the think tank said there had been a “vicious internal row,” and that Labour Together had at one point pitched that it would work on policy for a second-term Labour government, but that its advisory board has not held a meeting since the election.
“I don’t see them as being nearly as influential as they used to be,” the Labour official quoted above added. “They haven’t quite worked out what their purpose is when Labour is in government, and potentially there isn’t one … Maybe [it] doesn’t serve a function when Labour is in government and you’ve got a civil service of hundreds of thousands of people to do that work for you. I’d be really interested to see where they are in another year.”
This would be of little note if not for Labour Together’s links to McSweeney. Several Labour figures said the No. 10 chief of staff is still working closely with the organization. One said it is “Morgan’s baby” and he is “involved for sure;” a second described it as “doing Morgan’s bidding;” a third said he is widely expected to be involved closely in the succession plan for Ashworth.
Sound and fury
The influence of think tanks on any government should, of course, be taken with a large dose of salt.
They all have an interest in showing their own importance in order to keep their donors on side, and — in some cases — for staffers to line up their next role.
“Bear in mind, there’s an awful lot of bitterness out there,” said the 10th think tank official quoted above. “The think tank world is very bitchy, particularly in this context, because people are fighting over links with the incumbent government and over SpAd jobs.”
An 11th think tank official argued their own influence is overstated. They pointed out that Labour in government tends to appoint high-profile individuals from inside the machine such as Casey, the former civil service troubleshooter, to do reviews of knotty issues.
“I don’t think the government is using think tanks in any big policymaking sense, in truth,” they said. “The Tories have always had much more of a think tank culture … Think tanks were deliberately created to be laboratories for radical thinking and were encouraged by figures in those Conservative governments to go and develop and set of ideas and run with them publicly. There’s never been that tradition in the Labour Party.”
A person who has worked closely with No. 10 agreed. They said even though engagement is ticking up, “I remain skeptical that anyone in Downing Street is genuinely in the market for new ideas from think tanks.”
Even so, the push and pull with the wonks won’t stop any time soon — especially as Labour seeks ways of taking on the rise of Reform UK.
A 12th think tank official said: “I think it’s going to accelerate what was already in motion — this realization that the government needs to have a coherent narrative that policies hang off.
“Otherwise you just end up with the [cut to the] winter fuel allowance [a state payment for many pensioners] just standing there on its own. It just looks like a turd on a Christmas tree. And they need a much more beautiful Christmas tree where people can make sense of the good decorations and the bad.”
The post The battle for Keir Starmer’s brain appeared first on Politico.
