Oxford policy engagement workshop 4: How should the new Labour government be listening?

“They’re just not listening” has become a familiar lament in contemporary politics. Politicians often promise to listen, and citizens still feel let down. If listening is often hailed as a remedy for the ills of distrust, disaffection, and polarization, what do we mean exactly by listening and what does listening well look like in practice? To whom should government listen, and how? What needs to be done to embed listening in the workings of government across multiple scales?

This workshop brings together people thinking about these issues in academia, think tanks, and charitable organizations to address these questions from multiple angles—from the impacts of unresponsive economic policy to the potential of deliberative democracy, from the political challenges of building sustainable coalitions to the marginalization of minorities in public policy. The workshop will be interactive, with two sets of short panel presentations, each followed by small-group discussion organized around prompt questions. The aim is to identify opportunities for future exchange and collaboration that could help to bring insights on listening to bear on concrete policy proposals.

The workshop will be divided into two halves, each beginning with short panel presentations before breaking out into group discussion guided by a set of related questions. There will be an opportunity to chat with other participants over lunch, plus an option to go for drinks afterwards.

12:30–13:00 Networking lunch

Session 1

13:00–13:15 Intro—Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford)

13:15–14:15 Panel 1

Will Jennings (University of Southampton)
Claire Ainsley (Progressive Policy Institute—joining virtually)
Phil Burton-Cartledge (University of Derby)
Jonathan Hopkin (London School of Economics)
Ben Ansell (University of Oxford)

14:15–15:00 Small-group discussion

15:00–15:15 Tea/coffee

Session 2

15:15–16:15 Panel 2

Ceri Davies (National Centre for Social Research)
Becca Massey-Chase (Institute for Public Policy Research)
Rich Wilson (Iswe Foundation—joining virtually)
Matt Johnson (The Runnymede Trust)
Aurelien Mondon (University of Bath)

16:15–17:00 Small-group discussion

17:00–17:15 Final closing discussion and next steps

The rhetoric of “listening” isn’t an entirely recent phenomenon, even if it seems to have become noisier in recent years. Back in February 1975, Margaret Thatcher set out her stall in a letter to her Conservative Associative constituency chairman in North Finchley, using the word no fewer than eight times to outline her vision for “leadership that listens” to working people. Come May 2005, Tony Blair welcomed his third term with the words “I’ve listened and I’ve learned.” More recently, Lord Ashcroft pinned Labour’s 2019 defeat on a party “unwilling to listen” which had “failed to understand or even listen to the people it was supposed to represent.” In the UK and abroad, centre-right and centre-left politicians in a tight spot have turned to the institutionalization of listening-as-method with focus groups and listening tours galore, but it was largely too little too late as Donald Trump and then Boris Johnson won electoral victories and Marine Le Pen has put pressure on the republican front in France. Starmer, meanwhile, appears to have taken to heart the lessons from figures advocating listening to the socially conservative voters whom New Labour had been haemorrhaging to parties on the right.

It might be tempting to think that, with Labour’s victory, the appeal to “listening” has peaked. Labour had listened and the matter had been put to bed with a resounding 172-seat majority. Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons why this assessment is too hasty and why the art of listening will remain as important as ever for the new Labour government. This election was the most disproportional on record, and the low-trust environment in which the new Labour government must operate is unlikely to resolve any time soon. It will take time to ameliorate the economic conditions that have fuelled both the disaffection with the political class and polarization among citizens. “Deliverism” without “connection,” as Morgan McSweeney puts it, is unlikely to be enough.

Listening seems as if it will be key to success but what do we mean by listening exactly? It’s a conveniently polysemous word that can stand in for a number of slightly different things from policy responsiveness to a sense of political efficacy or even simply empathy. Research on political trust and its geographies, the politics of competence, the state and devolution, electoral reform and participatory democracy, partisanship and disaffection, anger and the rise of the far right, deliberation and disinformation—all have something to contribute to fleshing out a richer and more efficacious account of how the new government should be listening.

At first blush, it might seem that questions of democracy and empowerment have been displaced by a focus on growth, productivity, and effective but a quick read of Marianna Mazzucato’s book on missions shows that citizen engagement, discovery, and experimentation are essential to their ultimate success. Channelling popular participatory energies into the co-design of mission-drive governance is just one of the areas where a deeper focus on listening would help to deliver policy responsiveness in ways that rebuild popular trust—as well as the sustainable support base that Labour will need to secure another term. Tackling a host of issues including distrust, polarization, regional inequalities, and far-right violence means that making citizens feel heard is going to require a multidimensional, distributed approach to embedding listening in governance. This workshop invites participants to thrash out some of the issues and possibilities together—in a model example of listening well.

The workshop takes place on Monday 16 September between 12:30 and 17:15 at Merton College, Oxford.

To attend, please email Naomi Waltham-Smith no later than noon on Monday 9 September.