Lucy Smith argues that democracies need not be short-sighted
I have clear memories of the summer of 1991, which I spent with my French exchange Cécile and her large extended family in an enormous, falling-down house in the Brittany countryside. The family called this house a Chateau, but there were missing steps in the staircase and the kitchen was a couple of hot plates and a sink. Fields of tall corn started right outside the back door. The rest of the world seemed far away.
That is, until one evening, when we crowded round an old black and white television set to watch tanks rolling into Moscow’s Red Square. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had dissolved and the Cold War was officially over.
To a young person at the time, the global reordering that followed was highly visual, a series of events beamed into our living rooms. In some cases it involved direct experience. My school, for example, immediately organised an exchange with a school in the then Czechoslovakia, and off we went to stay in Soviet-style housing blocks near Prague. Importantly, it was also ideological. While historians and economists injected caution, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the triumph of liberal democracy and the end of history entered our collective consciousness. Not just because democracy was deemed to be the best available way of distributing power and holding it to account. But because it wins. We were confident then that our model’s resilience, adaptive qualities and competition of ideas would lead to better outcomes – more innovation and economic growth, a more equitable balance of risk, reward and social protection, more cohesion and resolve when faced with threats.
In the intervening years, that idea has been subject to serious challenge. Not so much from an ideological standpoint, as through changing facts on the ground – just visit Shenzhen or Dubai. To young people today, it’s as if modernity and the future are being created elsewhere, a feeling compounded by deep-seated fears about global volatility and conflict, climate change, an ageing population, societal cohesion and fairness for the next generation.
So what about the material benefit of democracy, the problem-solving part? Some might be thinking: if democracy can’t show me the future, what’s so important about it anyway?
“Of course we have to think long-term,” a politician said to me and my colleagues on a recent visit to Japan, “because the challenges ahead won’t change.” What he meant was that the challenges we are facing are about external facts, not politics, and are not something politics can ignore. But in the UK it is quite common to hear the view that democratic politics is congenitally and permanently unable to do long-term strategy, regardless of whether the problems we face now demand it or not.
If we accept that, think of the sorts of things we’re saying that we’re not going to do.
- We’re not going to investigate and plan for the profound impact of demographic change, the changing age structure and its impact for the economy and labour market, as well as the costs to public services which could soon crowd out other public spending
- We’re not going to reimagine a sustainable, fair tax system, resilient to the challenges of the next two decades
- We’re not going to look ahead to the impact on the economy and society of major technological change, consider the impact on our democracy and institutions and make sufficiently early choices about how young people will succeed in a rapidly changing world
If current structures and practices cannot solve real-world problems, governance systems – in democracies especially – will have to evolve. We could descend into authoritarianism. We could await, or generate, a disruptive crisis as an excuse to rebuild. Or, we could be practical about it and look at what needs to change so that our current system can solve long-term challenges. Philip Bray, in his article “Reclaiming the future: The UK’s chance to catch up”, describes how four democracies are looking to update and enhance their strategic capabilities so that they can remain agents of their own futures. Let’s learn from them.
At the heart of our project on long-term national strategy-making is a simple idea. If we can diagnose and select the top challenges we want to address as a country, set against them our long-term objectives and articulate the ‘big bets’ we think will make us successful, we will have captured and expressed a national strategic framework for the UK. As demonstrated by Spain and the Netherlands, the very fact of a state-level commitment to think about and set out scenarios and pathways for the future unlocks others to do the same. Everyone plans and acts with greater confidence and can reap the benefits and efficiencies of alignment, as well as contributing towards solving the same problem set.
But this isn’t enough on its own. The set of practices and the method by which we get to such an ostensibly simple framework are crucial. This is a moment when our underlying assumptions and ‘big bets’ need re-examination and reinvention, when the external problem set demands bigger thinking. That can only be done by opening up to wider perspectives across politics as well as civil society, by properly confronting conflicting views, choices and trade-offs and by conducting an honest conversation with the public about what these mean.
We need longer horizons that go beyond electoral cycles; a ‘national’ – not government – posture that creates a new relationship with other actors in society on long-term challenges; new methods for considering ingrained assumptions, ‘big bets’ and fundamental choices, including through a ‘contemporary Project Solarium’ based on President Eisenhower’s 1950s national-level exercise in strategy and foreign policy design; and a different level of openness and transparency, including digital and innovative techniques for testing choices with the public.
We can get going on this now. It is feasible that in 2026 the following things could happen. Imagine if…
- Government produces the first iteration of national scenarios for discussion and debate – three alternative scenarios for the UK in 2040, which crystallise the choices and trade-offs involved in different potential futures
- We hold the first ‘UK in 2040’ conference, with Ministers, parliamentarians, local and devolved government, experts, business, civil society and the public discussing the implications of the most important future trends and scenarios
- Parliament convenes its first interparliamentary committee for the future – with participation from the devolved legislatures – to examine the national scenarios and develop a conversation about the future
- We hear from voices across society – associations, representative bodies, businesses, places. Civil society experts convene conversations with the public about the future
- We pilot a contemporary Project Solarium on a long-term challenge, setting up separate taskforces, drawn from a range of partners, to evaluate and compare different strategies and scenarios
For those who think long-term strategy-making isn’t part of our political or administrative culture, we can reassure. We won’t suddenly find ourselves turning Penzance into Shenzhen or developing a Napoleonic administrative system. But we don’t need to accept the status quo either. Why should the public accept short-termism and incrementalism as a cost of democracy, a limiting factor on the problems we’re allowed to solve and the future we’re allowed to imagine?
Lucy Smith is the third Heywood Fellow at Blavatnik School of Government. She was formerly Director General for Strategy at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
