Why Labour Needs a Policy & Campaigns ‘Skunkworks’
In the heady days of mid-summer 2020, the Conservative government elected in December 2019 finally found itself with some leeway to flex its domestic policy muscles. The first wave of Covid-19 had abated and there was much speculation about radical reforms driven by the mercurial figure of “Assistant to the Prime Minister” Dominic Cummings. Fresh from the Barnard Castle debacle turning him into the closest thing to a political adviser can get to a household name, Cummings remained determined to carry on with his project of reshaping the British state.
Amid the countless stories about him trying to hire ‘weirdos’ or turn the Cabinet Office into something resembling NASA’s mission control facility, there was one small note about him hiring a data scientist to run a ‘Skunkworks’ focused on the flow of government data in Downing St. The name derives from a codename created for defence mega-corporation Lockheed Martin’s elite Advanced Development Programs division.
This famed group was established within Lockheed during WW2 to develop an aircraft which would break the mould, the first ever jet-engined fighter plane. To achieve this task, it was given independence from normal processes and procedures within the organisation and encouraged to do its work with no regard for orthodoxy. The group assembled the world’s first working fighter jet thirty-seven days ahead of schedule and went on to produce the biggest breakthroughs in military aircraft of 20th and early 21st centuries.
One of the features that makes Cummings a formidable political adversary is his eagerness to bring processes and methods from outside of the staid world of SW1 into the political and campaigning arenas. This is a feature of his approach which Labour should embrace as it gears up to take on the task of winning power in 2024. No one should be under any illusion that for Labour to win a majority from its current position is just as daunting a task as that which faced Lockheed’s engineers.
Labour should seek to create a crack team which includes communicators, strategists, policy wonks, pollsters, data scientists and behavioural experts. The aim of this group should be to generate the kind of calibrated policy positions and associated campaign strategies which will give Labour maximum impact in the fine margins it will need to win a FPTP election in 2024. The group would need to be free to innovate wildly as required and operate independently of party structures but focused ruthlessly on the task handed to it by the party.
Can Labour afford it? At this moment it seems unlikely the party has cash to spare but projects of such importance can be fundraised for. The party has in the past asked donors to specifically put-up money for such projects as the ill-fated Community Organisers Network, but what it needs this time is value for money in the form of electoral success. The point of the Skunkworks model is not that it be lavishly funded but that its operations be lean and finely tuned to its aims.
The Tory election war machine will as ever outgun Labour in pure spending power when the next contest comes around. Labour will need policies and campaign strategies which are the equivalent of the sleek and game-changing products of the original Skunkworks – like the legendary F-22 Raptor fighter or the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber.
The unit would require the boldness of ambition and a culture electric enough to attract talent who could genuinely be doing something else. People who will come precisely because the complexity of the challenge is so great, and because they know the prospect of even greater prizes lies beyond the boundary of success. The party should waste no time in making this move, as the founding leader of the original Skunkworks Kelly Johnson said, in what became the group’s motto, “Be quick, be quiet, and be on time."
Mark Mcvitie
Pagefield