Setting and purpose

On 9 July 2026, a roundtable was held as part of the Centre for the Edge initiative, at the offices of Demos in Whitehall. The Centre for the Edge is a collaboration between Kinship Works and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. This was the fourth and final roundtable in the current series; the first three explored the evidence standards used in government, the institutional monoculture that has taken hold in the public sector, and the differences in worldview between the centre and the edges.

Where the first three discussions focused largely on the official side of the state - the civil service, and questions of method, evidence, and institutional form - this final discussion turned to politics itself. Can the political layer of the system make space for the innovators working at the edges? What style of political leadership would that require? And is this, with a change of national political leadership underway, a moment of genuine opportunity?

The roundtable brought together a range of senior leaders from funders, government, academia, think tanks, and the community sector. Two provocations were shared in advance:

• Can a new style of political leadership unlock the energy at the edges?, by James Plunkett, Kinship Works

• Living with two clocks: staying with unbearable thoughts, and searching for a politics that's equal to these times, by Sophia Parker, JRF [link to follow]

The discussion was held under Chatham House rules; in the write-up below, comments are unattributed, with the exception of the opening framing and closing remarks.

Summary of discussion

Sophia Parker (JRF) chaired the discussion. James Plunkett (Kinship Works) opened by noting that the question of politics and power had come up throughout earlier discussions. Those conversations focused on the machinery of the state; but the political layer of the system shapes incentives and permissions. The timing of this conversation felt significant: the UK is now moving to a new flavour of political leadership, perhaps partly because the previous Labour administration came to be seen as too bureaucratic, and not sufficiently inspiring.

James observed that the two provocations - one more hopeful, and one more focused on the daunting scale of the challenge - both felt true at the same time. Yes, there are grounds for optimism - the style of the incoming PM's leadership seems well-suited to the moment: making space, inspiring people, and devolving power. However, as Sophia's essay argued, we still have not reached an honest reckoning with the scale of change that is needed, not least on climate.

Perhaps one answer to this is not to focus too much on the Prime Minister, or only on political leaders. Carrying the country through this moment will require thousands of leaders: political leaders at national, city, and local level, but also civic leaders - head teachers, faith leaders, community organisers. Perhaps our focus should be on leadership across all these layers.

Opening reflections

Four participants offered opening reflections.

1. This is not a new conversation, so what have we learned?

The first speaker asked why we have been having this conversation for so long. They first encountered debates about relational, imaginative leadership a quarter of a century ago, in discussions about how global companies should lead differently through the energy transition. These conversations were intellectually electrifying and changed nothing. A decade later, similar ideas surfaced in party politics: community organising began to influence a major party for the first time, a "relational state" was seriously debated, and, for a brief moment, there was a bubble of excitement. This collapsed at least in part because the force of political orthodoxy - the way politics is currently done - proved overwhelming. The prevailing mode of politics - top-down, focused on announcements, and so on - simply found a new style of politics too challenging.

This history poses three questions, to which we do not yet know the answers.

• First, have we failed to change political leadership because we haven't yet got it right - or because it is impossible within the confines of mainstream politics?

• Second, should we stop trying to bring the edges into the centre at all, and instead celebrate and resource the edges where they are?

• Third, what kind of moment is this? Specifically, do we think the incoming Prime Minister will carry through an enabling style of leadership into the Premiership, or will he revert to politics as usual? Watching this real-life case study might help us decide the extent to which politics can rise to this moment.

2. The need for an associational politics - and how hard it will be

The second speaker characterised the emotional state of the nation - vital context for any conversation about the possibilities of politics and leadership.

A first observation is that many people are now deep in zero-sum thinking. This is a natural response to prolonged scarcity, and it has changed our culture and society. An example: when one community wins something - e.g. a restored bus route - others feel aggrieved that they lost out. When a new community facility is announced, people assume it will not come to them. It is hard to build a politics of solidarity when this is the resting emotional state of the country. Note also that this same fraught state affects frontline practitioners, especially via what humanitarian workers call "moral injury" - the psychological damage that comes from being forced to make impossible trade-offs every day, such as choosing which people you don't have time to help. Again, this emotional state has a huge effect on behaviours across the system.

A second key feature of our moment is atomisation. Beyond the long-run trends that have privatised daily life, technology has now accelerated atomisation even inside the family. We no longer need to accommodate one another's preferences even to choose a film - we each just stare at our own devices. This undercuts the foundations of a functioning society.

Perhaps the answer to both trends is the same: a revival of associational politics, rooted in physical places. Institutions that people join, own, and belong to, and which cannot be sold out from under them. However, standing in the way of this goal are at least three barriers:

• The permission structure of the media, which treats community and associational life as soft at best and irrelevant at worst

• A civil service that is set up to advise ministers on what government can do - ban, regulate, tax, announce - not what needs to happen in society, including in the wider civic sphere, and how government can enable and catalyse others

• A very real threat to the safety of politicians and other public figures, which understandably now shapes their behaviour

None of these three challenges are insurmountable, but in order to get past them we need to be honest about them.

3. A need for new capabilities and institutions

The third speaker reflected that the relationship between the centre and the edges has been repeatedly reinvented; over the years, we have had endless area-based regeneration programmes, early-years initiatives, regional offices, and now test-and-learn approaches - and never quite got it right. This prompted two questions.

• First, what skills and mindsets do political leaders actually need in order to support decentralisation and innovation, and how do we cultivate them? A telling observation: some countries invest in training for political leaders; in Britain the only such training is funded by a US foundation (Bloomberg's support for mayors)

• Second, what institutions do we need to connect the edge and the centre more systematically? Progressive politics has depended on this relationship - ideas rise from the civic sphere, and at some point are backed by state action (laws, rights, budgets).

The two feed each other, and we need leaders who understand this. There are also actions we could take. An example: the UK government is investing a billion pounds in breakthrough research on science and technology via ARIA, but there is nothing comparable for breakthroughs on major social challenges - care, housing, democracy, neighbourly trust.

4. What kind of leadership do we need for this moment?

The final opening speaker described three features of the leadership needed at this moment:

• First, it all starts with compassion. Given the toxicity of the environment, leading now is extraordinarily hard, and a better relationship between the centre and the edges has to start from lowering this temperature.

• Second, there is a myth about power. Researchers who went looking for power in Whitehall found that everyone - from senior civil servants to Ministers - felt powerless and yet also sharply accountable. Meanwhile, citizens think all the power sits "over there" - in Whitehall - and nobody is accountable. The lesson: it's a hard sell to ask people at the centre to share power when they don't feel they have any. Perhaps instead of asking people to share power, we should aim to create power together.

• Third, we should reject the false binary between "strong" leadership - the leader who takes risks, tells people what to do, and disdains engagement - and a supposedly woolly, enabling alternative. The harder, stronger work of leadership at this time is creating space for people to come together.

Discussion

After introductions and paired conversations, eight broad themes emerged.

1. The Burnham test

The incoming Prime Minister was a recurring reference point - partly as a leader, partly as a live experiment in whether enabling leadership is possible in today's environment. One participant who had worked closely with Burnham's Mayoral administration described his leadership as being powerful because it was "invitational". This included an inspiring narrative ("let's build this together"), tone (human, informal), and a method of working (setting big outcomes, then figuring out delivery together). There was also a genuine pluralism and openness to ideas. The approach, they judged, is real. The question is whether it can be sustained in Downing Street.

2. Perceptions of the role of politicians

One key constraint on leadership style is how politicians perceive their role. One participant, with decades of experience at the heart of government, argued that since the late 1990s politicians have seen their job mainly as managing public services; this was reflected, for example, in New Labour's retail contract with the public, delivered through a command-and-control machine. A critical step is for politicians to instead see their job as mobilising social forces. This would also require the Treasury to be rewired, away from a managerial approach and towards centring value and purpose (e.g. societal wellbeing, prevention, cross-cutting missions).

3. Focus on being, not doing

A recurring theme was that we obsess over what leaders should do, and neglect how they need to be. One participant warned that even "enabling leadership" could be viewed through the 'doing' paradigm - reduced to five things to do - when the important work is inner work: growing the capabilities needed to lead in a different way. A running problem is that we do not make space for politicians to reflect on what this moment is asking of them. Another participant problematised the idea of a leadership "style" to be replicated - leadership development programmes, even with diverse cohorts, often try to produce a single archetype. The modern obsession is arguably worse than "what will I do?" - it is "how will I look?" We need to be comfortable with many styles of leadership, all underpinned by self-awareness and humility.

4. Anxiety, and the fear beneath

As in earlier roundtables in the Centre for the Edge initiative, anxiety emerged as a central theme. One participant described how anxiety produces dysfunctional leadership: a flurry of doing, a "manic defence" of perpetual motion, leading to wheel-spinning. In healthcare, this anxiety runs deep - a fear that if we get things wrong, people will die, and scandals will follow. This is one reason we throw resources at high-cost, life-extending treatments, and starve the unglamorous frontline preventative work that has a bigger return. This all raised the question of how we can cultivate non-anxious forms of leadership. Another participant noted that this depends on us being able to "decommission" old, risk-averse institutions.

5. The missing campaigner's mind

Are we too clever by half? One participant argued that progressives now seem to lack a rabble-rouser's instinct, or an advertiser's mindset - the ability to distill these ideas into a powerful, simple story to inspire people. Some participants invoked community leaders from an earlier generation; people who "just got on and did things". Another participant, who has been involved in training elected leaders, echoed this point: city mayors often reach for a politics of visible fixes, e.g. potholes, because it is a way to communicate their priorities. Maybe the problem is that we have not yet found a sufficiently inspiring story about devolution and place. One participant shared a note of optimism - clearly the public has not given up on collective life; millions of us stay up half the night to watch the national team play football. Yet national politics has seemed unable to tap into a positive national story.

6. Moral leadership

Closely related to these themes was the question of moral language. One participant pointed to a lecture the incoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, had given at Theos, a theology think tank. There, he made the case for devolution not just as a driver of growth, or a way to improve public services, but as a way to help people live flourishing lives. This was a decidedly moral case for an agenda that is usually couched in technocratic terms. Recent work in political science suggests that when politicians harness these kinds of moral arguments, it can support a swing from "I" back towards "we". Community leaders likewise often speak in moral terms of right and wrong, but with politicians this kind of discourse seems to have become unfashionable.

7. Honesty about resources

Running under the conversation was a warning: many of the places that see the deepest anger and distrust are economically depleted - households have nothing spare, businesses have moved out, local public services have run out of money. Rather than being honest about the scale of this challenge, all political parties have tended to resort to a politics of "announceables", proposing lists of solutions to problems. This context of material scarcity makes it harder to pursue a more enabling and hopeful politics, but also makes it more important that we try.

8. A fifty-year project

Where can a deep shift in the mode and narrative of politics come from? One participant pointed to the success of the American right, which over fifty years invested patiently in leadership, endowed institutions, and learned to translate its ideas into popular language. The argument for a new type of progressive politics - one built around associational life, fraternity, mutualism, and community power - will need to be built just as intentionally and patiently. Part of this challenge falls to major funders: who is funding in this long-term, infrastructural way? A related question was how we can invest more in leadership training, in politics and beyond.

Closing reflections and next steps

In closing, the discussion returned to the theme of anxiety, and to the concept of non-anxious leadership: the non-anxious leader reduces the reactivity of the system. We do have leaders who embody this, but they are mostly leading transformative work in communities. See, for example, Hastings Commons, where a combination of leadership and new institutions has been able to deliberately absorb risk, creating space for community-led transformation. Perhaps part of our task is to give more salience to leaders like this, and not rely so wholly on politicians.

Turning to next steps, the Centre for the Edge is moving from an inquiry phase into a stage focused more on experiments and recommendations. This will include a Whitehall-facing report, feeding into live processes around civil service reform. Given the new administration's commitment to place and devolution, what should the centre of government look like? Beyond this, the initiative is open to partners; to deepen the research, or seed practical experiments.