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MPs are so cowed by the institutions and the scale of official failure that they generally just muddle along tinkering and hope to stay a step ahead of the media.
Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence - i.e adapt to feedback.
I know from my nightclub days that when local cops need to show a fall in crime for political reasons there are all sorts of ways in which they can easily cheat numbers.
In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to reality plus startups pop up.
Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works - never mind the question 'what could work much better?'
Priorities are fundamental to politics because of inevitable information bottlenecks: these bottlenecks can be transformed by rare good organisation but they cannot be eradicated.
All the best companies quickly go downhill after the departure of people like Bill Gates - even when such very able people have tried very very hard to avoid exactly this problem.
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind's journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.
In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree - not rigorous thinking and not solving problems.
Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much much better if we will face our problems honestly.
I know from my days working on education reform in government that it's almost impossible to exaggerate how little those who work on education policy think about 'how to improve learning.'
In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make it almost impossible for startups to contribute and so on.
The Single Market is no-where defined in the E.U. treaties. If you suddenly ask people to define the Single Market, the number who can do that, who are specialists in the area, is pretty small.
In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals).
One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.
Inevitably, the world of 'communications' / PR / advertising / marketing is full of charlatans flogging snake oil. It is therefore very easy to do things and spend money just because it's conventional.
Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called 'Hacking the Electorate.' It's pretty much the best book I've seen on the use of data science in U.S. elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.
Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g 'witch doctor') to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).
Most political operations - and government - don't try to be rigorous about decision-making or force themselves to think about what they know with what confidence. They are dominated by seniority, not evidence.
Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard - there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use - yet we can't embed it in government.
The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but management and operational ideas which are extremely hard to change fast.
People in politics tend to spend far too much time on higher profile issues affecting few people and too little time on such basic processes that affect thousands or millions and which we know how to do much better.
In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.
Vote Leave argued during the referendum that a Leave victory should deliver the huge changes that the public wanted and the U.K. should make science and technology the focus of a profound process of national renewal.
Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of 'the educated classes' in general, tended to hold a broadly 'blank slate' view of the world mostly uninformed by decades of scientific progress.
Fundamental to real expertise is 1: whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it's possible to make good predictions and 2: does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction.
If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.
People are always asking 'how could the politicians let X happen with Y?' where Y is something important. People find it hard to believe that Y is not the focus of serious attention and therefore things like X are bound to happen all the time.
If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.
It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.
The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure and, second, everybody keeps their heads down focused on the particular and they ignore the system.
The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.
The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.
As I've said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment's OODA loops are broken - as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily - and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.
If you think of politics as 'serious people focusing seriously on the most important questions,' which is the default mode of most educated people and the media (but not the less-educated public which has better instincts), then your model of reality is badly wrong.
The stock market is an exploitable market where being right means you get rich and you help the overall system error-correct which makes it harder to be right (the mechanism pushes prices close to random, they're not quite random but few can exploit the non-randomness).
One of the things I wanted to do in the Department for Education was open up the policy making process and run things like wikis in open formats in order to a: start off with better ideas and then b: adapt to errors much faster than is possible with normal Whitehall systems.
The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as 'the party of the rich, they don't care about public services.' This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed.
In many areas, the E.U. regulates to help the worst sort of giant corporate looters defending their position against entrepreneurs. Post-Brexit Britain will be outside this jurisdiction and able to make faster and better decisions about regulating technology like genomics, AI and robotics.
People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.' That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.
If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.
CRISPR-enabled 'gene drives' enable us to make changes to the germ-line of organisms permanent such that changes spread through the entire wild population, including making species extinct on demand. Unlike nuclear weapons such technologies are not complex, expensive, and able to be kept secret for a long time.
Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.
Britain could contribute huge value to the world by leveraging existing assets, including scientific talent and how the NHS is structured, to push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field - genomic prediction - that is revolutionising healthcare in ways that give Britain some natural advantages over Europe and America.
While our ancestor chiefs at least had some intuitive feel for important variables like agriculture and cavalry our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors.
If you go back to the Euro campaign in 1999, how many chief executives and chairmen of FTSE 100 companies were speaking out on this? I think two. Two out of 200 people. Did that represent the reality of what businesses in Britain thought about the Euro? Of course it didn't. Did it represent what CBI members thought? Of course it didn't.
Those of us from the Vote Leave team would never have gone to No10 to help if Boris hadn't told us that he is determined to change the Conservative Party - change its priorities and change its focus so it really serves the whole country. Most of us were not 'party people.' For us, parties are a means to an end - a means to improve lives.
Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives.