The Blob playbook

You are James Goodperson and you have just been appointed executive director of We Are The Good Guys Charity.

Your office is in a converted building in London, close enough to Westminster to be useful but far enough away to preserve the fiction of independence. The staff are bright, committed, and fluent in the strange dialect of modern civil society. The charity exists, according to its website, to protect the vulnerable, empower communities, advance rights and speak truth to power. It is difficult to know what any of this means in practice, but that is part of the point. A precise mission can be completed. Yours can always find another frontier. Welcome to the Blob.

On your first morning, after the HR induction and the briefing on inclusive language, you find a manual in your desk drawer. It is called Civil Society Engagement Strategy. That sounds innocent enough.

The manual is not about winning elections. Elections are too crude, too vulgar, too dependent on the public having the correct opinions. It is about something more useful: how to shape power without appearing to possess it.

The first rule is never to say plainly what you want. Political demands can be swatted away. Your goals must be advanced in a higher language. This is one of the central techniques. The activist charity takes a political preference and renders it as process, expertise or compassion. It is a form of laundering. A view that would sound ideological if expressed by a party activist sounds neutral when expressed by a charity chief executive in the language of evidence, rights and lived experience. The substance is the same, but the costume has changed.

It works because it moves the argument onto friendlier ground. The question shifts away from whether the policy is the correct one for the issue and into the realm of whether The Stakeholders have been consulted and The Process has been followed.

Democracy asks: should the state do this? The Blob replies: has the process been followed to the satisfaction of those who opposed it from the start?

This fictional manual captures one of the patterns my colleagues and I at Cambridge Circus Research have been examining over the past year. In a report titled Breaking the Blob, we investigated NGOs and charities, how they influence policy, and what can be done about it. This only scratches the surface, but our findings are numerous. One of the most crucial is the pattern these organisations follow when attempting to frustrate government policy.

Suppose the government announces a policy your organisation dislikes. The playbook is set in motion. You can denounce the policy as “concerning,” “unworkable,” or even “cruel.” (Ideally, it can be described as being all three.) You have now created moral delegitimisation. 

Then comes the briefing note. It must be short enough for journalists and MPs to understand, but dense enough to look authoritative. It should include the right vocabulary: vulnerable people, safeguards, unintended consequences, evidence gaps, international obligations, communities at risk. On the surface, you are informing, but really you are supplying ammunition. You are giving your allies the phrases they will later repeat as though they arrived at them independently.

Next, you must find the human face. After all, no campaign can survive on procedure alone. Somewhere there must be a person who will suffer as a consequence of policy. Ideally, the case should be sympathetic, difficult to criticise, and not entirely representative. The policy therefore becomes emotionally impossible to defend.

This is how a general reform becomes a story about one person. If ministers talk about the general case, they look cold. If they engage with the individual case, they are dragged onto your territory. Either way, the campaign has found its moral centre.

We can now engage the coalition. A single charity objecting to a policy can be ignored. But 35 charities objecting to a policy is “civil society”. It does not really matter if these organisations are funded by the same foundations and are all drawn from the same, often revolving list of trustees and employees. They look different.

The open letter is the perfect instrument. It looks spontaneous, but it is usually a managed product. Away from public view, your organisation constructs carefully agreed wording, gathers signatories and briefs journalists. By the time the letter appears, the important work has already happened behind the scenes. “Campaigners say …” is weak. “Leading charities have warned …” is stronger. The substance of the argument has not changed, but repetition across letterheads creates the impression of consensus.

The people who must actually live with the consequences of policy … are effectively shut out of this process

The next phase is consultation. This is where the system is most vulnerable, because the modern British state has made itself dependent on people who know how to speak its language. Departments like stakeholders, and stakeholders are legible. They have policy leads, consultation teams, legal officers, comms people, and monitored inboxes. They can attend roundtables. They can submit evidence. They can sit on advisory boards.

Ordinary voters cannot do this. The people who must actually live with the consequences of policy — small-business owners, commuters, parents, taxpayers, victims of crime — are effectively shut out of this process. The stakeholder world is not the public. It is the public filtered through professional organisations, many with their own interests and assumptions.

This is how consultation often tames serious proposals. A policy begins as a clear intention. It passes through the stakeholder machine and eventually emerges softened, hedged around with safeguards or buried in further work. While nobody says, “We are vetoing this,” they do say things like, “Implementation will require further consideration,” or “There are serious concerns from the sector,” or “Ministers must listen.”

And ministers must always listen. They must listen until the policy has become something else.

If that fails, the legal weather can be made to turn. A letter before action may never lead to a full case, but it changes the atmosphere inside government. Suddenly the policy proposal is exposed. Perhaps the entire implementation has to be changed as a result. Judicial review is therefore not simply a legal mechanism, but a political strategy. The aim of this is not always to win. Delaying and exposing policy proposals to legal risk can be just as useful. Forcing the government to rerun part of the process is useful. So is making the next minister think twice before trying anything similar.

The media then amplifies the pressure. The story is delivered to them ready-made: a vulnerable person has been harmed, charities are alarmed, legal action is incoming. Journalists do not have to endorse the campaign, but merely report that “serious concerns have been raised”.

At this point, the government is no longer simply trying to pass a policy. It is pressing ahead “despite warnings” — a phrase that implies recklessness at best and outright cruelty at worst. Ministers may have a mandate. They may even be right. But they are now walking past warning signs erected by people the media treats as morally authoritative.

Parliament adds another route. The Blob is not outside Parliament in any simple sense. It has friends there. Some MPs and peers share its worldview, while others rely on its briefings. Many have even been drawn directly from this sector. A parliamentary question can force a ministerial response. A committee can lend the campaign respectability. A Lords amendment can slow legislation. None of this has to defeat the government outright — it simply adds drag.

Drag is underrated in politics. It is less dramatic than a victory, but often more effective. When a policy is delayed long enough, it may miss the legislative window. A reform surrounded by enough legal and reputational risk may never reach Cabinet. A proposal made complicated enough may be abandoned by the next minister. The idea is to make the prospect of reform so costly — so much of an enormous headache — that the bureaucratic machine grinds to a halt. 

The funding that organisations like our fictional We Are The Good Guys Charity receive allows charities to become permanent fixtures in the policy world. This is why the distinction between restricted and unrestricted funding is misleading. Perhaps the government grant pays only for service delivery. Perhaps the foundation grant funds the campaign. But the staff, materials, and rent can all be paid for with this funding. The government may not have explicitly paid for the placards being waved in front of the Home Office, but their grants created the conditions for them to be there.

There is something almost comic about this. The government funds a service. The service provider uses the authority gained from delivering that service to attack the government’s policy. The state has helped create the infrastructure for its own opposition.

The last trick these organisations deploy is to never accept defeat as final. If the policy does end up passing, move on to delaying or frustrating implementation. If implementation begins, you must demand the ability to monitor it. If guidance is issued, you must challenge the guidance. If the courts do not help, return to Parliament. If Parliament does not help, go to regulators, inspectors, local authorities, professional bodies, or the media. There is always another front.

This is why elected politicians find the Blob so hard to deal with. While ministers fight conventional political wars, the Blob acts like an insurgency. It does not need to win today. It simply needs to keep the issue alive until the minister weakens, moves jobs, loses office, or surrenders.

The NGO-charity complex can therefore act very efficiently, rather like a cartel. It knows everything it needs to achieve its objectives with the minimum amount of effort. Charities law around political campaigning does not stop them, because they have been doing this for decades.

Thank your partners. Praise civil society. Remind everyone there is still much work to do

James Goodperson understands this instinctively, though he would never put it so crudely. He knows a policy can be stopped without waiting for the next election. Rather, it can be slowed by consultation, burdened by process, embarrassed in the media, challenged in court and made too costly to pursue.

At the end of the manual there is one final instruction.

When the government retreats, do not gloat. Say you welcome the decision to listen. Say this is a victory for evidence-based policymaking. Thank your partners. Praise civil society. Remind everyone there is still much work to do.

Then open the next file.