Dan Hedley is policy advisor in charge of the New Capital Consensus project, a joint venture between Radix Big Tent, Chatham House, FinSTIC (Institute and Faculty of Actuaries) and the University of Leeds.
Before that, he was director of public policy and government affairs for Fidelity International.
Rachel Reeves, Habermas, and the Lost Rhythm of Adult Political Life
Jürgen Habermas famously identified the social conditions that birthed the public sphere in 18th-century coffee houses—a blend of shelter, caffeine or alcohol, and the free flow of newspapers allowed citizens to meet as equals and debate the future of their shared societies. Today’s world, with ubiquitous Work From Home, more leisure, the internet, hyper-personalized news, and AI, should on paper have accelerated political maturity under the Habermasian model. In reality, it has fractured dialogue into a cacophony of algorithmic flag-waving, splintering the possibility of genuine, adult-to-adult debate into a messy landscape where everyone is “right” and few listen.
There is hope. New aggregator platforms try to neutralize bias, “truth checkers” police narrative distortion, and analysts warn that only a restoration of Habermasian exchange can rescue the public sphere. Yet political conversation remains stuck: rather than the shared risk and co-ownership of the future Habermas envisioned, collective discourse slips into the ersatz comfort of consumer satisfaction and shallow impatience. In a blog this summer, I observed how new information architectures might coax us back to public maturity, but that the obstacles ahead are psychological as much as technological.
Rachel Reeves’ speech today was a rare and salutary break in this trend—a performative act of political adulthood. Standing before the nation to explain not simply her Budget choices, but the circumstances, principles, and lived consequences of those choices, Reeves modeled precisely the “adult-to-adult” communication at the heart of a healthy Habermasian public sphere. She explicitly refused the paternalistic posture of easy promises or technocratic breeziness:
“I recognize the significance of these choices; they will influence our economy for years ahead. It is crucial for the public to comprehend the circumstances we are encountering, the principles that inform my decisions, and why I am confident they will serve the nation well”.
That shift—a leader treating citizens as capable partners in a shared national journey—should be welcomed by all sides. If we want collective responsibility for tough reforms (whether fiscal or investment system), government must speak to the public not as customers but as participants, able to share risk and shape outcomes. This is exactly the pedagogical and psychoanalytic shift from “adult-child” to “adult-adult” dialogue that managerial politics abandoned post-Drucker. Once, politics was about steering shared liabilities and interests; now it too often offers “one-and-done” policy packages with the citizen cast as passive recipient. Reeves' approach dares to reset this cadence.
In political theory and psychoanalytic terms, this shift is urgent. Sir Philip Sidney’s metaphor of the poet or ruler as horseman—balancing control, cooperation, and unpredictability—reminds us that leadership means guidance, not domination. Parliament and public must wrestle, yes, with the uncertainties and costs of change, but real progress demands both discipline and responsiveness, not paternal management.
When political cadence is lost—when citizens become “customers” and government treats all risk as comprehensively managed from above—the national rhythm breaks down.
The great risk transfer, whether in pensions or policy, ought to have rematured the public sphere. Yet because new models of policy co-creation were never actually embraced—because defined contribution members were treated with the same paternal logic as defined benefit members—the chance was missed. Reeves, today, is right not to squander the next opportunity.
The UK’s productivity problem, and the broader failings of our investment system, cannot be solved by decree. “Crowding in,” as NCC rightly argues, must be both an economic and a political act—government needs to bring citizens into its project, and make them co-owners of its timeline, if the necessary space for economic crowding in is to be built. Policy must be paced to human rhythms, not just market tempo. We need realistic, human-shaped timeframes for reform: sometimes that means pausing normal business, sometimes accelerating—but always making space for mature, shared debate.
Reeves' speech demonstrated a model for dialogue in the Habermasian sense, with carefully choreographed press questions and a return, however brief, to the rhythms of newsprint and in-person exchange. It’s an almost nostalgic reference—Habermas' coffee shop cosplay, perhaps, but a reminder that the old forms of discourse, however battered, still offer lessons for how a national conversation should proceed.
In sum, today’s performative act by Rachel Reeves is not just a good move for fiscal management: it’s an invitation to re-mature British public life. It is a small restorative step in finding our way back to the shared rhythms, responsible risks, and adult debates of a functioning polity. Long may it continue.
