Why we need a gentle radical revolution

Our social arrangement needs to prioritise human relationships, argues MP Danny Kruger.

Danny Kruger

Danny Kruger is the Conservative MP for Devizes. He is the author of Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation.

A group of people stand in a field by a fence and a railway footcrossing.

Danny Kruger with a campaign group in his Devizes constituency.

Democracy divides us. The political system best calculated to hold together a diverse society is also one that exacerbates differences and obscures our common opinions and interests. A two-party system - and all Western politics is largely binary, split between conservative and progressive parties or groups of parties - encourages vicious disagreement across the aisle, and polarises opinion in the country.

The paradox is that, despite our party disagreements, the most popular opinion with the public is that ‘they're as bad as each other’. The view held in common across the country is that ‘they’re all the same’; that ‘there’s nothing to choose between them’. And deep down, the public is right, but in a good way. Fundamentally the parties share a worldview, which derives from our common inheritance as the heirs of the Christian tradition.

That tradition taught us that individuals are intrinsically, personally, valuable, without reference to the identities of sex, household, tribe or race which, in pagan cultures, gave people their only worth (or for most people, their lack of it). It also taught us that, despite our individual personal value, our mission in life was other-facing. Our object of worship was outside the self. God’s will was made material and meaningful through the institutions of our common life, in what we came to call civil society. These institutions in turn, especially the institution of the law, worked to protect the individual and make diversity safe.

This tradition split into two parts in the modern age, as an old, anti-Christian idea, which Christianity had expunged, crept back in. In my book Covenant I call it ‘the Idea’, as opposed to what I call ‘the Order’. The ‘Idea’ is that I am god, with the creative power to order reality and decide for myself what is right and wrong. This ancient heresy has been refreshed in our times precisely by the principle of individual rights and freedoms that Christianity gave us. This is because we have steadily degraded the other side of the Christian bequest: the other-facing, institutional life that gave individuals a more textured sense of who they were, i.e. members of a community with something to live for outside themselves. The consequence is both the narcissism of self-worship and the rise of identity culture - a return to the pagan belief that your value is determined by your sex, race or tribe.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency.

Individual value and dignity, made safe and meaningful by a social arrangement which emphasises solidarity, peace and care for the stranger - these are the elements of what I call the ‘Order’. They are not absolute principles: even individual rights to life and liberty must be constrained in certain circumstances, and other-facing generosity likewise needs to be limited in order to be sustained. To take a current example, ‘care for the stranger’ does not, in my view, mean offering a home in the UK to anyone who manages to arrive on our shores and claim asylum. It does mean treating every asylum seeker humanely, whether we admit them or remove them, and it means committing part of our wealth and power to preventing, or mitigating the effects of, war and natural disaster in other parts of the world.

How does such a covenantal politics approach other policy areas? The principles that Graham Tomlin set out in the report he compiled after the Grenfell Tower fire, after listening to local voices, are a helpful guide. We need to ‘humanise welfare’, dismantling the inefficient bureaucracies which see people as units to be managed, rather than as people to be helped and given responsibility and agency, and build instead relational systems of social support. We need to ‘provide homes’, which means so much more than the sterile term ‘housing’: it means attractive, affordable, safe buildings where people can live both with privacy and in community. As this suggests we need to help people ‘become neighbours’, with the means and the motivation to connect with others who belong to different identity groups. We should ‘notice faith’: as happened after Grenfell, it is local community faith groups which more than any official agency provide support, belonging, cohesion, and practical change at a local level.

And lastly, overall, we need to ‘renew democracy’. In Graham’s words, ‘we need to find ways to enable people, especially in more deprived areas, to have more of a say in issues that directly affect their lives, rather than politics happening at a distance by competing parties remote from local life.’ The sense of this is both deeply conservative (small-c) and deeply radical. Of course, we need power to be close to the people; this was the traditional way of things before the Durkheim and his followers decided that the centralised state, not local civil institutions, was the proper place for managing human services. In the Middle Ages, according to Robert Tombs’ history of England, fully a third of men, of all classes, played a responsible role of some kind in the management of their neighbourhood. Yet a return to this model would be radical, because it involves upending Durkheim’s assumptions - shared by his heirs in the school of New Public Management beloved of the Blairites - about the proper arrangement of society.

We need a gentle revolution: a return to some old ideas about social organisation that prioritise human relationships, the organic and the natural over utility, efficiency and equality of outcome; ideas which actually lead to a more useful, more efficient and genuinely more equal system. These are the ideas of what I call the Order, derived from theories of the social covenant that lie deep in our history but which are also best fitted to the modern world.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency. We can recreate a more localised economy, but this time more fair, equal and capable of supporting a larger and more diverse population than the pre-modern world knew. And we can make a democracy that more closely reflects the principle that we all, whether progressive or conservative, share a common inheritance and belong to a single political community.

Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation is published by Forum Press.

Article

Comment

Justice

Leading

Politics

7 July 2025

5 min read

The consequences of truth-telling are so severe our leaders can’t admit their mistakes

When accountability means annihilation, denial is the only way to survive

Leah Brown

Leah is a campaigner for restorative practices and founder of The WayFinders Group.

Baroness Casey.

BBC.

Why do our leaders struggle so profoundly with admitting error?

Media and inquiries regularly report on such failures in the NHS, the Home Office, the Department of Work and Pensions, HMRC, the Metropolitan Police, the Ministry of Defence, and so many more public institutions. Often accompanied by harrowing personal stories of the harm done.

In a recent white paper (From harm to healing: rebuilding trust in Britain’s publicly funded institutions), I defined “harm” as a holistic concept occurring where physical injury or mental distress is committed and sustained and explained that harm is generally something that is caused, possibly resulting in injury or loss of life.

When we look at harm from an institutional perspective, structural power dynamics inevitably oppress certain groups, limit individual freedoms, and negatively affect the safety and security of individuals. But when we look at it through the lens of the individuals who run those institutions, we see people who often believe that they are acting in good faith, believe that their decisions won’t have a significant impact, who don’t have time to think about the decisions they are making, or worse still, prefer to protect what is in their best interest.

Even well-intentioned leaders can become complicit in cycles of harm - not just through malice, but through their lack of self-awareness and unwillingness to put themselves in the shoes of the person on the receiving end of their decisions.

Martin Luther King Jr supposedly said, “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” In contemporary politics, leaders are neither selected nor (largely) do they remain, because of their humility. Humility is synonymous with weakness and showing weakness must be avoided at all cost. Responsibility is perceived as something that lies outside of us, rather than something we can take ownership of from within.

So, why do leaders struggle so profoundly with admitting error?

The issue is cultural and three-fold.

First, we don’t quantify or systematically address human error, allowing small mistakes to escalate.

We then enable those responsible to evade accountability through institutional protection and legal barriers.

Finally, we actively discourage truth-telling by punishing whistle-blowers rather than rewarding transparency. Taken together, these create the very conditions that transform errors into institutional harm.

Nowhere is this plainer than in Baroness Casey’s recent report on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse that caused the Government to announce a grooming gangs inquiry. In this case, the initial harm was compounded by denial and obfuscation, resulting not just in an institutional failure to protect children, but system-wide failures that have enabled the so-called “bad actors” to remain in situ.

Recently, this trend was bucked at Countess of Chester Hospital where the police arrested three hospital managers involved in the Lucy Letby investigation. Previously, senior leadership had been protected, thus allowing them to evade accountability. Humble leadership would look like acting when concerns are raised before they become scandals. However, in this case, leadership did act; they chose to bury the truth rather than believe the whistle-blowers.

Until we separate admission of error from institutional destruction, we will continue to incentivise the very cover-ups that erode public trust.

The answer to our conundrum is obvious. In Britain, accountability is conflated with annihilation. Clinging onto power is the only option because admitting error has become synonymous with career suicide, legal liability, and is tantamount to being hanged in the gallows of social media. We have managed to create systems of governing where the consequences of truth-telling are so severe that denial is the only survival mechanism left. We have successfully weaponised accountability rather than understanding it as the foundation of trust.

If Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council had admitted even half of the failures Alexis Jay OBE identified in her 2013 report and that Baroness Casey identifies in her 2025 audit, leaders would face not only compensation claims but media storms, regulatory sanctions, and individual prosecutions. It’s so unthinkable to put someone through that that we shrink back with empathy as to why someone might not speak up. But this is not justice. Justice is what the families of Hillsborough have been seeking in the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill: legal duties of candour, criminal offences for those who deliberately mislead investigations or cover-up service failures, legal representation, and appropriate disclosure of documentation.

Regardless of your political persuasion, it has to be right that when police misconduct occurs, officers should fear not only disciplinary action and criminal charges. When politicians admit mistakes, they should face calls for their resignation. Public vilification is par for the course. Being ejected from office is the bare minimum required to take accountability for their actions.

The white paper shows that the cover-up always causes more damage than the original error. Institutional denial - whether relating to the Post Office sub-postmasters, the infected blood scandal victims, grooming gang victims, Grenfell Towers victims, Windrush claimants, or Hillsborough families - compounds the original harm exponentially.

In a society beset with blame, shame, and by fame, it is extraordinary that this struggle to admit error is so pervasive. Survivors can and will forgive human fallibility. What they will not forgive is the arrogance of institutions that refuse to acknowledge when they have caused harm.

The white paper refers to a four-fold restorative framework that starts with acknowledgment, not punishment. The courage to say “we were wrong” is merely the first step. Next is apology and accountability followed by amends. It recognises that healing - not just legal resolution - must be at the heart of justice, treating both those harmed and those who caused it as whole human beings deserving of dignity.

Until we separate admission of error from institutional destruction, we will continue to incentivise the very cover-ups that erode public trust. I was recently struck by Baroness Onora O’Neill who insisted that we must demand trustworthiness in our leaders. We cannot have trustworthiness without truth-telling, and we cannot have that without valuing the act of repairing harm over reputation management. True authority comes from service, through vulnerability rather than invulnerability; strength comes through the acknowledgement of weakness not the projection of power.

We must recognise that those entrusted with power have a moral obligation to those they serve. That obligation transcends institutional self-interest. Thus, we must stop asking why leaders struggle to admit error and instead ask why we have made truth-telling so dangerous that lies seem safer.