The longer you work in policy the more you realise new ideas are extremely rare. Even ideas that seem new are usually old ones repackaged and given a different spin. It’s why so man...
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The longer you work in policy the more you realise new ideas are extremely rare. Even ideas that seem new are usually old ones repackaged and given a different spin. It’s why so many people who’ve been around politics for a long time develop an air of weary cynicism. When you’ve heard the same idea in a hundred different panel sessions, with a glass of cheap white wine warming in your hand, it’s hard to get excited.
I’ve been around for a while now and have occasionally found myself drifting into the cynicial “it’s been tried before” mode. So I’m trying to avoid it by taking a different approach. When I’m talking to a young think-tanker or political aide, whose enthusiam is not yet dimmed, I try not to dismiss ideas that have been doing the rounds for a while, but ask a different question: “given you’re not the first person to think of this why hasn’t it happened before?”
Good post but the claim that there has been a "failure to make any progress on preventative health" seems to rest on local public health budgets being cut. What evidence is there that the council was making any process on, say, obesity before they were cut? 1/