Geoff Mulgan

Geoff Mulgan has been called "the chief ideologue of New Labour" and "the ultimate New Labourite". Mulgan has been a key advisor to Tony Blair and was one of the founders of the think tank Demos, which has close ties to New Labour. He was a key figure in the drive to modernise left-wing politics and move the Labour Party towards the market.

Background

From 1982 to 1984 Mulgan worked as an administrator at the Greater London Council. He was a 1986-87 Harkness Fellow (which reinforces Anglo-American links) at MIT. He was co-founder and director of the London based think tank Demos from 1993-98. Mulgan's CV on the Demos website does not mention that he joined the British American Project (BAP) in 1996. In September 2003 he was appointed head of policy at No 10 in addition to his role as head of the Strategy Unit in the Cabinet Office.

Mulgan is said to have been involved with Red Wedge, an initiative allegedly started to bring young people into politics. According to John Harris, writing in The Guardian, Mulgan claims he just "drove their van". Harris writes:

To start, though, I want to know about a role that mysteriously is not mentioned his resume: the time he spent in the 1980s with the Labour-supporting collective of musicians and comedians known as Red Wedge. According to Billy Bragg, the young Mulgan drove their van. True? He laughs, slightly nervously. "I did drive the van. Not very well, sadly. It wasn't one of my more heroic moments. I'd forgotten all about that. Who did I have in there? Oh, all sorts of musicians. Paul Weller, Dr Robert (of the Blow Monkeys), Jimmy Somerville from the Communards. But I wasn't in charge. I was only the driver." To some extent, this humble claim crystallises Mulgan's multifaceted career.

The two Red Wedge tours took place in January/February 1986 (featuring Billy Bragg, Paul Weller's band The Style Council, The Communards, Junior Giscombe, Lorna Gee and Jerry Dammers) and in the run up to the June 1987 General Election (featuring the main participants from the first tour as well as The The, Captain Sensible and the Blow Monkeys). If, as seems likely, Mulgan was referring to the second tour, this would have been at the time he was a Harkness fellow at MIT in Boston.

In the 1980s Mulgan was part of the Comedia consultancy, which, with Roger Liddle's Pieda Consulting, advised city administrations. These consultancies spread the practice of purging left-wing people, whose politics were seen as old-fashioned, from positions of power, in an effort to modernise. From 1990-92 Mulgan was special adviser to Gordon Brown when he was shadowing the Department of Trade and Industry, and became 'the Clinton campaign's link to Labour, which involved lots of telephone calls with the Americans - mainly advising them how not to repeat our mistakes.'(Independent On Sunday 24 January 1993)

Demos aimed to transpose the mishmash of Marxism Today's 'fetishised' Thatcherism into Labour policy. Mulgan was part of a 1995 'secret committee' led by Mandelson 'to examine policy changes', which met with Blair on alternate Fridays. The group contained no MPs, preferring Roger Liddle and Derek Scott (both former SDP), Patricia Hewitt (not then an MP), and TV producer Michael Wills. Here Mandelson and Liddle urged Blair to use the SDP as a party model. (Guardian 15 July 1995)

As Demos' 'policy entrepreneur' Mulgan was 'seconded' to concoct a consensus around key issues. Typically this connected markets and the future as a matter of inevitability, as determinism; or conflated Daniel Bell's end of ideology dictum with a British (Atlanticist) version of neo-Conservatism.

His appointment to the PM's Policy Unit converted Demos' experiments into new shibboleths surrounding 'social exclusion' largely to coerce NGOs dealing with the poor. He is the first person to go from political adviser to civil servant as Director of the Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) and Forward Strategy Unit.

The PIU reviewed the nation's energy policy at a 4 July 2001 seminar. Mulgan introduced and handed over to Chair, Kevin Tebbit (Ministry of Defence). Then there were presentations by Sian Davies of the Henley Centre, which has several Demos members, Bob Tyrrell (Demos) and Ged Davis (Shell), a Demos funder, and closing comments from Mulgan. Lunch everyone?

Mulgan is a trustee of the Political Quarterly (with the British American Project's Richard Holme) and is on the editorial board of Prospect magazine. There is an American Demos and an American Prospect (with the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Daniel Bell on board).

Mulgan is a former Trustee of Crime Concern, the Prudential's (£750,000 Home Office-funded) adjunct to their 'Corporate Social Responsibility' initiatives. The board includes: Princess Anne, Lords Brittan, Carr, Hunt and Merlyn-Rees, Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy (Kingfisher plc), Michael Hastings (BBC), Nathaniel Sloane (Accenture), Matt Baggott (Deputy Chief Constable, West Midlands Police), Liz Wicksteed (Home Office) and Sir Stanley Kalms (Treasurer of the Conservative Party). [1]

Demos brought to the UK several free-market ideologues from the US including Philip Bobbitt (Lyndon B. Johnson's nephew). He was Reagan's legal counsel from 1980-81, on the Select Committee/cover-up on Iran/Contra and Director for Intelligence at the NSC 1997-98. Demos also advertised an April meeting with George Soros.

Affiliations

As of February 2009 Geoff Mulgan is:

• Director of the Young Foundation
• A senior fellow of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government - which is run by another former Demos director Tom Bentley
• A member of the controversial British American Project

Career

• 1982-4: administrator at the Greater London Council
• 1984-6: investment executive (for Greater London Enterprise).
• 1986-7: Harkness Fellow at MIT (specialising in telecommunications).
• 1987-90: researcher at the Centre for Communication and Information Studies and lecturer at the Polytechnic of Central London specialising in policy relating to digital technologies and broadband; member of Comedia consultancy (mainly working for city administrations in the UK and abroad); occasional consultant for the European Commission on telecommunications policy, appointed as expert 1990; co-founder and director of Rhythm Radio.
• 1990-92: special adviser to Gordon Brown MP, focusing on trade and industry policy.
• 1992-3: Fellow at the British Film Institute, specialising in film and broadcasting policy, with particular reference to the future of the BBC.
• 1993-7: founder and director of Demos, think-tank 'responsible for a range of research projects on diverse issues including privacy, parental leave and local government reform, and publishing authors ranging from MPs Alan Duncan, Nigel Foreman, Vincent Cable and Roger Freeman, to intellectuals such as John Gray, Roger Scruton, and Theodore Zeldin.'
• 1997 - August 2000, Special Advisor to Tony Blair in the Prime Minister's Policy Unit on 'social policy issues'. Responsible for 'social exclusion, welfare to work, family, urban, voluntary sector and other issues'.
• September 2000 - 2004 Director of the Performance and Innovation Unit from 11 September 2000

Other affiliations

• World Economic Forum, Global Leader of Tomorrow
• Circa 2000: Occasional reporter for BBC TV (programmes include the BBC2 series 'In Search of Power') and radio (including Radio 4 'Analysis').
• Circa 2000: Occasional columnist on UK newspapers, including the Independent and Guardian. Trustee of Crime Concern, the Photographers Gallery, and the Political Quarterly, and on the editorial board of Green Futures journal and Prospect magazine.

talks

State of the World Forum (New York, September 2000): chair Prospect roundtable on genetics (London, July 2000); Resurgence (London, June 2000); Appeldoorn Conference (Netherlands, May 2000); Business Innovation and Social Renewal conference (Glasgow, May 2000); Crime Concern (London, Mar 2000); Chief Executives' Annual Conference (Newcastle, Mar 2000); World Economic Forum (Davos, Jan 2000); Sunningdale Node (Sunningdale, Dec 1999); OECD Futures programme (Berlin, Dec 1999); Redcliffe Maud Club (London, Dec 1999); Anglo-French symposium (London, Nov 1999); chair of Progressio Foundation conference with the Dalai Lama, Ruud Lubbers and others (Amsterdam, Oct 1999); Swedish government (Stockholm) and Malmo University (Malmo, Oct 1999); Australia World Economic Forum (Hayman Island, Sept 1999); Department of Health board (Stevenage, Oct 1999); Canadian Institute of Public Administration (Ottawa, Jul 1999); Public Management Foundation (London, Jul 1999); 21st Century Trust (Strasbourg, Jun 1999); State of the World Forum (Belfast, Mar 1999); St James Ethics Centre Millennium Lecture (Sydney, Dec 1998).

Books

• Good and Bad Power: the ideals and betrayals of government (Penguin, 2006)
• The prospects for social renewal, (forthcoming from the OECD, 2000).
• Connexity (Harvard Business Press and Jonathon Cape 1998).
• Life After Politics (Harper Collins 1997),
• Politics in an antipolitical age (Polity 1994);
• Freedom's Children (Demos 1995);
• The Other Invisible Hand (Demos 1995);
• Communication and Control: networks and the new economies of communication (Blackwell 1991);
• Saturday Night or Sunday Morning (Comedia 1987).