Over the past few months, The Truth Contract has been preparing for its next phase.
Until now, much of our work has focused on examining the challenges Britain faces, questioning accepted narratives and encouraging a more honest public conversation.
That work remains important. We cannot change what we are unwilling to see clearly.
But identifying what is wrong is not enough.
The time has come to move beyond diagnosis and begin the deeper work of exploring credible, practical solutions. Solutions that are not designed around the next election, the latest headline or the interests of one political party, but around the kind of country Britain could become over the course of a generation.
In September, we will launch Vision 2061: a principles-first framework for Britain’s long-term renewal.
At its heart is a simple but ambitious idea: Britain needs to build its civic intelligence.
What do we mean by civic intelligence?
Civic intelligence is our collective capacity to understand the challenges facing our country, examine the available evidence, consider different perspectives and make wiser decisions about the future we share.
Britain does not lack intelligence, experience or imagination.
Across the country, there are researchers, entrepreneurs, educators, practitioners, public servants, community leaders and citizens who understand different parts of the national picture. There are also millions of people whose lived experience offers insight that cannot be found in reports or spreadsheets.
What Britain lacks is a trusted, independent way to bring more of that knowledge together.
Our public debate is too often fragmented by party politics, shortened by electoral cycles and distorted by outrage. Complex questions are reduced to slogans. Disagreement becomes division. People are invited to react, but rarely given the time, information or meaningful opportunity to think and participate.
Vision 2061 is our attempt to create a different kind of space.
A space in which evidence can be examined rather than selectively deployed.
Where competing ideas can be explored rather than immediately dismissed.
Where experts can contribute without pretending to possess every answer.
Where citizens can ask serious questions, test assumptions and help shape the choices that will affect their lives.
This is not about telling people what to think. It is about creating better conditions in which all of us can think.
Why 2061?
The year 2061 has been chosen deliberately.
Britain’s 1961 Census gives us a clear historical baseline from which to examine how the country’s population, economy and society have changed. The 2021 Census allows us to see what happened over the following 60 years. Looking ahead to 2061 completes a 100-year arc, enabling us to consider where current trends may take us and what different choices could make possible.
It also gives us a generational horizon.
The decisions Britain makes today will shape the country for decades. Economic renewal, demographic resilience, healthier institutions and restored public trust cannot be achieved within a single electoral cycle. Nor can they be addressed through a succession of disconnected policies, each abandoned or reversed when governments change.
2061 is long enough for structural renewal to take effect, but close enough to matter to those of us living today and to our children and grandchildren.
Vision 2061 is not a prediction of what Britain will become.
It is a direction of travel: an invitation to consider what Britain could become, the choices that would take us there and the consequences of continuing along our present course.
A framework for national renewal
Vision 2061 begins with 36 interconnected principles organised around three foundations:
A healthy economy
A healthy population
Healthy governance
The principles are not presented as a finished manifesto or a fixed set of answers.
They are a starting framework through which we can examine the relationships between Britain’s most important long-term questions.
Economic policy cannot be separated from population. Population cannot be separated from housing, health, education or infrastructure. None of these can be separated from the quality of governance, public trust or the capacity of our institutions to make and implement long-term decisions.
Too often, these issues are discussed in isolation. Vision 2061 will explore them as parts of one national system.
You can read and download the initial 36-principle blueprint here:
Vision 2061: Principles for Designing Britain’s Future
These principles will continue to develop as evidence is examined, assumptions are challenged and more people contribute their expertise and experience.
We begin with demography
Our first major Vision 2061 exploration will focus on one of the most powerful forces shaping Britain’s future: demography.
For the past five months, we have been working with a leading UK demographics expert to examine how Britain’s population changed between 1961 and 2021, and what different choices could mean for the country by 2061.
Demography does not determine every aspect of our future, but it profoundly shapes the conditions within which that future will unfold.
The size, age and composition of a population affect almost everything: economic growth, public finances, pensions, healthcare, housing, education, infrastructure, employment and the relationship between generations.
Yet demographic change is rarely discussed as a whole. Individual aspects may become politically contentious, but the underlying choices, trade-offs and long-term consequences are seldom presented clearly to the public.
Our opening Vision 2061 episode will explore four possible demographic futures for Britain.
Each involves different choices. Each carries different economic and social consequences. And each requires a more serious national conversation than the one currently taking place.
Our purpose will not be to hand down a predetermined conclusion. It will be to make the evidence understandable, reveal the choices before us and invite informed consideration of what kind of future Britain wants to create.
From information to understanding
Following the demographic launch, we intend to explore one Vision 2061 principle each week.
Each topic will include:
A substantial conversation with an expert or practitioner
A long-form written paper examining the evidence and possible solutions
A short video explaining the problem, vision, potential solution and economic impact
A concise one-page written summary
We have already identified a wide range of potential contributors across the 36 subjects and begun confirming guests.
The aim is not simply to produce more content.
Britain is already surrounded by information. The deeper need is for context, connection and understanding: work that makes complicated issues accessible without stripping away their complexity.
That means bringing together evidence and lived experience. It means making space for differing perspectives. It also means being willing to revise our thinking when stronger evidence or better ideas emerge.
Keeping public understanding accessible
All existing content on The Truth Contract will remain freely available.
As Vision 2061 develops, each topic will continue to have a freely accessible public layer, including a short explanatory video and a one-page summary. We want as many people as possible to be able to understand the questions being explored and the choices facing the country.
The full conversations, substantial research papers and deeper opportunities to participate will form part of a new member-supported layer of TTC.
This model will allow us to fund serious research and production while continuing to make the essential ideas accessible to the wider public, without relying on advertising or allowing commercial sponsorship to shape the conversation.
Participation at greater scale
Content alone will not build civic intelligence.
People need meaningful ways to question, contribute, challenge and participate.
That is why we are creating the Founding Wisdom Council: a community of 2,061 thoughtful, independent-minded people who want to help shape Vision 2061 while it is still developing.
The Wisdom Council will not require political agreement or ideological conformity. Its value will come from the quality of its thinking, the breadth of experience within it and the spirit in which members engage.
We will share the full invitation, membership arrangements and application process in due course.
The Wisdom Council is only the beginning.
Over time, we also intend to develop a dedicated TTC app through which many more people will be able to explore the evidence, respond to proposals and contribute to Britain’s long-term direction.
Our intention is to build a wider civic participation platform: one capable of turning public concern into informed contribution and bringing together insight from across the country.
A different kind of national conversation
Vision 2061 will not belong to one political party, institution or established school of thought.
It will not be an outrage-driven campaign, an echo chamber or another place in which people talk past one another.
Nor will it claim to possess every answer.
It is an attempt to build the civic infrastructure through which better answers can emerge.
We believe Britain can think beyond the next election.
We believe difficult truths can be faced without surrendering to cynicism or fear.
We believe disagreement can sharpen understanding rather than destroy trust.
And we believe that citizens should be given a more meaningful role in shaping the future they and subsequent generations will inherit.
That is the work now beginning.
That is Vision 2061.
And over the coming weeks, we will invite you to become part of it.
Read the initial Vision 2061 principles
If this work speaks to you, please subscribe and share it with someone whose intelligence, experience or perspective could strengthen the conversation.
Further reading
Vision 2061: Principles for Designing Britain’s Future
Let Britain Dream Again and Build
The Truth Contract – not just more content, but a commitment.
You’re here because the surface story doesn’t hold.
You’re ready to question, contribute, and help shape a future worth showing up for.
This is the contract: Truth. Action. Together.
Add your voice to the conversation. This is how we grow the mandate for change.
I have recently returned to an old interest in the Hermetic principles, particularly the Law of Correspondence — *“as above, so below; as below, so above.”* Very simply, I understand it to mean that the same underlying pattern is expressed throughout a whole, with every part affecting and being affected by the rest.
As an experiment, I have begun testing proposals for political and social change against this principle. Vision 2061 produces an interesting result.
Much of what you propose seems, whether intentionally or not, remarkably consistent with the Law of Correspondence. You recognise that intelligence is already distributed throughout society; that housing, health, education, economics, infrastructure, demography and governance cannot sensibly be treated as isolated problems; that expertise is valuable without being omniscient; and that conclusions must remain capable of changing as information moves through the system.
But I think there is an inherent risk at precisely the point where all this distributed intelligence is *brought together*.
Who chooses the questions? Who selects the experts and evidence? Who synthesises what comes back? Who determines which conclusions become action? Most importantly, can information arising anywhere within Vision 2061 change not merely its conclusions, but its organising framework — its priorities, principles and even its “direction of travel”?
If it can, you have created something very interesting: a genuinely responsive system in which no part stands outside the feedback loop.
If it cannot, there is a danger of inadvertently recreating the structure we are trying to escape: a hierarchy at the centre receiving information from everyone else and deciding what to do with it. Participation then becomes consultation.
I don't know whether the Law of Correspondence can provide a sufficient organising principle for political renewal. That's the experiment I'm conducting. But Vision 2061 strikes me as already embodying a surprising amount of it.
Perhaps the crucial test is simply this: **can every part change the whole, while remaining open to being changed by the whole?**
Build the conditions under which answers can emerge.
And then make damn sure that the people who built those conditions don't acquire ownership of what is allowed to emerge.