Introduction: governing with feeling

A ‘more human’ government? In May 2015, following a return to power of a right-wing Conservative UK government, and resultant despair from the UK left about the failures of its political imagination, a new arrival appeared on the bookstands of popular political non-fiction. Entitled More human: designing a world where people come first (Hilton et al., 2015), the book is written by a former adviser to the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, and is a call to both the left and the right to radically rethink government, politics and policy. The book opens with an anecdote about the treatment of a family on a budget airline flight that frames the rhetorical question: ‘Why can’t we just treat each other with kindness and decency, like human beings?’ (p. 2). What follows is an exploration of what this might mean across strands of government, business, education, urban planning, the food industry and more, with key themes of the need for more ‘empathy’ and care, smaller-scale and thus closer government, and less ‘bureaucracy’.