I was recently pointed to NESTA’s report on innovation in the British economy and our recovery, or otherwise, from the Great Recession. This is a pretty good example of the first two functions in the post on thinktanks – it’s assessment and comparison first, with ideas arising from them – but that’s not really my…
Read More More radical consensus – the innovation strikeI sometimes wonder how I got away with being a 1980s kid. Between the Ro-Ro ships sailing with their bow doors open, the football grounds burning down, the police-enabled disasters at them, the state-backed kiddy fiddlers, the beef that ate your brain, the Soviet nuclear rain, aircraft full of smoke on the runway at Manchester…
Read More scanner appeal!So they put Jimmy Savile in charge of Broadmoor? Even if you didn’t know he was a rapist, that would be…head-burstingly weird and inappropriate. It’s yet another reason to think Chris Morris’s life work is a documentary. So, whodunnit? A valid question, especially as Grant Shapps, the man with two faces and half a brain,…
Read More so who was a health minister in 1987-88?Tristram Hunt: Perhaps an unfair comparison, but it does highlight two criticisms. The first is the lack of particularity: for a thesis so rightly concerned with the intimacies of national identity, this is a broad-brushed work of political science that seeks to impose the policy solutions of Canada and Australia on Britain. In particular, it…
Read More Tristram, not JeremyAnyway, so Tom “Boris Watch” Barry was having at the Grauniad’s Nicholas “He Said” Watt over thinking that Boris Johnson really is a frightfully nice chap. I responded, recapping a point I’ve made earlier, which is that Johnson skates because the national press doesn’t report London politics and the locals focus on their borough councils:…
Read More it’s personal, but not in a good wayHere’s a story that throws light on a lot of things that are wrong with thinktanks, even the ones that have content beyond just wanktanking. Neil O’Brien has advice for the Tories. O’Brien observes that only rich people, and specifically rich people from southern England, want to vote Conservative, and that this is not enough…
Read More In which I write the piece on thinktanks Dsquared promised