The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ fiercely guarded reputation for political impartiality rests assured. At the beginning of October the thinktank provoked Gordon Brown’s ire with a report arguing that his tax credits’ policy had weakened incentives for the poor to stay in employment or earn more. The Tory shadow chancellor, George Osbourne, seized on the findings, attacking the chancellor for having made ‘poverty more entrenched’ in Britain. ‘We need a new direction that fixes the broken rungs at the bottom of the ladder of aspiration,’ he said.
But by the end of the month the IFS had turned its sight on the Tories’ own tax proposals. Responding to the leaked report of the party’s tax commission (see page 5), the Institute’s director Robert Chote told the BBC’s Today programme: ‘This package, if it were to be implemented in its entirety, is likely to benefit people on relatively high incomes rather than people on relatively low incomes.’ He went on to criticise the commission’s proposed environmental taxes, which, he noted, ‘tend to be, at best, neutral across the income distribution or tend to hit the least well-off harder than the best-off.’ So much for fixing those ‘broken rungs’, hey George?
Madeleine Bunting managed an impressive 45 days as director of the thinktank Demos, before resigning in October to return to her old column at the Guardian. So why the sudden exit from wonkland? ‘It has emerged that her vision for Demos is incompatible with that of the trustees,’ was the terse response on the thinktank’s website. (Surely that’s the sort of minor detail you check before offering someone the top job?) But rumours persist that a looming staff rebellion over Bunting’s difficult management style may have been the real cause of her swift departure. ‘She just pissed us all off and rubbed everyone up the wrong way,’ was the view of one anonymous poster on the Guido Fawkes blog, which leaked the story the day before it was announced. Looks like the wonks at Demos have taken their slogan as ‘the thinktank for everyday democracy’ to heart.
Britons are more likely to blame young people for anti-social behaviour than other Europeans, and are less inclined to intervene when teenagers are causing trouble, according to a report published by the ippr this month. The study finds that 65 per cent of Germans, 52 per cent of Spanish and 50 per cent of Italians would be willing to intervene if they saw a group of 14 year-old boys vandalising a bus shelter – but just 34 per cent of Britons would be willing to do the same. Thirty-nine per cent of Britons would avoid a confrontation for fear of physical attack. The thinktank have even coined a new term to describe this worrying phenomenon: ‘paedophobia’. A New of the World campaign to ‘shop a paedophobe’ will no doubt be on its way.
Finally, the fate of ‘Maggie’s children’ has been preoccupying our friends at Cameron’s favourite thinktank, Policy Exchange. No, not the delightful Mark and Carol, but rather the ‘unlucky generation’ born during Thatcher’s reign, who, according to a collection of essays published jointly with Age Concern last month, face an increasingly bleak future of financial pressure, delayed retirement and solitary old age. Curiously, the fact that child poverty tripled under Thatcher, thereby blighting the life chances of one in three of ‘Maggie’s children’ goes unmentioned by the report’s Conservative authors.