After a fringe-tastic party conference season, the great and the good gathered in London on 10 October for Prospect magazine’s seventh annual Think Tank of the Year Awards, the Oscars of the wonk world.
The Guardian’s David Walker told the assembled cerebral mass that he and his fellow judges ‘thought energy levels were higher on the right of the political spectrum’ although he commended those stalwart lefties at the Fabians for their ‘excellent and courageous’ Facing Out pamphlet on party reform.
In the end, however, it wasn’t just thinktanks on the right who walked away with prizes. Centre Forum was named runner up in the thinktank of the year category, giving Lib Dems a rare reason to be cheerful, while the Centre for European Reform took the international prize, with Chatham House as runner up.
And while Policy Exchange was surely hoping to repeat its success at last year’s awards, it was the ippr that walked away with the coveted thinktank of the year gong. One observer noted that the announcement was greeted by a suspiciously coordinated outbreak of party poppers which ‘appeared to have been placed strategically around the hall’.
Not to dampen the joy of the winners, Prospect editor David Goodhart said: ‘The truth is that it hasn’t been a vintage year in the British thinktank world. In the absence of any groundbreaking work this year, we awarded both prizes…to two previous winners…for consistently strong and important work.’
The new economics foundation (nef), the ‘think and do tank’, must have been disturbed to find what can happen when weighty tomes of research find their way into the hands of a journalist.
China-dependence, a report revealing ‘the many ways in which Britain is becoming increasingly dependent on the rest of the world to fuel our high-consuming lifestyles’, was released on 6 October to coincide with the day the whole world went into ‘ecological debt’. Hacks at the Guardian, overwhelmed by the sight of all those numbers and graphs, got a bit muddled about the report’s findings, claiming the UK ‘ranked…behind only the US as the world’s biggest consumer of natural materials and goods’.
As it happens, this is not quite so, as the paper admitted in a correction a few days later, apologetically explaining that: ‘We misunderstood a graph in the report which did not include all countries. Britain ranks 14th of the 147 countries for which data is available.’ Things are bad, it seems, but not that bad.
While nef were warning of the dire consequences of over-consumption, Policy Exchange held an event to alert the public about another issue of grave importance – the threat to the nation’s gardens. The thinktank teamed up with Tory MP Greg Clark to discuss the problem of ‘garden grabbing’, whereby developers buy up large houses, knock them down and build new homes on the land.
‘Britain’s gardens are under threat,’ it warned in its promotional material. ‘As planners are trying to meet their brownfield and density targets, more and more private gardens are disappearing under bricks and concrete.’