Policy wonks probably not by nature the most competitive types, more likely to be preoccupied by the latest developments in their field than the fortunes of their peers. So, an awards ceremony handing out ‘Oscars’ to thinktanks sounds like a curious affair.
Nonetheless Prospect magazine’s Think Tank of the Year Awards have built up quite a level of prestige since it began several years ago, and so it was with some anticipation that tanks from the right and the left gathered at King’s College, London in early October for the 2008 awards ceremony.
Last year saw the ippr take first prize, although it was centre-right thinktanks who dominated in other categories. This year’s awards continued that trend, with the majority of recipients sharing a similar blueish tinge.
The winner, picked by a judging panel of journalists and academics from across the political spectrum, was the Royal United Services Institute who chair of the judges David Walker applauded for combining ‘strong focus with global reputation, deploying expertise, research and a new rigour in an impressive set of publications and policy interventions’. George Osborne, handing out prizes, joked it was the only thinktank in the room to genuinely ‘think about tanks’, such wit indicating a bright future on the after-dinner speech circuit should the political career not work out.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies was handed the runner up prize, described by Walker as a ‘byword for impartial, authoritative commentary, building bridges between academic and practical knowledge’. The IFS could console themselves with the fact that if there were an award for most appearances on Newsnight, they’d surely win hands down.
The award for publication of the year, meanwhile, went to the thinktank run by Osborne’s former boss, Iain Duncan Smith. The Centre for Social Justice’s report, Breakdown Britain – Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown, was hailed by the judges as ‘a body of work deeply influential within opposition circles, that has made the weather: for the Tory party.’ The shadow chancellor praised the CSJ for ‘outstanding work in seeking effective solutions to poverty in the UK’ before assuring the audience the prize was not a fix.
While Walker praised the assembled thinktanks for a ‘lively year’ of activity, he did offer a slight rebuke to the assembled policy wonks, noting there was ‘little or no work that anticipated the financial crash and its consequences for fiscal policy let alone the real economy,’ before asking: ‘Have tanks been bold enough?’
The last few months have seen a fair amount of comings and goings at the leading progressive thinktanks. In September, Richard Reeves filled the director’s chair at Demos, left vacant after the departure of Catherine Fieschi over the summer. Fieschi, who continues to work with Demos as a senior associate, was more than complimentary about her successor, saying: ‘I said in the New Statesman that Demos deserves the best, and it has got it.’
Soon after Reeves’ arrival, the ‘thinktank for everyday democracy’ snapped up a heavyweight (in the policy sense) duo from the ippr. Julia Margo joined as head of the new ‘Capabilities Programme’ along with Sonia Sodha who was appointed senior researcher on the same programme.
Over at the Social Market Foundation, meanwhile, chief economist Ian Mulheirn has been appointed as the new director, replacing Ann Rossiter. The appointment of an economics expert may well prove a clever and timely one, given the current financial crisis.
Mulherin noted that, when the SMF was founded in 1989, its mission was to argue that markets can help everyone but recognise their limits and find the right role for government. ‘Now, nineteen years later, in the face of a global financial crisis, we have reached another fork in the road,’ he argued. ‘The line between the state and the market will be redrawn.’