After the marathon of the party conference season Westminster’s wonks barely had time to dry clean their suits and polish their shoes before the highlight of the thinktank social calendar was upon them – the Prospect thinktank of the year awards.
The self-styled ‘intellectual’ magazine’s annual celebration of wonkery has developed a reputation as something of an industry standard among thinktankers, which was why on a cold mid-October evening more than a hundred of the brightest and best of wonkland found themselves gathered at the Royal Society of Arts in London hoping to get their hands on the glittering star prize – Prospect editor David Goodhart’s much coveted but increasingly threadbare ‘tank top for Britain’s top tank’.
After some brief introductory remarks from special guest David Willetts – who memorably joked that thinktanks were the policy equivalent of hedge funds: entrepreneurial, lighty regulated, and prone to taking risks in search of headlines – it was left to Prospect’s managing editor (and former ippr staffer) James Crabtree to announce the awards. While it had been ‘a very good year’ for Britain’s thinktanks overall, he noted, it hadn’t been ‘a particularly bravura year for the older more established thinktanks, on the left or the right’. And so it proved. With a few notable exceptions it was the younger organisations along with the non-partisan policy specialists who triumphed on the evening, at the expense of the more traditional tanks.
In a surprise move the top prize of thinktank of the year went jointly to the Centre for Social Justice and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, after the judges failed to agree a conclusive winner. Despite it being a ‘natural year’ for the IFS given the glum economic outlook, the judges were impressed by how often other organisations including the Treasury relied on the IFS. Meanwhile the Centre for Social Justice was praised for the number of positive recommendations that have been adopted by the Conservative opposition. ‘The pressure on the Conservatives to continue to think about the issues they have used to rebrand themselves is largely due to CSJ,’ said Crabtree.
Although the centre-left thinktanks missed out on the top award they didn’t go away empty handed. The runner up prize of ‘one to watch’, or ‘the Lazarus reward for thinktanks’ as Crabtree dubbed it, went to Demos for its remarkable turn around under its new director Richard Reeves. The ippr also received commendation for its influential global climate change network, taking away the green thinktank of the year award. Meanwhile, last year’s overall winner RUSI was awarded the British-based foreign thinktank of the year for its ‘eye-catching’ work on defence procurement and terrorism. Finally, publication of the year was awarded to Centre Forum for its widely praised pamphlet on the debt crisis, A Balancing Act.
Among the ‘honourable mentions’ of the evening were Reform for its influential publication Back To Black and success in ‘carving out space on the dry Thatcherite right’. Following Willett’s remarks earlier in the evening on the rise of the ‘do-tank’, the pioneering work of Civitas and the Young Foundation in grassroots community engagement was also praised. The Fabian Society’s ‘one-man thinktank’ Sunder Katwala and Matthew Taylor at the RSA were lauded for their innovative use of online media, as was the work of ‘niche’ thinktanks such as the Centre for Cities and the 2020 Public Services Trust.
Despite the generosity of the judges with their praise however some wonks inevitably went away disappointed. Crabtree confessed to being ‘puzzled’ by what to say about ‘quasi-thinktanks’ such as the Tax Payers’ Alliance, which despite its high profile didn’t quite nudge over to getting one of the awards – ‘for reasons that may be obvious’. One thinktank notably absent from the feast was former winner Policy Exchange, which failed to make the shortlist for any of the awards, although its success at ‘shoving its staff into the higher echelons of the Conservative party’ was duly noted by a smiling Crabtree.