This year’s summer silly season was a whole lot more serious than usual, rocked as it was by phone hacking revelations and riots on the streets. With actual news being reported for once, one may be forgiven for missing some of the recent ructions at the top of the thinktank world.
The Fabian Society’s new general secretary is Andrew Harrop, who hails from Age UK and, before that, the New Policy Institute. All eyes will be on the venerable granddaddy of the tank clan as it takes its next steps in the world under new stewardship. The last edition of the Fabian Review before Harrop takes over was entitled The State Under Attack, and reported that YouGov polling for the Fabians found that two-thirds of the public and half of Tory voters agree that ‘the government should increase spending on public services again when the public finances are in better shape’.
Meanwhile, from one familiar story to another: former Labour MP Kitty Ussher has quit as director of Demos just a year into the job after the board rejected her plans to radically restructure the thinktank. During the Ussher era, Demos set up the Centre for London and the Commission on Assisted Dying. It is a similar-sounding tale to the short-lived tenure of Madeleine Bunting, who also resigned after a contretemps with the board, while subsequent directors Catherine Fieschi and Richard Reeves remained only a couple of years apiece. Fieschi then became director of Counterpoint, the British Council’s own in-house thinktank, but remains to this day an associate of Demos. Reeves, meanwhile, went on to greater things (or not), becoming special adviser to Nick Clegg after last year’s general election.
Demos might be able to give good advice on transitioning from one regime to another to the, er, Transition Institute, a ‘new, independent centre for inquiry and collaboration formed to inspire and facilitate new models of public service delivery embedding innovation and social value’. It has been set up by Social Enterprise London and NESTA, and is headed up by Dom Potter, who is their aptly named ‘interim director’. Observers will be keen to see how the institute contributes in this time of change.
Meanwhile, the Pragmatic Radicalism pamphlet was launched in the House of Commons just before the summer recess and contains a diverse collection of essays written by ‘Labour’s New Generation’. Contributions range from Labour Friends of Iraq director Gary Kent writing on liberal interventionism, while IPPR associate director Will Straw writes with Nick Anstead on Four Big Ideas to Refound Labour, one of which is to open up party membership to ‘all those recording strong support for Labour during canvassing sessions (”L5s”, in the jargon),’ on an ‘honesty box basis’, to help reverse the long-term decline in party membership.
At the other end of the spectrum, in this time of severe austerity even the coalition’s swingeing cuts have not succeeded in satisfying the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. It will be happy, no doubt, that hawkish chancellor George Osborne has not flinched even at pressure on police budgets. But in its new report Sharper Axes, Lower Taxes the tank demands that public spending be slashed to 29 per cent of national income, and makes the astonishing claim that ‘government spending – even in areas such as research and development, investment and education – has little or no beneficial effect on economic growth’ and that all foreign aid should stop. The brief flirtation the UK saw with Keynesian measures presumably did not go down well chez the IEA, founded in 1955 at the height of consensus politics. Despite big changes in the political landscape since then, it seems some things will always remain unchanged.
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