Welcome to this weeks round-up – everything from drug abuse in prisons and ‘virtual caliphates’ to burying carbon and a dearth of ‘jocks’ on the news. As before please flag in the comments anything worthy you think I might have missed…

Left \ Liberal Think Tanks

• Almost a month old now but worth highlighting in view of David Davis’ crusade this week – Demos have a report entitled ‘UK Confidential’ exploring “the underlying challenges and realities of privacy in an open society, and argue for a new settlement between the individual and society; the public and the state; the consumer and business. To achieve this, we need collective participation in negotiating the terms and conditions of twenty-first century privacy”
• Theos*, the ‘public theology thinktank’ also weighed in on this issue with a good piece by Dr David Landrum – ‘Are we sleep-walking into a surveillance society?’
• The IPPR was the source of the stories this week about media imbalance post-devolution. They commissioned a paper from Douglas Fraser, Scottish political editor of The Herald, which found that “The UK is badly served by a media which fails to reflect the regional and national diversity of the country. Too much of our national conversation is mediated by people who don’t get out of London enough. It is easy to dismiss these issues as more whingeing from the Jocks, but there are important issues here about Britain understands itself as a nation”. Full report here.
• Nick Clegg spoke to The Kings Fund on Tuesday night on his vision for the future of the health service. “He called for more devolution of power from Whitehall, including directly elected ‘local health boards’, for patients with long-term conditions and mental health problems to be given more control over personal budgets, and greater incentives to keep GPs in deprived areas”. Speech extracts and more details here.
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation responded to the disappointing poverty figures released this week.
• Daniel Korski at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) addresses what he sees as Ireland’s creative destruction in rejecting the Lisbon treaty. “The Irish voters have to be respected, but the EU must find a way to accommodate this respect with equal amounts of respect for the clear will in many other countries for the Lisbon Treaty and the EU’s machinery to improve”
• Neal Lawson’s been busy at Compass as always. First up he highlights ‘a paradox at the centre of modern politics’ – “Social liberals recognise the complexity of modern life. They want diversity, experimentation and localism so that people are more engaged in key decisions. But they want fairness, and as much equality and universalism as possible, which can only come from a strong centre. This creates the central paradox of modern politics, as diversity and equality conflict.” Neal also urges Labour to pay more attention to the unions.
• Finally, also at Compass, Lucy Wake from Amnesty asks if gender based violence remains the greatest barrier to equality.

* I’m still not sure about the classification and my decision to put Theos under ‘left/liberal think tanks’ was an accident of construction and not a deliberate provocation!

Right \ Libertarian Think Tanks

• The Centre for Policy Studies has a paper from Huseyin Djemil, a former heroin and crack cocaine addict turned Drug Strategy Co-ordinator for the seven London Prisons. ‘Inside Out: How to get drugs out of prisons’ tackles the fact that drugs undermine any attempt to clean up prisoners from pre-existing addictions and greatly increase the chances of recidivism. According to Djemil: “From a drug user’s perspective, the “dealer” can be an illicit trader or the state. Both harness the power of the drug to influence behaviour. The former says commit crime to get money to buy drugs; the latter says stop committing crime and we will give you drugs for free. Both want control. Neither offers freedom.”
• The CPS blog also picks up on a spat in Washington over their educational voucher program. The democratic congress has no appetite to extend it but students and parents groups have a different view.
• Reform this week highlights ICM research that suggests only 7 per cent of voters support the Department of Health’s ban on “top-up” payments by NHS patients. The research is part of the ‘Doctors for Reform’ campaign which aims to help patients who have been prevented from paying extra towards their NHS care in order to receive new drugs and treatments.
• I think this is a few weeks old but in light of Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty it’s worth sharing anyway. The Bruges Group – the think tank effectively formed in honour of Mrs Thatcher’s Bruges speech in 1988 – carries a fascinating report by William Mason on ‘The Costs of Regulation and How the EU Makes Them Worse’. Mason concludes: “Good regulation is not easy. It will always be an art rather than a science but our leaders need to appreciate the probability that their quest for risk reduction has damaged and will continue to damage our culture and society. Politicians need to have the courage to implement radical changes if we are to survive as a free people.”
• The Centre for Social Cohesion have a new report by James Brandon entitled ‘Virtual Caliphate: Islamic extremists and their websites’. Brandon contends that “the existence of such websites run by UK-based individuals demonstrates that the government’s current approach to tackling online extremism is failing” and offers “a range of recommendations about how websites run by British extremists can be tackled”.
• The Henry Jackson Society believes Labour needs to reclaim the language of liberty if its to have any hope of reviving its fortunes. According to Tristan Stubbs “The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are coalescing over a shared liberal vision. A glance at the Labour party’s twentieth-century history reveals a gentler strand of liberalism waiting to be reclaimed. The Prime Minister and his government would be wise to take advantage of a narrative that is rightfully theirs, while they still enjoy the liberty to do so”
• Tristan at the HJS also has a good piece on ‘A Marketable Solution to Climate Change: Why The Polluter Must Pay’ – “At the moment, the costs of polluting the environment fall most heavily on the least guilty. This situation needs to be reversed”
• In a week when the government invited communities to consider hosting radioactive waste Policy Exchange has a comprehensive report called ‘Six Thousand Feet Under: burying the carbon problem’. The report looks at Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) technologies and how difficult if will be for those technologies to evolve into a viable commercial industry without some sort of government incentive.

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