Recent Think-tanks Articles

Taxpayers’ Alliance: take from the poor to give to the rich

The Taxpayer’s Alliance have a new report out about how to reform welfare.

They claim to have spent a lot of time on the report, and it includes detailed calculations for things like the computation of negative income tax (if rG – T >= 0, then N = M – rG + T and so on).

It is an attempt to simplify the benefits system and improve financial incentives for people to take a job, while reducing the overall cost of the system.

The way that it seeks to do this is by making lots of middle and lower income taxpayers considerably worse off.
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Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?

Things are looking rosy for ResPublica, the Conservative think tank led by official enemy of Paperhouse and original Red Tory Phillip Blond.

There’s now a government that’s broadly sympathetic to ResPublica’s aims (Red Toryism occupies the same sort of self-help space as Compassionate Conservatism). And it’s received a hefty injection of support – enough to be recruiting for six new positionsoffering “competitive + bonus” salaries.

One of the roles it’s looking to fill is “head of the security and civil cohesion unit“. Wait, what? Why does “security” go with “civil cohesion”?
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Where will these think-tanks go from here?

ippr’s innovative co-director team Carey Oppenheim and Lisa Harker emailed the think-tanks’ friends and contacts on Thursday last week about their decision to step down in the near future:

Next week ippr begins the search for a new Director as we step down to pursue new challenges. With more than 10 years of service to ippr between us we retain great pride and affection for an organisation that continues to produce unrivalled policy research in pursuit of a more equal, democratic, sustainable world.

On the right, Centre for Social Justice executive director Phillippa Stroud has joined Iain Duncan Smith as special adviser at the Department of Work and Pensions.

I have yet to see any official announcement from Demos about Director Richard Reeves’ departing to advise Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg on political strategy.
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Standard’s Paul Waugh hypes up charity complaint

contribution by Stephen Newton

The Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh is hyping up a complaint to the Charity Commission from the Greg Hands, Conservative Party candidate for Hammersmith and Fulham, about the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, a newly registered charity.

The nature of Hands’ complaint is not revealed, but Waugh is ever so excited to hear that Hands complaint is to be assessed.

How exciting… not.

Scratch the surface and it becomes clear that Greg Hands has received little more than a letter of acknowledgement.

Any complaint the commission receives is subject to an initial assessment no matter who made it or how serious or frivolous its content.

At this stage the Charity Commission has yet to decide whether or not to investigate, but it has passed Hands complaint on to the charity out of courtesy.

It is far too soon to tell whether there is any merit in the issues Hands raises and every chance Paul Waugh will be disappointed.

Perhaps Hands and Waugh are upset that Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge charity has felt obliged to formally end its commitment to the ‘special relationship as exemplified by the Reagan-Thatcher‘ partnership’ as it buckles under the strain of an all too real Charity Commission investigation.

(Although we’re sure that when its advisory board of William Hague, George Osborne, Chris Grayling, Micheal Gove et al meet up, their love of Maggie is undiminished.)

Fox’s think tank (which has not published a thought since registering as a charity in 2003) is best known for paying for $2,500 a night rooms for US senators like Jon Kyl who spent last summer attacking telling Americans that Britons hate the NHS and sponsoring celebrations of William Hague’s books.

The Charity Commission investigation of the Atlantic Bridge, and a parallel US investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, are ongoing.

Cameron’s friends show how to destroy the BBC

Facing the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free news website, as yet there wasn’t a set-out policy on how the BBC could be emasculated by the Tories.

Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn’t so much as mention Murdoch.

Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board.

Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt’s much-loved tenure as director-general.
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The government is smaller than the right admit

A standard attack on Labour is that it has left the government dominating the economy, which spells doom for our future growth. Policy Exchange’s approach to this has been the most uncompromising and (as I shall show) wrongheaded; see this publication, mentioned by the Wolf, and utterly debunked by me.

A state that actually dominated economic production is terrible for economic efficiency. For the UK to grow for 200 years has needed capitalism’s endless, restless search for better ways of doing things. Good ideas get rewarded and prosper– for a while – and bad ideas get thrown out.

Imagine if the development of the IT industry had been all decided in think tanks and Whitehall. We would still be on BBC Microcomputers.

So, are we in a 50%-state economy? Superficially the government spends about £650bn of a £1400bn GDP economy. But does it feel like that? Um, no.

Think about it: the state employs 6 million people, or about 20% of the workforce (h/t John Redwood). Half of the state’s spending is actually transferring money to people so that they can spend it themselves. Government consumption is about 20-25%.
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The top left-wing campaign organisations of 2009

2009 was the year that left-wing campaign groups independent of the Labour party found their voice and found the Internet.

There have been notable successes for the left blogosphere but in this I want to highlight and point to the top left campaign groups that have made a mark and will continue to grab the limelight in 2010.

Compass
2009 was the year that Compass threw off its shackles as an exclusively Labour-left group and embraced the idea of positioning itself as a broader, more plural left-wing pressure group. As Gordon Brown failed to live up to their expectations, Neal Lawson realised that trying to work just within the party and push from the left was useless when most people on the left were abandoning New Labour in droves.

The Left is much bigger than Labour and that is where Compass want & need to be. They got some stick for inviting Caroline Lucas to the conference rally but I think it was an important watershed.

Compass did well to tap into the anger over bankers bonuses and I hope they continue to develop left wing populism in 2010. They were the most high-profile left-wing campaign group of 2009.
(disclosure: I’m a member but didn’t part in any of the re-positioning discussions)
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Policy Exchange: You win some, you lose some…

Sunny’s busy elsewhere at the moment, so I guess I’d better take on the news that the North London Central Mosque’s libel action against Tory think-tank, Policy Exchange, has been struck out by Justice Eady, leaving the trustees of the mosque facing a £75,000 legal bill just to cover PX’s legal bills.

The case related to allegations made in a 2007 report by Denis McEoin, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, which was withdrawn earlier this year, at the same time as it issued this apology to one of the organisations named in the report as allegedly selling extremist literature.

The Hijacking of British Islam:
Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre

In this report we state that Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre is one of the Centres where extremist literature was found. Policy Exchange accepts the Centre’s assurances that none of the literature cited in the Report has ever been sold or distributed at the Centre with the knowledge or consent of the Centre’s trustees or staff, who condemn the extremist and intolerant views set out in such literature. We are happy to set the record straight.

The key phrase in this piece of news seems to be ‘struck out’, which gives no clues whatsoever as to the reason that the mosque’s libel action failed. As yet, there’s nothing on BAILI relating to this case, so whether it failed on a technicality, or because the mosque was unable to put forward a viable case, or even because Justice Eady decided that the mosque has no reputation to defend is anyone’s guess.

I must admit to being a little disappointed that this case failed to all the way to a full hearing, not because I really give a toss about either side winning or losing but because it might have shed just a little bit more light on the circumstances that resulted in McEoin incorporating fabricated evidence in his report. continue reading… »

ResPublica? You’re having a laugh

I have no idea why various policy people get so excited by Philip Blond. Everything he says sends my inner bullshit detector into sirens blaring overload. Even the title of his new thinktank make’s me think of Johnson from Peepshow. ResPublico/ResPublicus, anyone?

Anyway, whenever someone perfectly sensible tries to get their head arounds this stuff, they end up writing a thousand words on the complex inner contradictions and fuzzyness on specifics inherent in the “Red Tory” project, which is a polite Thinktank way of saying it’s a load of old toss.

I have a simpler version. It’s toss, with the sole interesting feature being that it is fashionable toss. Why it is fashionable is a far more interesting a question than what Philip Blond is actually saying.*

I mean read this stuff:

“A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to represent those in its area”

Why is it such waffle? Because if it wasn’t, if it was clear and you knew anything about housing, you’d probably say something like, “ah, like a Tenant management organisation you mean? But hold on, arent’ they part of the state that’s destroying society a paragraph ago…” and then you’d go, “ah, this is all toss”.

Which it is. So don’t bother yourselves with it.

(BTW, If the transcript of the launch is to be believed, the one thing that can be said about red Toryism is that it is resolutely, indefatigably opposed to commas. This is not good.)

As someone once said to me – Many things that are provocative are not worth arguing with. Red Toryism is one such.

‘Big Brother Watch’ and Alex Deane

The Sunday Times yesterday carried news of a civil liberties campaign being launched by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in October.

TPA chief executive Matthew Elliott wants the campaign, called Big Brother Watch, “to become the central hub for the latest on personal freedom and civil liberty – a forum for information and discussion on something that directly affects British citizens in their everyday lives.”

In response, Spy Blog challenges many of the claims in Elliott’s article and asks:

Why exactly should Spy Blog, or anybody else who cares about these issues, support Yet Another Campaign Organisation rather than existing ones like:
• the NO2ID Campaign,
• Privacy International,
• GeneWatch UK,
• Open Rights Group
• the Foundation for Information Policy Research
• Liberty Human Rights.

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