A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

Welcome to this week’s Think-tank Roundup. Perhaps still a little on the thin side this week as silly season draws to a close but you’ll still find worthwhile stuff on the Russia-Georgia conflict, Climate Change, Middle East negotiations from the negotiators perspective David Lammy’s thoughts on handling Cameron. No roundup next week since I’m on holiday but I’ll be sure to reflect everything I’ve missed in the next one.
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

Welcome to this week’s Think-tank Roundup. This week we have calls to scrap the next census, ‘Policy Exchange do Blade Runner’ and even the suggestion that all this web stuff is slowly throttling the very idea of think-tanks – your correspondent, of course, perishes the thought but that’s this weeks must read so see below. Also this week a series of links for all the main conference and fringe events from the major think-tanks.
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

Welcome to this week’s Think-tank Roundup. As well as the controversial Policy Exchange report and some good stuff on events in Georgia you’ll find rows over the Muslim Writers Awards, debates about the legacy of Solzhenitsyn, windfall taxes for energy companies and calls for football clubs to pay more – to those off the field!

As ever please use the comments for anything I’ve missed…
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

Welcome to this week’s Think-tank Roundup – everything from ‘new money’ and supply-side oil crunches to the call for better teachers and yes, Michael Gove’s ‘Nuts’ (there was more to his speech than that storm suggested).

Things seem to be quiet on the events front but I guess that’s a function of both parliamentary recess and the impending party conference season (of which more soon). Must read piece this week is probably Gove’s speech if only because it deserves a better airing than it got because of that unfortunate quote about lads mags – details below.

As ever please use the comments for anything I’ve missed…
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

Don’t let the mention of that lazy trope ‘political correctness’ put you off this weeks ‘must read’ piece -the CPS report ‘Through the Looking Glass’ on Western foreign policy and the sometimes erroneous attitudes that frame it.

No roundup next week for personal reasons but I’ll try to cover off everything in the subsequent one.

As ever please use the comments for anything I’ve missed…

Reports & Publications…

• Today the Centre for Policy Studies publishes ‘Through the Looking Glass: political correctness, foreign policy and bad decisions’ by noted foreign policy expert Roger Howard. Roger examines ‘how political correctness is seeping into foreign policy’ and concludes “we are looking at the rest of the world through a highly distorted looking glass, one that has been shaped, to an important degree, by political correctness. We will see the outside world in a much clearer light if we can smash the glass. Doing so is one of the biggest foreign policy challenges that confront us.”
• Liberal think-tank CentreForum published ‘Earned amnesty: bringing illegal workers out of the shadows’ – the report ‘proposes a detailed strategy and rationale for an ‘earned’ regularisation programme which identifies those illegal immigrants who contribute to British society’.
• The International Policy Network published ‘While Doha Sleeps: Securing Economic Growth Through Trade Facilitation’ – a report which ‘shows how unilateral reforms of bureaucratic procedures can be even more valuable than the tariff reductions sought through the WTO’.
• The New Economics Foundation published “A Green New Deal: Joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices” – the report proposes a modernised version of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ designed “to power a renewables revolution, create thousands of green-collar jobs and rein in the distorting power of the finance sector while making more low-cost capital available for pressing priorities.”
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have some interesting research into ‘Immigration and Social Cohesion in the UK’ – “The researchers conclude that to ensure cohesion, the impact of social and economic changes needs to be addressed as well as how people relate to each other. The limited opportunities and multiple deprivations of the long-term settled population in parts of UK towns and cities undermine social cohesion”

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For those of us who lean centre-right the most dispiriting thing about the row over the crime statistics is the paucity of confidence it demonstrates in some Tory supporters, particularly among bloggers.

We’ve established a near-constant 20pt poll lead, notched up significant electoral victories in London & Crewe, garnered the sort of positive press coverage they’ve only dreamt about for c.15 years and seen even Labour’s most loyal and optimistic supporters in the press now talk about the ‘scale of’ rather than ‘likelihood’ of defeat.

That’s the sort of context most oppositions would shed a limb for.
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

This week’s ‘must read’ item is the Theos report on the role of Christianity in Britain today, not because I agree with every word but because it’s a provocative read, particularly for those on the liberal / left. Other than that enjoy and as ever please flag anything I may have missed. Also if anyone would like to be included in the email version please let me know…

Reports & Publications…

• Liberal think-tank CentreForum published a report on Academies and the future or state education – ‘Featuring a foreword from Schools Minister Andrew Adonis, this collection brings together the leaders of some of the most successful academies to explain how they have made these previously failing schools so popular with parents’.
• The Foreign Policy Centre published ‘Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews’ – a ‘series of conversations about the dilemmas of progressive foreign policy after 9/11’ edited by Alan Johnson.
• The Hansard Society have published a report called “Law in the Making: Influence and Change in the Legislative Process”. The report “analyses the influences and elements that come together in making an act of Parliament. It looks at the role of external actors such as, the media, voluntary organisations, governmental bodies, professional associations and businesses, as well as Parliament and government departments in the process of making the law”. Note: this report isn’t available for free download but can be ordered here.
• The Institute of Economic Affairs published “The Economics of Fair Trade: A Christian Perspective” – arguing that the promotion of fair trade in schools ‘has often degenerated into crude anti-capitalist propaganda’.
• The New Local Government Network weigh in on the topic of the moment with a report entitled ‘Gangs at the Grassroots: Community solutions to street violence’. Author Anthony Brand warns the Government to “avoid using centralised policies to tackle gang violence and knife crime” and allow local areas “to introduce interventions based on local factors”
• Theos, the ‘public theology think tank’ published “Neither Private nor Privileged: The Role of Christianity in Britain Today”. The report “rejects calls to privatise religious faith but insists that the nature of the church’s involvement with government should differ according to the ‘moral orientations’ of the state at any given time”
• Reform launched a report called “A New Reality: Government and the IPOD generation”. Reform have dubbed 18 to 34 year olds the ‘IPODs’ because they are ‘Insecure, Pressurised, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden’ and this report aims to ‘understand what kind of government IPODs want to see and the relationship they want to have with government’.

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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

On the assumption that most people who read this are as sad and nerdy about politics as I am this week’s ‘must read’ item is ‘Taming Leviathan’ from IEA, more details below.

Other than that enjoy and as ever please flag anything I may have missed. Also if anyone would like to be included in the email version please let me know…

Reports & Publications…

• The Centre for Policy Studies have two interesting reports this week. Anthony Jay presents his view on the need for a much-slimmed down, self-financing BBC and Maurice Saatchi has a highly provocative paper called “Enemy of the People” – a mocked-up high court judgement on Labour’s 10 years in office.
• The Centre for European Reform have a briefing note by the CER analysts on the French EU Presidency – “France’s EU presidency was always going to be ambitious, with wide-ranging plans for climate change, immigration and defence. Now, however, President Sarkozy will have to focus on resolving the legal and institutional mess created by the Irish No to the EU’s Lisbon treaty.”
• The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) has an interesting report on how free-market liberal think tanks can influence public policy the world over – drawing on insights from 13 authors from think tanks around the globe it observes that “though the ‘war of ideas’ has been hard fought, it has been only partially won. New threats to freedom have emerged, including environmentalism and big-government conservatism. In some countries the burden taxation and regulation has never been greater” – the report is called ‘Taming Leviathan’ and you can read it here.
• IPPR North released a paper on the Barnett Formula arguing that “current disparities in funding across the UK is becoming an increasing source of tension between the four nations, especially between England and Scotland, and that unless addressed it could have implications for the union”
• The Joseph Rowntree foundation published a report by Andrea Waylen and Sarah Stewart-Brown called “Parenting in ordinary families: Diversity, complexity and change”. The report ‘examines parenting in Britain during early and middle childhood within different social and cultural groups and looks at how parenting develops and changes over time’.
• The New Local Government Network offer up a collection of essays on ‘Next Steps for Local Democracy: Leadership, accountability and partnership’. The collection “brings together the reflections of leading thinkers within local government, setting out a range of ideas on future service delivery, leadership, citizen interaction and rebalancing the relationship between central and local government”
• The Policy Exchange have produced a report on gun & knife crime which, according to the Sunday Times, is getting some attention in Downing St. I’ve spoken to Policy Exchange and the report isn’t actually online at the time of writing (Friday 11th am) but will be later today – their publication area is here.

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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

Even although I’m now having to leave out as much as I’m putting in (see below) I’m conscious this is still quite a lengthy read (certainly by the standard of most blog posts). So each week I’ll flag a ‘must read’ item for those who don’t have the time to read the full post let alone the content it highlights – an entirely subjective choice on my part of course but I’ll endeavour to be as fair and non-partisan about that choice as I can.

This week it has to be the Joseph Rowntree paper “A minimum income standard for Britain: What people think”, touching as it does on issues of relative v’s absolute poverty and making judgements about income levels needed to ‘participate in society’. donpaskini blogged about it on LC here.
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As promised last week I’ve ditched the classification into left & right and decided to break things down slightly differently into three sections – I’ll highlight any formal reports and publications issued, articles / briefings or blogposts from their own sites or in the MSM and finally public events or debates that might be of interest.

If there are any significant personnel changes among the major players I’ll highlight those as well.

Reports & Publications…

• The Centre for Policy Studies published a paper by Tony Lodge, ‘Wind Chill’, on the limits of wind power in terms of plugging the UK’ energy gap.
• The Institute of Economic Affairs published ‘Sixty Years On – Who Cares for the NHS’, a fascinating paper on the risks politicians face proposing anything remotely radical about the NHS – “Elite opinion does not, as yet, warm to a free market in healthcare. Although aspects of a market-based system are accepted, ideas of ‘market failure’ loom large – especially amongst the political class. Nevertheless, the author shows how some groups of opinion formers are prepared to be more radical. These groups, she believes, may in time be effective in promoting a vision of a market in healthcare that is free from government interference and from the stifling power of government-granted professional monopolies”
• The IPPR published a paper by Jane Midgley on ‘How the UK should respond to food policy challenges’
• Two publications from the New Local Government Network worth highlighting. The first – “Healthy Places: Bonds that bind local government and primary care trusts” looks at the options for further devolution within the health service and how it could improve service delivery. The second – “Directly Elected, Direct Results” – calls for an expansion in the directly elected mayoral model with powers over local police, transport and health services. (joint venture with the IPPR)

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Welcome to this weeks round-up – an (almost) ‘David Davis / 42-day’ free zone. As of next week I’m going to drop the classification between left & right – I always anticipated this causing problems and I’ve actually been contacted by some organisations with a polite request to classify them differently.

While some groups like Compass and the ASI can be easily identified with left or right, many others such as the Kings Fund, Theos etc. are harder to align and there’s a strong case that it diminishes the work of them all to assign them such blunt political labels. I trust none of my readers as so blindly partisan as to only read one part of the update anyway. In the weeks ahead I’ll look at a more meaningful way of organising the update, perhaps into reports & publications, briefings & articles, events etc.

As ever please flag anything worthy I might have missed.
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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!
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Welcome to this weeks round-up. Lest anyone think I’m resting on my laurels with this feature, I’m currently reviewing the feeds I use and building a definitive links page for my own blog with all the think-tanks I can identify.

I’ve also been in direct contact with a few people from some of the leading ones to see how I can better support them in terms of publicising their output. As before please flag in the comments anything worthy you think I might have missed…

Left \ Liberal Think Tanks

• Two things worth flagging from the IPPR this week. The first is the latest contribution to their ‘Commission on National Security in the 21st Century’, chaired by Paddy Ashdown and George Robertson. Misha Glenny discusses his most recent book – McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers – explains why ‘unprecedented levels of consumer demand for drugs, trafficked women, illegal labour and arms challenge conventional policing methods and have roots that lie in global poverty and the ever widening divisions between rich and poor’.
• The other interesting piece from the IPPR is Thursday’s Child – the report Civitas take issue with above. Sonia Sodha and Julia Margo investigate the educational issues which still face children from disadvantaged backgrounds and what more schools can do to support addressing these.
• The Kings Fund have a good report addressing the health issue at the moment – Polyclinics. ‘Under One Roof’ asks will they deliver and identifies and explores both opportunities and risks in relation to quality of care, accessibility of services and cost.
• At Compass Steve McCabe defends his handling of Labour’s controversial Crewe and Nantwich by-election campaign and Howard Reed talks about the need to rebalance the tax system – “The eventual goal of the project is to design a package of tax reforms which can make the tax system more progressive overall, while at the same time enabling the UK to pursue environmental goals more effectively”
• The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) says it’s time for Europe to do more to help in Iraq and warns of the danger that outgoing Bush administration won’t pursue this opportunity to the full – “To avoid wasting the current opportunity, the presidential candidates should agree to set up an entirely independent team to canvass European views and share ideas for what do next in Iraq. It should be charged to report this winter, once the elections are done.”

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I missed a round-up last week for family reasons but it’s still a bit thin this week – I think everyone’s been consumed by reaction to Crewe so not a tremendous amount out there in terms of new & interesting thinking. As ever please flag in the comments anything worthy you think I might have missed…

Left \ Liberal Think Tanks

• At Compass, Jonathan Rutherford calls on Labour to ‘challenge the New Conservatism, understand its strengths and expose its weaknesses’. According to Jonathan Labour’s central error was to ignore society and the dramatic changes in personal circumstances and the way communities operate. He says the Conservatives have understood this and are offering a compelling and attractive argument about how to address it.
• The IPPR carries a piece addressing a tension most people have noticed in recent years – that between the Government’s transport policy and the environmental agenda.
• On the ‘FreeThink’ blog associated with CentreForum there’s a lengthy discussion on how the current political landscape risks a fatal squeeze for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.
• With rather unfortunate timing the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) says the EU should pay attention to who takes the helm of the UN Peacekeeping forces and that engagement with UN global activity is as if not more important than EU interaction with NATO. (This piece appeared in the Observer too).
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has a piece on ‘Designing Citizen-centred Governance’ – “The fundamental challenge for the governance of communities is how to create flexible, effective organisations for delivering public services, while at the same time promoting the values of local democracy”.

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Welcome to this week’s think-tank roundup. Please flag anything worthy you think I might have missed out…

Left \ Liberal Think Tanks

• At Compass Neal Lawson, in a typically robust mood, calls for a ‘New Collectivism’, a return to the basic politics of left & right and a rejection of the inherent shallowness of the New Labour project. “This capitulation to market forces had its roots in the failure of the left to renew and reinvent itself after its postwar domination of the political landscape. But in confining itself to a project that put the needs of the market before those of society, New Labour sowed the seeds of a limited and deeply frustrating life span [and the] contradictions of a largely neoliberal project performed within the body of a party of labour were always going to cause an implosion.“
• Also at Compass Gerry Hanson on the unravelling of Labour Britain – the implications of SNP control in Holyrood, the evident tensions between Gordon & Wendy and the what it all means for the union.
• In stark contrast to the Compass view the Fabian Society carries the text of a lecture by John Denham, the only Cabinet Minister representing a southern English seat. John argues that the New Labour coalition must be rebuilt and that means connecting with voters in the South of England – where his seat is – did I mention that…?
• Naomi Pollard at the IPPR picks up on research suggesting the great westward migration from Eastern Europe since 2004 may in fact be over and increasing numbers of migrants are now returning home.
• CentreForum has a piece on education policy for those with learning difficulties – it suggests the debate between specialist units or mainstream integration misses the point and “parents, rather than politicians or officials, are best placed to decide where their children should go to school”
• The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) carries a piece by Wolfgang Ischinger on the likely relations between Europe and the US post November’s elections. “Regardless of who wins, 2009 promises to be decisive for the transatlantic relationship. On some key issues, serious differences between US and European views remain, such as on climate change, the speed of Nato’s next enlargement steps and the strategic relationship with Russia.”
• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has a study on the attachment people feel to their current neighbourhood and the extent and nature of attachment in deprived areas.
• The Kings Fund has a report on how “social and technological changes are challenging doctors and causing many to rethink their role, the way they practise and the nature of their professionalism”

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This is the start of a weekly round up of what various think tanks and such organisations on the liberal-left are doing and publishing. I do a weekly round up on my blog for think-tanks on the left and the right.

• The IPPR challenges a union \ left-wing shibboleth in highlighting that at least some of the problems we see in education can be attributed to poor teachers. “[I]n the last ten years teachers’ pay has improved and the number of people choosing teaching as a career has increased. But teaching is still not attracting the very best graduates and poor performing teachers are not being dealt with effectively”
• They also carry an worthwhile report on the complexity of UK migration numbers – half of those who’ve arrived from new EU members since May ‘04 have now left but I think the Daily Mail missed that story.
• “New Labour is now dead” – according to Compass who, to be fair, have been trying to administer last rights since about 1998. Last Thursday’s results have boosted their confidence somewhat – “The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished”
• Also on Compass Hilary Wainwright takes a pop at the impact triangulation has on traditional supporters and one of their regular ‘thinkpieces’ tackles ‘Capitalism and Social Recession’.
  Anthony Painter also did a write-up on LC after a Compass event here.
• The Social Market Foundation have an interesting piece on individual behavioural change and the challenges policymakers face in linking that with broader cultural changes.
• CentreForum have a great (and timely) piece on whether Liberal Democrats and Conservatives can co-operate. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are “two declared liberals [who] share a vision of a new, ‘post-bureaucratic’ politics in which power is devolved, not just from central to local government, but from government at all levels to individuals, families and communities”