There is a section in Douglas Adams’ great work Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the residents of earth decide they have had enough of consultants, public relations men, telephone sanitizers and other non-productive sorts. They send them out into space in a specially selected spacecraft for VIPs, claiming the planet is about to be consumed by a huge, inter-galactic goat.
My pre-dilection is to fill the craft with London think tanks (with a few honourable reprieves). Why?
Because they are collectively responsible for the sheer absence of radical thinking in British politics, the explanation of why party manifestos, rhetoric and vocabulary sound increasingly and depressingly the same. Scarcely a week goes by without some or other party leader sounding off in their midst with negligible political effect. Collectively they are responsible for a dearth of genuinely new ideas.
The explanation is relatively simple. Karl Marx claimed “Social being determines consciousness,” and if we examine the denizens of ‘think-tank world’ we will find people of astonishingly similar backgrounds, experiences and education who unsurprisingly come up with astonishingly similar views of the world and its problems.
There is ample scope for some ‘Sociology of Knowledge’ here. Ought we not to be surprised if prominent members of Centre Forum cosy up to Liberal Democrat leaders one day and Labour Prime Ministers the next?
Ought it not to concern us that party leaders’ speeches all contain the tellingly limp line, “Yes, I know our political opponents also say X (fill in blank), but they don’t mean it quite like we do”? Ought we not to start building that spaceship?
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17 Comments
I don’t know that many denizens of think tank world, so I will take your word for it. But even if their backgrounds were more diverse I would still expect them to reflect the ivory tower of the Westminster village that they inhabit.
I think it was Popper – and probably others before him – that said that philosophy can become useless if it doesn’t address itself to problems that come from outside philosophy. Perhaps something similar is true about politics. We need ideas coming from people who:
-spend their lives battling a corporate or public sector bureaucracy to get their own job done.
-are running a small business
-are trying to survive on benefits
-are battling the system to get their children into one of the good schools
-have no idea how to battle the system to get their children into one of the good schools
-etc, etc
But we are all too busy to attend seminars, schmooze and write pamphlets.
I’m not at all sure that this is right personally. I think people like the IEA push the Overton Window. But I do think there are too many more or less party political think tanks, even though most of them are supposed not to be so they can collect charitable donations. IPPR is one – far too closely identified with one party, indeed one faction of one party.
For ourselves, I reckon we tend to ignore proper radicalism unless it has come from one of these bodies – we seem to trust them to have done the work more han, say, ALTER our own very radical tax and economic reform group.
Oh, and wasn’t it Golgafrincham, not Earh. They ended up on Earth from memory. Which is why we have so many of them!
I’m struggling to understand the point of this rather brief and strange post.
Is Mr Pugh suggesting that, for example, Reform, Civitas, Centre Forum and the Fabian Society are all virtually the same and responsible for the dearth of ideas proposed by Westminster parties?
If so, this is odd. They are all completely ideologically different and thus suggest often polar-opposite policies.
Think tanks can propose quite radical ideologically-driven policies as they have the luxury of not being accountable to the electorate. This is what they’re for. Politicians in a certain party may agree with an idea from a think tank but their party will typically water it down through fear of scaring the electorate.
Our current state of affairs in which the parties sound depressingly similar is a familiar trait of FPTP (in which parties aim for the middle of the bell curve) as well as a consequence of the end of the bipolar Thatcher v Scargill era.
Some people may find the argument that the ‘think tank world’ is homogenous and unrepresentative a tad ‘pot kettle black’ coming from a member of one of the most white middle-class middle-aged male-dominated places of employment in the country.
Given the chance to send either politicians or researchers into outer space, I have a hunch which way the ‘residents of earth’ might choose.
Yes, it was Golgafrincham, not Earth. The non-productive sorts went on the second mission, which was launched first and the other two never went at all. They landed on earth, so they are our forebears, and you can tell.
Me, I’d put all marketing people, including but not confined to those who work for political parties, on a ship blasted into space. Thereafter there would be capital punishment of a particularly nasty sort reintroduced soley for the uttering of the word ‘brand’.
But wait – weren’t the Golgafrinchans eventually wiped out by a malignant virus cought from a dirty telephone?
Ideas from outside the box are not hard to come by. try The Unit for Social Engineering at http://www.use-solon.org for a few.
If you want deep radical thinking and ideas which come up from local and immediate experience (as most of us LibDems do), try The Young Foundation.
I think the IEA is the only British think tank that has changed a Westminster political mind set; and even the IEA now resembles an exhausted geyser. The best of the others limp through a cycle of dynamism and decay. Thimk tanks come in the remit of the Charities Commission. As an act of charity, perhaps the Commission would be good enough to accept as charities only those think tanks whose costitutions provide that they shall cease to exist not more than fiteen years after their foundation.
What an extraordinary analysis John Pugh puts forward here. In my view, he is just plain wrong on a number of points:
1. The main political parties are much closer to each other than British think tanks (e.g. the Tories, Labour and the LibDems all support the exact same tax burden, but merely disagree about how it should be raised)
2. There is some genuinely radical thinking amongst think tanks. My own think-tank – Progressive Vision – which brings together liberals of all parties and none, advocates replacing the NHS with health savings accounts, privatising the Royal Mail and a pro-freedom stance on lifestyle choices (smoking, drinking, gambling etc). The IEA’s excellent recent publication “Prohibitions” pushes the boundaries on a whole range of issues and is particularly startling coming from a long-established and “conservative” think tank.
3. Party manifestos are in the control of the party’s themselves – not written by think tanks (more’s the pity, I say). They are also inevitably dictated by opinion poll evidence and attempts ot appeal to floating voters. Think tanks are under no such constraints and often even benefit from advocating policies that only have minority suport from the electorate.
4. The suggestion that think tank employees have remarkably similar social backgrounds is even more applicable to Parliament.
5. A debate between IPPR, IEA, Progressive Vision and Centre Forum would be more challenging than a debate between the three main parties.
If you don’t like the ideas that thinktanks are coming up with, then rather than pointlessly trying to prevent them from thinking, maybe you should come up with some ideas of your own
Easier said than done IMO Anonymous. My first point was that parties seem to me to find their pet think-tanks authoritative and if “they ain’t saying it” your idea’s crap, or rather that you couldn’t possibly have done the research necessary to progress it to policy stage.
What we should have maybe is a fund for policy development from individuals and local and regional parties. The regional policy process seems to be very haphazard and is nominally at least restricted to region-wide policy.
I would like to plug another think tank that is curiously missed out here; The New Economics Foundation.
Their environmental perspective is important and often missing from other think tanks.
It is true that some think tanks have been guilty of some howlers; The Adam Smith Institute persuaded the Tory government of the day to introduce the Poll Tax for example.
I am sometimes disappointed with Centre Forum as well. I could not believe that thir recent paper on population growth failed to mention the likely impact of global warming. It seemed very complacent to me. They seem to me too obsessed with economics to the exclusion of everything else.
On the other hand, the pupil premium policy which they champion looks potentially like a good radical policy, as long as enough money is put in and the wider social consequences are also considered.
I suppose the obvious point is where are the policies going to come from without them?
I have some sympathy with JP’s view. I could certainly believe everything he implies of the closed circle-jerk culture.
I could well believe that some MPs (particularly newer ones) arrive at Westminster with a headful of slightly mad and ill-researched ideas and quickly realise that they didn’t come into politics to have ideas, that’s what thinktanks do. Which must be quite frustrating.
However, I think the fact that our political leaders spend their speechtime dancing round pinheads has a lot more to do with trying to market to the broadest group than an actual dearth of policy ideas. We are, as a party, in favour of some quite startlingly radical measures, but if you blinked you’d miss them.
In this connection, I am the first person to mention Land Value Tax *even though* Jock is already on this thread and I claim my five pounds.
Oh bugger. No, he did mention it first, I just didn’t spot it. I relinquish my five pounds.
To be fair I only mentioned ALTER and tax. I didn’t mention the “L” word!
This article is aimed at me as much as anyone – I am an academic, and on the advisory board of both Centre Forum and Policy Exchange.
This week I published a column in Inside Housing, a longer version of which is to be published by Centre Forum. I argue that we should allow social housing tenants the right to sell the property they live in, and use the money to buy another one that they like (which would then be owned by the social landlord, who is essentially unaffected). In this way social tenants would have greater freedom. Now we can debate the merits of this idea, but I think it daft to claim that it is unoriginal.
My challenge to John is simple: demonstrate that I am unoriginal and should be put in your spaceship by telling me where have you seen this particular idea before.
Pleased that people have already pointed out the point that it was Golgafrincham, not Earth, and that in doing so they wiped out their entire civilisation. Of course it also needs pointing out that in the book, the Earth is one big think thank. Make of that what you will.
My question to John is this: as a founding member of the Beveridge Group – a think tank which appears to have spent a great deal more time tanking than thinking – does he accept that he should be first on the B-Ark?
Tim – not entirely sure what you are saying in your idea – that tenants, people who are still paying full (target) rent levels as opposed to right to buyers, can sell the house they rent? Sound novel to me, selling something they do not own, that the rest of us subsidise heavily and so on. Or, is it like my proposal of a couple of years ago with Community Land Trust ownership of social housing where as their incomes change they can pay more than their rent and buy equity which they can then sell which does not affect thee future affordable availability of the house they are selling out of.
What do the various think tanks say about land value tax?
Or does it have a ‘not invented here’ problem?
Jock: the former. They would sell something that they do not own, and use the money to buy something to replace it. Future affordability is not affected. As you say, and as I hope John will agree, it is novel. It reduces state control over the lives of people who are poor, without costing others anything. That sounds good to me! If you send me your email, I will send you a copy. I am not opposed to your idea, which could be used concurrently. Indeed, under my scheme, if they want to buy somewhere more expensive, they can, and it would then be shared equity.