Tag Archives: thinktanks

Daily View 2×2: 31 March 2020

So, welcome back on what is the International Transgender Day of Visibility. By the way, if somebody wants to write about it, and its significance, for us, that would be very gratefully received.

2 big stories

Has the Government been less than wholly accurate in its explanations over why the United Kingdom didn’t take in EU projects to bulk-buy medical kit? The Guardian has seen EU minutes which record the involvement of British officials in four meetings dating back as far as 31 January. Missing e-mails, communication confusion, or simply buck passing by HM Government? A public inquiry might not …

Posted in Daily View | Also tagged , and | 5 Comments

Radix and the Liberal ecosystem

One of the huge successes of Blairism was creating an ecosystem of thinkers around new Labour who set the tone for political debate throughout the 90s and beyond. Left of centre think tanks had a symbiotic relationship with the party and the centre left media, who could be relied upon to be sympathetic. When Blair eventually took power the party recruited many policy advisers and senior staff from this ecosystem: Campbell and Mandelson, Patricia Hewitt from the IPPR and Geoff Mulgan from Demos, who became the Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

The political centre ground – including …

Posted in News | Also tagged | 29 Comments

What the think tanks are saying: The IPPR on “How much is Labour to blame?”

(On 14 January 2011, the IPPR published a paper by Tony Dolphin, Senior Economist and Associate Director for Economic Policy at the IPPR entitled Debts and Deficits: How much is Labour to blame?)

Tony Dolphin makes a key point in his paper, that Labour did not seem to realise how much it was relying on revenues from sources associated with rampant lending, such as the City and the housing market.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t develop this point.

Using the Treasury figures for the budget deficit, between 2007 and 2009, the deficit leapt from £37bn to £123bn. These figures are cyclically adjusted, …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 26 Comments
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