The darlings of Thatcherism are now advocating that most of the Civil Service should be moved out of London to poorer parts of the country. Not a radical policy, in fact yours truly has been saying exactly the same for many years for exactly the same reasons.

To me the ASI seems to be a bundle of contradictions which is the reason I keep commenting on them. The above example can't in any way be genuinely interpreted as a free-market policy, which is supposedly thier raison d'être.

Quote: "...A small number of civil servants need to be near central government, such as people working on policy who need to interact with Ministers. But for the vast majority of jobs, it wouldn't matter if they were in Liverpool, Aberdeen, Wigan, Stoke-on-Trent or Sheffield....".

Seems fair enough to me, but even a moderate free-marketeer would advocate outsourcing to somewhere like India where wages are infinitely cheaper, not forgetting the large reservoirs of highly qualified staff. Moving to other parts of the UK is much more like a policy that would not look out of place from the Labour governments of the 1970's.

The issue I strongly disagree with in thier item is regarding the need for policy wonks to be so near to Government as most CMC's make it equally easy for the majority of this cohort to be situated elsewhere also. Considering (as I have mentioned previously) that the Adam Smith Institute is mainly funded by Her Majesty's Government, they are little more than superannuated Civil Servants themselves.

Being situated between DEFRA, DETR, MI5, the new Home Office building and the Houses of Parliament, they must be shelling out a packet for such a prime location. It would seem to be financially prudent to move at the very least to a cheaper part of London.

If I was a potential funder I would be reluctant to have a think-tank advise me on anything while it failed to address wasting its own money in such a senseless manner.

Just in case anyone believes I'm being unfair to Madsen in the previous item, you couldn't be more wrong. I was originally alerted by a former colleague of appallingly shoddy practices before he left one of the senior think tanks in the mid-1990's.

Overall I really rate Rob's item. Like I suggest above where I would take issue with him is his view that poor research is something that appeared with New Labour. It's more a case that think tanks became trendy and there was an explosion of agencies using the moniker but the pool of dosh has been unable to support them.
I can name a couple people who have little more than a laptop and headed paper who call themselves think tanks.
Here's another couple of crackers from Rob Blackhurst's item in the New Statesman:

Demos - which made huge waves in the 1990s, but now seems to have left the political sphere entirely, floating away on its own verbiage - worked with Cable & Wireless on a project about the "future of telecoms regulation". It duly concluded that Cable & Wireless's main rival, BT, should be broken up, leading to the Guardian headline: "Break up BT, says Demos. Its sponsor? C&W."

Rob was the communications director of the Foreign Policy Centre between 2000-05. The main impetus for the creation for the FPC was that the then Foreign Secretary wanted an agency to have a fresh look at UK foreign policy. The problem being that although Robin Cook it was Patron, it was badly under-resourced. Rob on under-resourcing:

The biggest symptom of empty think-tank coffers is poor-quality research that owes a great deal to Google. The researchers are mostly recent graduates on low wages and the turnover is high. The Fabians' recent calls for a rewrite of Clause Four and an increase in tax were no more or less profound than a leader column in a national newspaper. Journalists have realised that much of this research sent for them to write about is wafer-thin...

...My former employer, the Foreign Policy Centre (patron: Tony Blair), has accepted more than £100,000 from an unnamed Russian oligarch to establish a programme on Russian democracy. The money does not come directly; it is channelled through London PR companies presided over by a retinue of former new Labour special advisers. The PR people want to shift public sympathy away from Vladimir Putin, who is at odds with several oligarchs, and they are no doubt delighted that the project has led to a paper criticising Downing Street's closeness to the Russian president.

My own instinct about where most think tanks (lets call them t²s) should proceed from here is indicated in a paper from the one I am least impressed with: Demos. The reason for this is complex but the clincher for me was when a group I was involved invited one of thier senior people to do a talk on social justice and New Labour in '96 which left us unimpressed.
Anyway last year the produced a document that is available free (.Pdf ) download from thier site. Admittedly it parallels a lot of my own thinking so I suppose I would be inclined to give thier paper the thumbs-up:

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Putting the typical Demos hard-sell above to one side, Pro-Ams could help t²s more than any other organisation. As t²s don't have the resources to achieve thier objectives they could co-opt Pro-Ams who have (say) a full-time job elsewhere to do some work for the t²s. In return the Pro-Am's could get access to specialist resources such as a nominal salaries, memberships to specialist libraries, payment for conference fees and so on.
Where my idea falls down is that most UK t²s are usually too prestige-driven to allow the possibility of such a thing to happen. The only exception to this that I can think on would be if someone from the great and the good championed the idea.

Here's a photo of Madsen Pirie.


You know every time I hear his name the phrase 'Vestigial Propellerhead' immediately appears in my mind. No idea why.

Perhaps it was the result of reading something years ago about Edward De Bono's inability to take seriously someone who wears a bow tie. If someone would (god help us) appear at an interview wearing one, he would ask a colleague to conduct it instead. I can easily understand that. I mean it's a free and democratic society but who on earth wears those things of thier own free will?



I mean, even parents of learning-disabled sons consider it imprudent, even cruel to allow thier progeny to wear one as they may end up becoming a target of ridicule. At least the Chancellor of the Exchecquer had enough sense to refuse wearing the customary bow tie when presenting his annual Mansion House speech.

Two things in the last week have reinforced my unintended view of Pirie. The first was reading two quotes taken from the Adam Smith blog by Jim in his item titled Less democracy please, we're the Adam Smith Institute:

- 1-
Gordon Brown prefers to spend our money inefficiently and wastefully on projects which he values, rather than the ones we would choose.

- 2 -
Most people know their circumstances and needs better than government does. They care more about their future and that of their family. They are more cautious spending money they have worked to acquire. When they choose how to spend it, they are exercising the freedom to express their tastes, preferences and values. Government, by contrast is profligate and thoughtless.

While agreeing with Jim's views, I want to juxtapose Jim's quotes with one from an item by Rob Blackhurst in last week's New Statesman:

The Adam Smith Institute - once the informal common room of Conservative Central Office - courted the new government in 1997 with seminars on "how to achieve Labour's goals". Now the government is the institute's biggest funder, paying more than £7m out of the overseas aid budget last year for advice on "public sector reform" in developing countries such as Afghanistan and Palestine.

• It seems bizarre that even a New Labour government has been the main backer for the Adam Smith Institute. Especially over a prolonged period of time. Mind you the Prime Minister is to the right of John Major. John Kampfner describes him as a Christian Democrat and I'm sure he's right.
• Criticising his paymasters is either the hieght of audacity or intellectual autism.
• What on earth does Pirie, a so called right-wing libertarian think he's up to using government money? It beggers belief.

It seems to me that considering the Secretary of State for International Development probably authorised the funding for the Adam Smith Institute to work in places like Palestine is akin to employing the Yorkshire Ripper to run a Women's Refuge.

Don't get me wrong, Madsen is super-talented but I feel he is fundamentally mistaken here. And he is more than welcome to have the right of reply.
NB: Proxy attacks and sleights of hand will not be tolerated.