Speaking at the launch of the Mirrlees report, this week, IFS Director Paul Johnson mused on the fact that we had strategies for education, for health, indeed for much of public spending – but no British government had ever seen the need to produce a tax strategy. Tax matters. Not only do we need...
E-petitions allow voters to raise issues which they believe politicians should consider. They are agenda setting, but, unlike a referendum or a plebiscite, they are not meant to decide policy. They represent a marriage of direct and representative democracy. The problem is that the terms of the marriage are unclear. What happens when a...
Most politicians’ books on policy tend to be predictable – particularly when written by ambitious young MPs with an eye on office like Tories’ Matthew Hancock and Nadhim Zahawi. Yet their account of the financial crisis, ‘Masters of Nothing: How the Crash Will Happen Again Unless We Understand Human Nature’, has many unexpected insights...
When Galileo first turned his telescope on Saturn he sent his scientific rivals information on his new discovery in the form of an anagram. That was the dissemination norm in the seventeenth century – it enabled the discoverer to lay claim to the new finding – without letting rivals in too soon. Scientists were...
Over the last year I have travelled around England’s greatest cities talking to more than sixty five business and voluntary sector leaders, local authority chief executives, journalists and councillors. The picture of city governance I have bought back is decidedly mixed; ranging from ambitious and strategic leadership to chaos and stagnation. Everywhere there was...
Adrian Brown posted an excellent and thought-provoking piece earlier this week on government’s inability to price, distribute and understand risk in its efforts to improve public services. In it, he cited this week’s SMF paper on risks to the viability of the Work Programme, and the Treasury Committee’s recent report on the poor value...