News & Insight

6 September 2012

In Defra, like many other departments, it was more 52-card pickup than a reshuffle, with both Caroline Spelman and Jim Paice leaving the government to be replaced by Owen Paterson and David Heath. The consequences of asking two new ministers to...

3 September 2012

What went wrong with the UK economy started going wrong several years before the financial crash of 2008. During the crash it got very much worse. It is still seriously wrong even now. Just as it dragged Labour down, so...

30 August 2012

It is now clearly established that the rate at which water is being taken out of the environment to supply homes and businesses is causing damage to rivers across the UK . The water white paper ‘Water for Life’ published...

29 August 2012

In a finite world with finite resources, surely the only concept of fairness that really matters is one of equitable distribution of those resources and the incomes that lay claim to those resources. If resources were infinite, one could imagine a...

23 August 2012

Under the guise of ‘reform’, this government is making sweeping changes to our public services. David Cameron says that state structures will be dismantled, “brick by brick” and will no longer be the default provider of public services. In the...

22 August 2012

It’s encouraging to see that fairness is back on the political agenda. Until recently, it might have looked to some observers as though there were only two sets of questions across which political lines were drawn. Questions, first, about how...