Attacks on the Civil Service are nothing new. But when they come form a new government less than a year in office, something strange is happening.

As I predicted, the 2011 Budget has stuck rigidly to the public spending plans set out in the Spending Review 2010, including spending on services and capital spending.

A colleague at MBS, Tudor Rickards, has launched an interesting initiative over at Leaders We Deserve focussed on the Fukushima problem. But, as I indicated in my previous post, I still think the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami to the coastal communities in north-east Japan is by far the biggest problem. Estimates of […]

Today’s report from the Public Administration Select Committee (see here and Press Release reproduced below) makes complete sense. It argues that as Ministers reduce the size of the House of Commons (from 650 down to 600 MPs) and devolve power (allegedly) away from Whitehall, there should be less need for so many Ministers and their […]

The current debate in the UK about the  “Big Society” has been marred by some unfortunate mythology about to what extent the “Big Society” already exists, whether it is growing or shrinking, and whether it is counter-posed to the “Big State”.  The argument can be summed up as follows:

The New Labour government made a great song and dance about “evidence based policy”, which was generally observed more in rhetoric than in reality. But to be fair to them, their period in office did see a big increase in knowledge about “what works” and “what performs” in government, even if they didn’t always (often?) […]

Over the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of students from (usually autocratic) Arab states have attended universities in Britain, America and other western countries. On a smaller scale, many western universities have also run all sorts of training and education programmes in these same states.

I got the following question from a student in Turkey, about a post I made some time ago about religion and “soft power”, and specifically why Joseph Nye seemed to ignore it. My reply is below.

Further to my earlier post about Libya,