I was amused, but also frustrated, to watch the media over Christmas get themselves into a tiz about whether the Government are “Maoists”. The Financial Times even went so far as to construct a sort of Mao-Metre for individual policies – amusing, but unfortunately a bad historical parallel.

This is an open invitation to colleagues who want to participate in “investigative research with a public purpose”, digging deeper into what governments actually do as opposed to what they say they do. “Speaking Truth Unto Power” as Aaron Wildavsky famously put it.

Toady’s economic results were worse than anybody expected. The world economy is growing faster, and we are back into recession territory. And the Chancellor’s explanation – the wrong sort of snow. Growth in the last three quarters has dropped from +1.1%, to +0.7% and now down to minus 0.5%. it doesn’t take a rocket scientist […]

I have been trying – and I confess failing – to try and get my head around a simple question: who owns (or rather will own) GP consortia? The legal status of these bodies may seem a bit pedantic, but it could have a fundamental affect on the dynamics of the New Model NHS. This […]

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Looking back on the Great Train Wreck of 2013, some say it was ironic that a government that was formed to tackle a public finance crisis of one sort should have managed to create a quite different one of it’s own making. But of course it wasn’t just a public financial crisis, as public services […]

One interesting little wrinkle in the “we are only cutting ‘spending power’ of local government by an average 4.4%”. Eric Pickles and the Coalition can only claim this because the local government ‘spending power’ figures appear to include £1bn of NHS money transferred to local government for social care.

Today we have seen clearly what “localism” means for the Coalition government: localising the bill for the financial and economic crisis caused not by government – central or local – but by the banks.

The focus of debate around the proposed changes to universities funding and student fees has been much more on the latter than the former. But in reality the Coalition’s policies are much more focussed on universities and the student finance issues is more of a means to and end – the effective privatisation of universities […]