I am in Australia as “Accenture-Crawford School Distinguished Visiting Professor” at Australian National University in Canberra. Many thanks to both Accenture and the excellent Crawford School of Public Policy. I’ve been doing a fascinating series of meetings, seminars and lectures with academics and senior public servants from across the Australian federal (commonwealth) government. I have had […]

William Hague (a well known after dinner raconteur and sometime Foreign Secretary) and other Ministers have launched an assault on business people for not working hard enough. Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Hague said: “There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.” This reminded me of a poem I vaguely remembered (and I’m grateful to Richard […]

Apology, this has nothing to do with Whitehall or Public Management, but here goes anyway….. Owen (”Chavs”) Jones started a discussion on Twitter to glorify his and others ancestors who’d been involved in what, to him, we’re worthy pursuits like the General Strike. (I or you or may not agree whether this was a worthy […]

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, says it should be just as easy to sack badly performing Civil Servant’s as it is to sack private sector workers. Which is to say, in today’s Britain, pretty easy. In truth, it is already just as easy to sack Civil Servants (at least in the lower echelons) – […]

My colleague at MBS, Michael Pryce, sends this: On 10 May 2012 Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond announces that the UK will revert to plans to buy the jump jet version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, to save billions of pounds in potential costs.

Let’s start by saying I have been through the ‘Developed Vetting’ (DV) process. I can’t tell you why, because then I’d have to kill you (a joke, of course).

The BBC’s Nick Robinson has it almost right when he says there are two ways of judging these elections – through the prism of the last three decades of British politics with its long-lived single party governments (Tories 1979-97; Labour 97-2010) or through the prism of 1970s one-term Governments. In the 1979-2010 period incumbent governments […]

I heard yet again today someone using the Queen’s Jubilee Gambit to explain that next quarter (Q2 2012) may see even more sluggish growth in the economy or even that wonder “negative growth”. This is based on comments made by the Governor of the Bank of England a few weeks ago:

Aditya Chakrabortty has suggested (in a Guardian column) that British “publicly funded” social scientists have failed to step into the breach as neo-classical economic orthodoxy so spectacularly failed over the 2007-2009 financial crisis and it’s on-going consequences. Read my analysis over on my new ‘Homo Janus’ blog here.