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.

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 […]

I have been asked what a retrospective tax would cost. Here’s my very guestimated answer.

The escalating movement against cuts in higher education teaching funding, linked to potentially huge hikes in teaching fees to £9,000 a year, has taken most commentators by surprise. The scale of the protests, so quickly after policy was announced, is unusual and suggests a deep reaction is underway.

It has entered popular mythology that in the 1992 US Presidential election Bill Clinton’s adviser James Carville hung a notice over Clinton’s desk that said “it’s the economy, stupid”. (It didn’t quite happen like that, but it’s close enough.)