The allegation is being widely circulated that Manchester City Council announced it’s 2,000 job losses today as a “spoiler” for the Old & Sad bye-election. Sadly, nothing so expertly Machiavellian has happened….

A crazy day after Manchester City Council confirmed that it was to make 2,000 staff redundant. A few minutes after I’d heard about on the Today programme just after 7am, they rang up to ask me to comment! Apart from a Today interview, which you can listen to here, I’ve done interviews for BBC Radio […]

I was surprised to hear David Cameron admit on Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show (BBC TV) that “no-one gave us a mandate on how to run a coalition”.  How true, how very, very, true.

Last week the Public Administration Select Committee published a hard-hitting, extremely blunt, report criticising the way in which the Government’s (non) bonfire of the quangos has been conducted. Well worth a read – one of the most intriguing suggestions was that many quangos should be turned into executive agencies, which for those of us who […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.