February 2016

The accountability of senior civil servants, and how far they should be independent of politicians or responsible to them, has been a recurrent theme of recent British political history. During the Blair years, retired mandarins muttered darkly of sofa government...

Professor David Nutt is a professor of neuropsychopharmacology, Imperial College London, chair of DrugScience.co.uk, and author of Drugs - Without the Hot Air. On Thursday 25 February he delivered the IPR Public lecture ‘Time to Put Science at the Heart...

This week official statistics showed that, at 74.1%, the employment rate is at its highest since comparable records began in 1971. Nearly 23 million Britons work full time, and 8.43 million part time. In total, we work in excess of...

Data science is being hailed as the latest frontier in evidence-informed policy making. It’s the shiny new crayon for nearly every level of government from local councils to national policymakers. There is a near universal embrace of data’s potential to...

I wrote this short blog for The Staggers this week on the future of the left, with particular reference to European social democracy: "There are plenty of grounds for pessimism about the left’s prospects and they are well rehearsed.  Across...

Now that the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, has published the proposed reforms to the relationship between the UK and the EU, and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, has endorsed them as the basis for the UK’s continued...