Thinktankery: Researching the Bleeding Obvious and the Pointless

I've not got that much of a problem with Steve Hilton and his "Blue Sky" pondering. While some of his ideas might be on the loony side of whacky, at least he's thinking some shit up, which is more than can be said for the hundreds of Think Tanks in the UK.

"Hey, Dave - I just saw some blue sky out the window
and I've been thinking about it..."

What some of these organisations seem to do is: Take something that everybody knows, "research" it to death and then publish a paper that makes a minor headline somewhere. And everyone with half a brain goes..."no shit, Sherlock?" in reaction to a statement of the bleeding obvious. Alternatively, their research wonks turn their attentions to totally pointless isuues. What's worse, is that some of these thinkers just get it completely wrong. And they all get paid for it! What a wheeze.

On the darker side of Thinktankery are those with a political motive. Take Migration Watch UK as an example. This organisation was set up a few years ago by Sir Andrew Green, a former diplomat and once the UK's Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and David Coleman (the professor of Demography at Oxford, not the sports commentator). The pair of them must have sat up all night wondering what to call their Think Tank and, having dismissed "Wogs Go Home" and "Tea Towel Heads in the UK - No Thanks!" decided on Migration Watch UK as a title that might appeal to funders and was a little less threatening.

And Green's business does what it says on the tin, in all fairness. It watches migration into the UK. Then it reports on it. The reports are widely quoted in some news media, notably the dailys Mail, Express, Telepgraph and Star. No surprise there then. Some of Migration Watch's research has been criticised as questionable and some of its methods also. But at least Migration Watch grinds its axe with a purpose. You can believe their outputs or dismiss them and there are plenty of organisations prepared to challenge and debate, such as the lovely Liberty. So that's fine then.

What isn't fine is the output of Think Tanks that are just a complete waste of paper and breath because "we knew that anyway", or we couldn't give a toss about the subject or the findings, or we realise that the Think Tank's findings are just bollocks.

Some of the "we knew that anyway" crap:

Last month, Demos revealed that "Bad parenting...made children...more likely to binge drink". Really? Well, I never. And earlier this year Demos came up with another real corker. Apparently, we don't know enough about the causes of the 4,000 suicides in Britain each year (one every two hours - headline!). As any good Thinktanker researcher will tell us, there's no substitute for primary source information. So...duh! And in May, the Demos report on legal highs was actually titled "Taking Drugs Seriously". As a mere recreationalist, I've considered doing it really seriously from now on as a result of this insightful report.

Politeia came up with a paper this year: Populism and Democracy: Politics in the Public Interest, in which John Marenbon, a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, argues that populism is now the dominant force in British politics. I didn't know that! And what an intersting placement of the adverb 'now'.

The New Economics Foundation has come up with a publication, Money Overboard, that examines why discarding fish from trawler catches is a waste of money and jobs. Now let's think that one through. We go fishing in a trawler. We catch a load of fish that some Eurocrat says we can't. The fish die (because the stupid beasts haven't evolved sufficiently well to live for a long time out out of water). We throw them back into the sea. Some are eaten by gulls and the rest rot. I think we might just have worked out on our own why that is indeed a waste of money and jobs without the NEF feeling moved to tell us.



Griffin and Brons: Neo-Nazi Ideologists, Liberal
Lefties, or just a couple of twats?

But this one wins it for me: Edmund Standing's report for the Centre for Social Cohesion is summarised thus, on their web pages: "On the day before two leading British National Party (BNP) members take their seats in the European Parliament, a new Centre for Social Cohesion report reveals that members and supporters of the BNP and its online activists display significant ideological affinity with key tenets of the neo-Nazi ideology. This included: support for violence; antisemitism and an admiration of the Third Reich; extreme racist views; and Holocaust denial." And there was me thinking that the BNP was really the home of wishy-washy, leftie, liberals.

Totally Pointless Thinktankery

The Kings Fund (Strapline: Ideas That Change Health Care) recently published "Routes for Social and Health Care - A Simulation Exercise", which was summarised: How can the health and social care system rise to the current political and financial challenges? This paper is based on a simulation exercise which set up a number of routes to managing change. That's what we need in the NHS, isn't it? A bloody simulation (pun intended) seeing as there's no real social and health care going on at all, it seems to them.

The Centre for Policy Studies has a habit of looking backwards. That's OK, if its objective is to "study policies" that have been and gone, as their name might suggest. Their "Fact Sheet" series includes Statistical Fact Sheet No. 9 (compelling title, you will agree), that examines the "killer question" asked by Ronnie Reagan, dead US ex-president, that posed, "...are you better off than you were four years ago?" and  uses this stupid, historical premise to examine household income trends under New Labour over the last few years. Why? You can go to the ONS and get all this shit together yourself. Or just examine your own income trends, seeing as they're really the only ones you give a toss about anyway. Or, how about asking the question (preferably by a living politician), "Do you think you'll be better off in four years' time?" And if the answer to that is "no", as it invariably will be, then maybe CPS might like to give us a policy interpretation on that. No...didn't think so.

The Centre-Right Bow Group wades in regularly with pointless rhetoric. Their recent "Target Paper - Towards an Effective House of Lords" is an example (and includes an oxymoron - spot that?) In the preamble, the paper actually says this..."The House of Lords has often been subject to considerable criticism on a number of different grounds, and the sheer amount written on the subject of House of Lords reform illustrates that our upper house sits uneasily in our constitutional framework of a modern, democratic society." Well, if that's the case, then stop adding to the "sheer amount written".

'Complete Bollocks' Research and Publication

Back to the wonderful world of Politeia. Chris Pelling and Llewelyn Morgan's Latin for Language Learners, comes with the blurb: "Latin has been squeezed out of the curriculum and recently excluded from the plan for foreign languages at primary school. Unless the trend is reversed English education will be poorer. In Politeia's new publication, Latin for Language Learners, Professor Chris Pelling and Dr Llewelyn Morgan explain the advantages of learning Latin. It facilitates learning other languages and helps raise standards across the curriculum." Bollocks. I was a Latin scholar back in the sixties. My study has resulted in two things only. First, I can appear more learned and pompous among those who didn't do Latin and those people can then call me names behind by back. Second, I can occasionally be one of the few who gets Boris Johnson's jokes. Futue te ipsum, Prof Pelling. OK, sorry, that's a third thing.

Who reads all of this crap?...

Well, to begin with, Think Tank wonks read other Think Tank wonks' stuff possibly to make sure that they're not duplicating but, as is more likely, there will be moves planned to discredit research by commissioning a load more research on pointless subjects.


Think Tank Wonk Explains His Latest Research

Then there's all the political advisors; the interns and those lucky enough to get paid for advising our politicians. There is so much of this stuff out there that it would require a staff of several thousand to even scratch the surface. As a result, the Think Tanks have to grab the attention through titles (e.g. "Taking Drugs Seriously" - see above), or taking on populist subjects such as immigration, binge-drinking or knife-crime.

Ask anyone outside of these two groups whether they've ever read a paper by a Think Tank. Oh, they may have scanned a version distilled into a few hundred words in a newspaper or listened to a headline summary on radio or TV but actually read one? No.

...And who's paying for it?

There are at least one hundred recognised Think Tanks in the UK and thousands more abroad. In the UK, none of those is paid for out of the public purse (directly) so must survive on donation, subscription and grants and there appears to be no shortage of money from benefactor individuals or groups who wish to promote the ideologies of their chosen tank and hopefully get their papers in front of some Junior Minister who might then mention it at meeting to a mandarin who might...and so on.

Sadly, none of this will go away. Even if something like "The Big Society" (which was born in a Think Tank anyway) meant that ideas and actions actually came out of talking to real people, there would emerge a new version of Thinktankery to research, distill and present it all.

But perhaps Think Tanks are just another indicator of reasonableness and freedom in societies. After all, I couldn't find any references anywhere to the Think Tanks of North Korea.