Guido Fawkes took great pride at the final report of the charities commission on the Smith Institute (which he invariably referred to as the Sith Institute), in which the commission found that SI were overly partisan and often worked as a party political association on behalf of Gordon Brown.
A common rebuttal from those who support Brown (a flagging breed at best) was to point to Policy Exchange, the centre-right think tank most strongly associated with David Cameron’s policies. The comparison is thrown into sharp relief by reports today that the Conservative Party is entirely disregarding the findings of Policy Exchanges most recent study, Cities Unlimited, which found among other things:
We need to accept above all that we cannot guarantee to regenerate every town and every city in Britain that has fallen behind. Just as we can’t buck the market, so we can’t buck economic geography either. Places that enjoyed the conditions for creating wealth in the coal-powered 19th-century often do not do so today.
Port cities had an advantage in an era when exporting manufactured goods by sea was a vital source of prosperity; today the sea is a barrier to their potential for expansion and they are cut off from the main road transport routes. More generally, the economic pull of Europe has boosted the South East at the expense of the North, Wales and Scotland.
The findings of the report are largely being spun as ‘we should write off the North of England and get everybody to move South’, which doesn’t seem to be too far from the actual content of the report. What’s interesting about the reaction to the report, though, is the evidence that ‘Think Tank’ reports are really academic studies, taken or left depending on their usefulness. In other words, just because the Conservative Party often uses reports from Policy Exchange to back up its policy proposals, that doesn’t mean that everything Policy Exchange reports on automatically becomes Conservative Party policy. All sparrows are birds, after all, but not all birds are sparrows.
Compare to the Smith Institute, who have several times spoken overtly in favour of Gordon Brown, hosted fundraisers at Downing Street and have even been accused of giving undeclared donations in kind to the Prime Minister.
Clearly, Policy Exchange have released a report which is completely (in their own words) “barmy” and completely unactionable, but the report is therefore of academic interest only and is happily disowned by the Conservatives. This disconnect between the think tank and the politcal party is an essential part of the healthy market of ideas, and it’s because of this that Policy Exchange are a legitimate charitable organisation, while the Smith Institute are in very deep trouble indeed.
*UPDATE:* Cameron called the report insane on BBC News, and Iain Dale has more analysis on what’s wrong with the Policy Exchange report.
*FURTHER UPDATE:* According to Centre Right the report was commisioned by a Lib Dem, Dr Tim Leunig. Intreguing.