All good things come to an end – and every blog must too, as personal sites become scarcer and scarcer and professional or hosted blogs jostle them aside. So this is the last of hundreds of posts on this site. We hope they’ve been illuminating, enlightening – and sometimes infuriating. It’s exactly ten years today since ‘Public Policy and the Past’ started up, and this is as good a time as any to bring down the curtain – because of a suitable anniversary if nothing else, but also because the practice of readable, historical, data-heavy and self-critical reflection is even more common the ..read more

When the bough breaks, it breaks big, and the fall of the limb exposes all the weakness and the rot within. That’s what’s happening in Britain’s universities at the moment, as they look on at the situation in Scottish Higher Education in a state that hovers somewhere between worry and panic. Thousands of students are now isolating, a small number are sick, and both undergraduates and postgraduates in both Scotland and areas experiencing chronic coronavirus outbreaks – in Manchester, for instance – are now subject to draconian measures not previously known in peacetime. In Scotland, students ..read more

That's it for now - there's no 'Public Policy and the Past' blog entry for August, because it's holiday time! Well, if one week away - with your laptop - is a 'holiday', though it probably does count given what everyone's gone through over the last few months. With the British government still facing its greatest crisis since the Second World War, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report into the Labour Party soon due, and Higher Education on the precipice, this blog will be back in September for just a little while yet. Hopefully that will help to make just a little bit of sense fro ..read more

Language matters. It reveals what you’re really thinking. It displays some of the mechanics of how you’re thinking. It shows off to the world not only what you want to say, but also quite a lot about what you're trying to leave unsaid. Imagine how depressing it is, therefore, if you work in Higher Education and you have to listen to Ministers – actual Ministers of the Crown – speak in the most deadening, heavy-footed, depressing way about a sector they barely perceive as it is, let alone understand. To that end, let’s take a look at two significant recent speeches about England’s universities ..read more

This blog doesn’t think much of Boris Johnson or Dominic Cummings (above). You may have noticed. Way back in 2016, we called Johnson ‘a poor man's Silvio Berlusconi endlessly replaying his own triumphs and legends back to himself’, and invited readers to boot him back into ‘the dustbin of history’. Hey, take our advice, don’t take our advice. It’s up to you. As for Cummings, well. In February we labelled him a ‘one-dimensional… symptom of a much, much deeper rot – the gangrene that tells you where the worst of the wounds reside’. Never let it be said that we’re behind the curve here. Toget ..read more

The Age of Coronavirus is also a Time of Conspiracy. Maybe the Chinese government made up the deadly disease in a lab, and then covered up just how many people it killed. Perhaps it’s those 5G mobile phone masts putting so many people in hospital, and killing so many others. There’s plenty of WhatsApp messages hammering those messages home if you want to read them (and you can get hold of them). There are even celebrity videos backing these apparently outlandish ideas if you want to watch them. Rather than tutting and sighing, so often the reaction of the expert or the practitioner, it’s pe ..read more

Dominic Cummings is out of control. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s right-hand boremonger is going around Whitehall sacking people as if someone elected him, a process that’s bound to end in tears. First he told a bunch of worried Special Advisers that he was going to get rid of half of them. They thought he was half-joking, but he wasn’t. People that one-dimensional never joke. Most of those anxious Spads got sacked all right, as Cummings (above) tightened his grip on the machinery of government far beyond what Alistair Campbell managed in the high days of New Labour. Not content with that ..read more

The UK’s Labour Party is starting to pick up the pieces after an epic defeat – leaderless, rudderless, and to be frank rather desperate. It must now winnow out the reasons for its historic reverse, and find a way forward that will prevent it ever being hammered in the same way again. We’ve been here before, of course, though history never quite repeats itself: Neil Kinnock said that the 1983 election debacle could ‘never, ever’ happen again when he took up the reins of Labour leadership later that year. Well, it has. And although the lessons must be somewhat different, the search for them is ..read more

So it may not have escaped your notice that the UK has just held a decisive General Election (above). The Conservatives triumphant; the Scottish National Party celebrating; everyone else flatlining or crushed. The age of English and Scottish Nationalism is upon us, and our next constitutional battles are likely to see those two forces fight it out for the future of the United Kingdom. Oh good. But where does that leave our predictions, here at Public Policy and the Past? One of the main losers on 12 December was Britain’s main Opposition, the Labour Party. They got run out of town in who ..read more

Regular readers will know that Public Policy and the Past is obsessed, absolutely obsessed, with the ‘don’t knows’ that you don’t usually read about when you scan the headline figures in voting intention polls. So - as we head towards the finishing line of yet another national election (thank the Lord), maybe it’s time to have another look at them.  There are three reasons for going back over this territory. The first is a general point. The don’t knows form the background hum of where the voters are coming in and out of each big camp – where the parties don’t have to detach people from ..read more