Administrative justice: Gordon Brown misbehaved in the same general way as Jeremy Hunt

A very large research laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute,  is being built on land behind the British Library in Kings Cross, London -  http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/objection-to-ukcmri-planning-application-for-a-research-centre-in-brill-place-london-nw1/. The land on which it being built was publicly owned. It was sold by ostensibly  public tender  by the Department of  Culture, Median and Sport (DCMS) in 2007 to  a consortium the [...]

The Great Charity Scam

Most people when faced with the word charity attached to an institution are inclined to be well disposed to the organisation regardless of what the charity is supposed to do.  If it is a popular area of work, such as medical research or the provision of services to disabled children, rationality goes out of the [...]

Why public service broadcasting (PSB) matters

We all know what comes from rampant and unrestrained commercial activity: a worship of Mammon to the exclusion of everything except the feeding of company directors’ and financiers egos and greed. In broadcasting, unrestrained commerce equals a low grade, populist cultural diet heavily polluted with advertising. Many supporters of PSB think that is a case [...]

Japan and The Big Society

The response of   Japan to the triple  disaster of a massive  earthquake, gigantic  tsunami and nuclear  power failure  has been surprising. One of the most advanced industrialised states  and the third largest economy in the world has struggled desperately to deal with what is admittedly a dramatic and unusually devastating multiple disaster .  Not only [...]

How corruption entered public service

In modern times the British Civil Service has been remarkably free from corruption (local government is a different matter), a fact made all the more surprising because of the truly colossal amount of money it disposes of each year – government spending for the financial year 2011/12 will be around £700 billion. There are two [...]

How should we decide what public servants are paid?

Over the past twenty years a new problem has grown around  public service pay at both national and regional level. The introduction of so-called business-methods into public service has resulted in the employment of people who are not career public servants in senior public service jobs.  These people have been commonly employed on fixed term contracts [...]