1. Policy Analysis
Paul Cairney is one of these rare academics who writes
well. He has had a policy analysis
blog for 12 years which is simply the most comprehensive on the subject
there is He makes the topic as
interesting as it actually ought to be.
His latest post refers to an article he’s just written about Covid 19 and health policy-making. I was impressed that, after the obligatory “abstract”, the article was preceded by a “Plain Language Summary” which I understand is a feature of at least this Open Research Europe site. And I also liked that he had teamed up with health and political science academics in at least one foreign university apart from his own, Stirling University.
I should at this stage confess that I was a graduate from one of the first (part-time) Policy Analysis courses run in Britain in the mid 1980s by Lewis Gunn of Strathclyde University – with the emphasis on the rationalistic side of things being challenged by the likes of Charles Lindblom. And I still vividly remember the first time “frame analysis” was presented to us.
But this did not prevent me from presenting an overly rationalistic “stage-approach” when, in 2002, I drafted a Manual for senior Slovak Civil Servants…. If only I had known that, by then, Deborah Stone’s Policy Paradox – the art of political decision-making was into at least its second edition! It remains for me the best read on the subject…although if it's a manual people are looking for Eugene Bardach's Practical Guide for Policy Analysis (2015) is an excellent intro
2. Eric Hobsbawm – a Life
Eric
Hobsbawm was a brilliant British historian who lived to a grand old age and
left us definitive and superbly-written histories
of our age which you can access on this post of mine. There’s a nice 1995
profile of him here.
LRB
commissioned an hour-long documentary
on him which you can view here
3. Leading Questions
Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. His latest post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest……
six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:
1.
What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that
differentiate you from most other people? When and how did these words
come to apply to you?
2. Describe
the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically
occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that
might increase its likelihood of happening?
3. What
do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it
disappeared? What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really
long and hard to conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?
4. What
is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re
uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would
elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would
devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your
purpose?
5. What’s
your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe
is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why you
think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we
are. It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this
belief?
6. What’s
your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our
civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to
this belief?
These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.
4. Britain - and its Union
Peter
Oborne may be a right-wing British journalist but he is certainly not typical
in his readiness to attack the myths of so many of his ilk – particularly the
country’s highly elitist system of power. I have been a great fan of his Triumph of
the Political Class since it came out almost a decade ago.
When
therefore he sticks it not only to Boris Johnson and Donald Trump but to the
enture media class, you can rest assured you’re in for a great read. And so it
is with his Assault on Truth – Johnson,
trump and the emergence of a new moral barbarism (2021) which is in epub
format.
It’s
on Johnson’s watch that the collapse of the so-called UK is becoming final - as
this paper from the neutral Constitution Society demonstrates - Britain
at the Crossroads - can the British State handle the challenges of devolution?
