Featured insights

2 July 2021

Project Fear: How the Establishment took back control

After a chaotic weekend, Sajid Javid marked his first week as Health Secretary by signalling a move towards a more libertarian approach to covid restrictions. As 19th July draws closer, we can relax into a summer of sport and dream of Gareth Southgate’s boys bringing it home. The national mood is a million miles from where it was […]
10 June 2021

Hopeful and erudite – Gareth Southgate’s remarkable kick off to England’s Euros

Gareth Southgate’s letter to England has rightly cut through to a country on the eve of the tournament. Capturing the issues about pride, identity, the meaning of what it is to be English, he has rallied not just his team but an entire nation. It was a masterclass in leadership and authenticity. Beautifully written, he chose to […]
4 June 2021

A Fair Game

What the recent problems in elite sport can teach us about the future of capitalism? In the Tyranny of Merit, philosopher Michael Sandel outlines the problem with our modern conception of meritocracy. We tend to champion meritocracy as an ideal to be upheld at any cost because it embodies the idea of fair competition, but […]
4 June 2021

Trust in the Trust – a restoration project

The ousting of Tim Parker last week, chairman of the National Trust, has been hailed as another skirmish in the wider culture wars.  Variously accused of politicising the National Trust by pandering to such modish causes as Black Lives Matter and gay rights, Parker was undone by Restore Trust, a fifth column of Trust members […]
1 April 2021

Workplace or woke-place?

Capitalism is always changing. No idea better encapsulates this than Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction”: the incessant innovation mechanism by which new products and services replace outdated ones is at the heart of the modern economic machine. If we transfer this mode of thinking onto the public realm, we begin to understand that creative […]
11 January 2021

The paradox of free speech

In The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper argued that unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. Intolerant groups will use their platform to dominate public discourse and institutions to destroy tolerance. Thus free speech can only be extended to individuals which are themselves tolerant of others, not to those who refuse […]
Categories
Insights Michael Baker Uncategorised

Polishing the proverbial

You can’t make good communications out of bad policy is a truism many readers of this blog will relate to. Lee Cain, former chief spin doctor to Boris Johnson, used it to describe the challenges of communicating through the pandemic while politicians made policy on the hoof. It neatly explains how communication of a policy […]
Categories
Insights Nigel Fairbrass Uncategorised

Fishful Thinking

Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse confirmed almost half a billion dollars in fines and $200m of Mozambican debt relief this week, following successive regulatory investigations into the so-called “tuna bonds” scandal.  Credit Suisse and VTB, a Russian investment bank, had arranged $2bn of bonds and loans for Mozambique, ostensibly to set up a state-backed tuna […]
Categories
Ben Cope Insights

Project Fear: How the Establishment took back control

After a chaotic weekend, Sajid Javid marked his first week as Health Secretary by signalling a move towards a more libertarian approach to covid restrictions. As 19th July draws closer, we can relax into a summer of sport and dream of Gareth Southgate’s boys bringing it home. The national mood is a million miles from where it was […]
Categories
Insights Michael Baker

Policing reputations

An inquiry into a historic murder has extraordinary implications for today’s communicators  Daniel Morgan was a 37-year-old private investigator found dead with an axe sunken into his neck in a London pub car park in March 1987. Despite four police investigations, Daniel’s killer(s) were never brought to justice.   This week, after eight years’ work a panel examining why the investigations collapsed – and the murky links between private investigators, police and journalists – reported […]
Categories
Insights Michael Baker

Hopeful and erudite – Gareth Southgate’s remarkable kick off to England’s Euros

Gareth Southgate’s letter to England has rightly cut through to a country on the eve of the tournament. Capturing the issues about pride, identity, the meaning of what it is to be English, he has rallied not just his team but an entire nation. It was a masterclass in leadership and authenticity. Beautifully written, he chose to […]
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