Last night the Southbank Centre hosted its second “Think Tank Clash”.
As last year, it was a sell out event, and saw representatives of six of the
country’s top think tanks take each other on in three debates. These debates were ably and wittily compared by writer John O’Farrell and the winners determined by audience
vote. The winners of each “clash” then competed in a three-way discussion to determine the overall top tank.
Round 1: “Revenge” – Res Publica v Demos
Res Publica founder and director Phillip Blond commenced by making the case for breaking up the banks. He argued that the current system does not distribute capital, but rather concentrates it,
thereby “strangling real business”. Blond’s proposed solution is not, he was keen to emphasise, a smaller banking system but rather a more diverse one, in which banks have many
different sources of capital and many different ways of investing it. Supporting him, economist Greg Fisher pointed out the limitations of orthodox economics and the need to “bring
decision making power closer to reality”. He called on us to “take the casino chips away from the casino players”.
For the opposition, Demos Director (and former Labour minister) Kitty Usher boldly proclaimed that “nothing about the cause of the recession was due to the size of the banks”. Breaking up the banks, she argued, would therefore do nothing to prevent another crisis but in fact weaken the very institutions that need to be resilient. Rob Kilick, CEO of cScape, claimed that “boom and bust was not the product of risky behaviour by bankers” but rather “government sponsored credit expansion policies”, and that the banks were now being used as scapegoats. Getting the banks to lend effectively is the solution, he argued, and breaking them up would only hinder this goal.
Winner: Res Publica, by a nose
Round 2: “Equality” – Fabian Society v Policy Exchange
The Fabian Society’s General Secretary Sunder Katwala claimed that increased inequality has damaged society, and that Britain must be made more equal. Inequality, he said, leads to segregation. His solution is greater cohesion through (unsurprisingly) radical redistribution. He was supported by Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell, who argued for more social mobility (it’s not people’s fault that they’re poor; too much of a person’s life is determined by the time they are 2 years old).
For Policy Exchange, Director Neil O’Brien argued that we need to tackle the root causes of poverty; efforts to simply reduce inequality (usually by “tweaking the tax-benefit system”) actually deepen problems, particularly because they retard growth. Researcher and writer Peter Saunders used his time to debunk The Spirit Level’s “evidence” that greater equality solves social problems. Cohesion, he concluded, requires fairness, and this is about just distribution, not equality.
Winner: Fabian Society
Round 3: Liberty – Institute of Economic Affairs v Institute for Public Policy Research
In the most controversial pitch of the evening, the IEA’s Mark Pennington and Philip Booth argued for total economic liberty: an end to all trade barriers, price controls and benefits. Greater prosperity was to be gained, they claimed, through economic liberty which enables “human flourishing”. Pennington said that “it is not compassionate to compel people to give to the poor”, and declared a need for “creative destruction” (and even used that other libertarian catchphrase, “let the market rip”).
In opposition to this, the IPPR’s Nick Pierce argued against “market fundamentalism” by pointing out that people could not be free unless they were free from “arbitrary power and exploitation”, and that this required restrictions on the market. He also argued against the IEA’s libertarianism by claiming that “liberty without a common life is empty freedom”. Martin Bright, founder and chief executive of New Deal of the Mind, cited Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme and said that state-driven employment schemes are needed to liberate people. He also claimed that there is “no democratic mandate” for creative destruction.
Winner: IPPR in a landslide
The Final
As winners of their respective bouts, Phillip Blond, Sunder Katwala and Nick Pierce discussed how Britain had changed since 1951. What has been the greatest improvement? Is society better now? Will we be better off 60 years from now?
Blond focused first on the failure of the orthodoxies of both left and right, and the acceptance of the need to create open markets “without consigning whole parts of the country to the dustbin”. He also suggested that people are lonelier now than they were in the fifties – with the rise in lone parent families and the atomisation of communities – and said that we need to rebuild human relationships. Looking to the future, he said that pessimism exists because the old answers are now redundant, and new solutions are yet to emerge. He also called for an ownership society with change driven from the bottom up.
Katwala said that he was pleased with the ways in which Britain has become more civilised: people are no longer locked up for being gay, women are no longer frowned upon for going to work and bananas are no longer thrown at black football players. Everything of which we are proud, he said, is the product of immigration and integration (even the monarchy!). He said that society had been improved by people working together, and said that we need to draw on this spirit to address our two biggest challenges: ageing and climate change.
Pierce also championed the “legacy of communal action”, particularly in the NHS and social housing, but said that people are now “more grossly exploited” at work. He listed three big challenges that we are facing now – equality of men and women in work and childcare; ageing; and inequality – but said that the test of whether the country is better in 60 years time will be whether we have tackled climate change.
Overall winner: Nick Pierce and IPPR
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