Jeremy Hardie has been a trustee of the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation for thirty years. He is now also a Research Associate at the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics.

Recent articles

Jeremy Hardie asks whether Britain's Whitehall-led bailout is really better than America's messy compromise.

Not for the first time – remember the long lost belief that our troops could handle things better in Basra than the Americans would in Baghdad – there are signs of complacency that the British rescue package for our banks is smarter and neater than the messy Paulson plan in the USA. Martin Taylor, the ex Chief Executive of Barclays has described the Brown/Darling plan as ‘trenchant’, ‘terrific’. The Treasury notice which announced it last week is excellently written, in the kind of polished mandarin prose that comforts us that maybe we at least do indeed still have Rolls Royce minds in our civil service. This contrasts with the sheer scrappiness of the Paulson proposal as first presented to Congress. Then there was the nerve wracking week, while Rome burned, of infighting and US pork barrel politics before finally the Americans got there. Contrast how our constitution worked – a swift decision promptly executed by an effective government machine. And now everyone, including the Americans, is imitating the big, broad, British package – you have to go beyond the sticking plaster of buying up toxic assets.

Could the next George W Bush or Tony Blair learn to make decisions that are accountable and transparent as well as quick? Jeremy Hardie on the missing element of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”: democracy.

The fragmenting of traditional politics is making the life of think tanks more difficult. Their potential recruits are seduced by the glamour of power, their funders prefer topicality to thoughtfulness, their university rivals are raising their game. In a political culture transfixed by “delivery”, an experienced grant-maker asks: where will the independent ideas of the future come from?