Chapter 9

Piling on the Pressure Groups

In This Chapter

Introducing pressure groups

Dividing groups between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’

Understanding how pressure groups exert pressure

British politics isn’t just about political parties, big-name politicians and close-run elections. Below the theatre of national politics and the everyday workings of local government are organised pressure groups looking to influence government policy and public opinion. These pressure groups aren’t to be confused with political parties – they don’t seek government office; instead, they have particular objectives in mind to which they dedicate all their energies.

Whatever the sizes or resources of the pressure groups, they’re a key part of the UK’s democracy.

In this chapter I explore the world of the pressure group, from the small local organisations – perhaps little more than a single person leafleting and lobbying – to huge well-staffed bodies that are experts at public relations.

Taking in the Universe of Pressure Groups

A pressure group is a body or organisation that tries to influence government policy and wider public opinion; but, unlike a political party, a pressure group doesn’t seek elected office. Pressure groups, particularly in the US, are also referred to in the media as special interest groups.

Literally thousands of pressure groups exist in the UK. Some are concerned with a single issue – keeping a local hospital open, for example – whereas others concentrate on a range of issues with one overarching theme. For example, the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) focuses on improving the welfare of children across the country. Some groups represent a particular section of society, such as nurses, lawyers or musicians.

Detailing all the pressure groups in the UK would require a book in itself. They come from all parts of the political and social spectrums. For example, pressure groups exist lobbying (finding ways to influence decision makers in government) for the legalisation of cannabis (the Legalise Cannabis Alliance), representing doctors (the British Medical Association, BMA) and even looking out for the police (the Association of Chief Police Officers). To make things easier, I divide pressure groups into two main types:

• Sectional pressure groups: Promote the interests of a group of people and are normally related to a profession or occupation.
• Cause-related pressure groups: Concerned with a particular social or ethical issue, such as protecting the environment or promoting civil liberties.

Generally, the bigger and more geographically spread the issue or the group represented, the larger the pressure group. Some of these large pressure groups are sizeable enterprises, employing hundreds of people and needing to raise lots of money to pay wages and to aid the group’s lobbying of politicians and the public. Smaller, less well-funded pressure groups have to rely on volunteers to do the administration and fundraising. The bigger bodies, though still using some volunteers, are organised more along the lines of a business, employing lots of staff with skills to help the group better raise funds and get its message across to the public and politicians alike.

Like political parties, some pressure groups have long histories dating back 50 and even 100 years. Why do they have such staying power? Well, the cause they’re working for or section of society they represent has widespread support so that the pressure group is adequately resourced and able to exert influence on politicians and the public.

Sorting out sectional pressure groups

These pressure groups look to promote the interests of a particular section of society, normally relating to an occupation. By far the best-known sectional pressure groups are the trade unions, each representing the interests of thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers according to their occupation.

Usually, membership of these pressure groups is restricted. For example, a plumber can’t join a teaching trade union or become a member of the doctors’ body, the BMA. What’s more, these sectional groups can often claim a high proportion of people working in a particular occupation or industry as members. Sometimes, in fact, membership of the group is a requirement of being able to practise. For example, dentists have to belong to the British Dental Association, which not only polices good practice in the industry and can stop wrongdoers from practising, but also represents and promotes the interests of its members.

Not all sectional pressure groups, however, are professional bodies or unions. Groups exist representing business owners, for example, such as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the British Chambers of Commerce.

Sectional pressure groups can have a big say in government policy. For example, no government would dream about reforming the National Health Service (NHS) without at least discussing its plans with the BMA, which represents doctors, who in turn would have to implement any government-inspired reforms.

A sectional pressure group usually sticks to trying to influence policy in a single area of daily life. For example, the Law Society looks to influence how the UK court system operates but doesn’t touch the workings of the NHS.

Seeing to cause-related groups

As the name suggests, these pressure groups look to promote a particular cause. Members of cause-related groups are people from all walks of life coalescing around a particular social or ethical issue. For example, Greenpeace wants to see greater protection of the environment, and in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of thousands of Britons from all walks of life were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Crucially, unlike sectional groups, membership of cause-related groups is open to anyone. However, members may be asked to make a regular financial donation to the group so that it can better fund its operations.

Most serious, long-term, cause-related pressure groups achieve some level of success as they continue to lobby and pressure government and persuade the public of the justness of their causes. They tend to make slow progress rather than no progress.

In some cases, the government of the day consults cause-related groups about its policies. For example, the Labour government of Tony Blair in the late 1990s consulted Age Concern, which represents the interests of elderly people, before introducing key reforms to the benefits it paid to this socio-demographic group. It wanted to get Age Concern ‘on side’ so that when the policy was presented to the media and the wider electorate the government appeared to have the support of a key pressure group. Sometimes this consultation may be a matter of mere courtesy. However, if a pressure group comes out and decries government policy it can persuade some of the electorate who feel strongly about the issue at hand to move their support from the government to the opposition parties.

Generally, cause-related groups find persuading politicians to do what they want them to do harder than sectional groups. Sectional groups tend to be well-organised and can in some cases withdraw their labour if they’re angered by a particular government policy – for example, in the past teachers have gone on strike in reaction to the introduction of new working practices. Cause-related groups don’t have the option of withdrawing their labour, because they come from such diverse backgrounds.

Going Inside, Outside, Up and Down with Pressure Groups

As well as dividing up pressure groups into sectional and cause-related (as I do in the preceding section), you can also categorise them by which groups have the ear of government on a regular basis – are on the inside, so to speak – and those that don’t – the ones on the outside. As you can imagine, a pressure group generally prefers to be an insider rather than an outsider.

Differentiating between inside and outside

Table 9-1 shows the main ways to tell whether a pressure group is inside or outside.

Table 9-1 Traits of Insider and Outsider Pressure Groups

The phrase ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ applies well to pressure groups. If members of a group are united, with a strong leadership talking with one voice and expressing coherent themes, the group has a better chance of influencing government policy and wider public opinion than a group with lots of different factions all claiming to represent the members’ interests. A group without a coherent stance, whose members are divided over key issues, is likely to have outsider status rather than insider access.

The bigger, better organised and more popular the pressure group, the more likely it is to be on the inside rather than the outside. After all, politicians rely on electors and if a pressure group has wide support, the amount of attention the government – or opposition parties – pay to it can influence voter behaviour.

Sometimes different pressure groups come together to fight a particular cause. They may intrinsically have very different outlooks, but they put these differences aside to work together towards a common cause. One major example is the opposition to the High Speed Rail link between London and Birmingham. This controversial project has led to environmental bodies and some pro-hunting country-sports groups to work together. In the normal scheme of things they’d probably not have much in common and may well be on opposite sides of debates.

Watching the political ups and downs of pressure groups

Which pressure groups are inside or outside changes over time. For example, trade unions often have significant influence when the Labour Party is in power, because the latter draws much of its funding and parliamentary candidates from the trade union movement. This situation gives unions unique access to Labour government ministers and, although their influence has dwindled over time, they’re very much on the ‘inside’ when Labour is in power. Check out Chapter 8 for more details on this evolving relationship.

In the 1970s, for example, the leaders of Britain’s big trade unions were regularly at 10 Downing Street talking over the minutiae of government policy with the prime minister. These get-togethers were famously dubbed the ‘beer and sandwiches’ meetings. The unions had huge power and influence.

When the Conservatives came to power in 1979, they believed that the unions were too powerful and brought the ‘beer and sandwiches’ meetings to an abrupt halt. Under Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, members of business pressure groups such as the CBI and the British Chambers of Commerce had the ear of ministers. So, groups that were insiders became outsiders to some extent, and vice versa.

Looking at How Pressure Groups Exert Influence

The goal of all pressure groups is to get the government of the day and the general public to support their goals and to act accordingly. To achieve this aim, pressure groups employ a range of methods and pull many political and public relations levers.

Nearly every pressure group uses the following two tactics:

• Having members contact politicians: Individual members of pressure groups often write to their MPs expressing their views on an aspect of government policy. This approach can have quite an influence, because MPs have to stand for re-election every four or five years, and if they anger their constituents they may not get voted back into parliament.
• Employing a professional lobbyist: This more sophisticated method of influencing MPs instructs the lobbyist to make contact with MPs and put the pressure group’s case before them. Professional lobbying has grown apace in the UK in recent years and is now a multi-million pound industry.

  The better a lobbyist’s contacts, the more it can charge the pressure group for its services. However, some pressure groups employ people from within their own organisation – as head of public relations, say – to do the lobbying.

Sometimes pressure groups strongly disagree with government policy and challenge its legality in the courts. Lawyers for the pressure group may argue that ministers have exceeded their legal powers or that a policy is discriminatory against a particular group or breaks European human rights legislation. However, legal action can be ruinously expensive, and so in many cases it’s usually a last resort for the pressure group or not deployed at all.

I sort out some of the main paths to influence in the following sections.

Getting the ear of ministers and civil servants

Government policy is implemented by ministries. At the top of these ministries are a handful of politicians (called ministers) aided by senior civil servants. (I talk more about ministers and ministries in Chapters 13 and 14.) Any pressure group that can put its views to these politicians and civil servants has a real chance of influencing what the government does.

When a pressure group is able to grab the ear of a minister or senior civil servant (not literally, of course, that would be called ‘lobey-ing’ not lobbying – groan!), it can be said to be an insider in the workings of government (refer to ‘Differentiating between inside and outside’ earlier in the chapter).

The relationship between ministers/civil servants and pressure groups is a two-way street: the pressure group gets access and its views listened to; and the minister and civil servant can call on the group’s specialist knowledge, gain co-operation for the implementation of government policy and (they hope) garner the group’s support in public, which can help at election time.

Focusing on backbench MPs

Only a limited number of pressure groups have direct access to ministers and senior civil servants. For one thing, only so many hours are available in the day for ministers and civil servants to listen to the views of pressure groups.

Those pressure groups finding themselves left out in the cold don’t just give up; instead, they look to influence the views of backbench MPs. After all, the MPs may one day be ministers themselves. In addition, MPs have the power to introduce legislation for debate in parliament (though backbench MPs have great difficulty seeing this into law without the support of ministers – see Chapter 13 for more on this process). MPs also get to sit on parliamentary select committees, whose job is to scrutinise proposed government legislation to see whether it will work.

So, although individual backbench MPs have limited power, a pressure group that can get enough of them on side and believing in what it has to say can have an influence on the formation of government policy.

Courting public opinion

Pressure groups – even those with access to ministers – also seek to appeal to the public directly. The idea is that the government also then listens, because it fears that, if it doesn’t, the public will vote for its political opponents at election time. Unlike meeting ministers or lobbying MPs, appealing to the public is an indirect method of trying to change government policy.

Pressure groups look to court public opinion through getting stories in the media that present their ideas in a positive light. To this end, some groups organise media stunts to get their name and their cause coverage in the press – such as Fathers for Justice staging a protest on the roof of prominent Labour politician Harriet Harman’s house to push for greater account to be taken of father’s rights after a family breakdown. Most attempts to get media coverage are a lot more subtle, though, and involve pressure groups employing professional public relations agencies that have access to prominent journalists.

Sometimes, pressure groups don’t try to appeal to the whole public, instead focusing on just the middle class. Many politicians, journalists and opinion formers are drawn from the middle class (opinion formers are people with high public profiles who are seen as possessing expertise). What they say often attracts media coverage. The idea is still to influence ministers and other senior politicians – just by using a roundabout way.

The rise and rise of social media has made the job of pressure groups simpler in recent times. The likes of Twitter and Facebook make reaching a wide number of people and gathering support much easier – while bypassing the traditional media. The accessibility and relative simplicity of social media allows campaigns to be set up and dismantled in the blink of an eye. As a result, causes can more quickly rise out of nowhere, enter the public consciousness and influence political decisions. After the financial crash, the Occupy movement was born with the aim of highlighting economic and social injustice in the rich capitalist West. The Occupy campaign, which involved street protest and also the occupation of prominent locations – such as Wall Street and outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London – was fuelled by stories posted and contacts made via social media. Although many of the Occupy demonstrations were broken up, the issues of greedy bankers and ongoing economic and social injustice were highlighted.

Joining the throng at party conferences

Many of the UK’s biggest and most influential pressure groups try to appeal not only to government ministers, leading opposition MPs (who may one day be in government) and the general public, but also to the rank and file of the big political parties. They do so by setting up stalls at and sending members of their group to the annual party conferences of the big political parties.

As I discuss in Chapter 8, party conferences are big shindigs where party members meet up with leading politicians and ideas are exchanged, policies formed, speeches made and plenty of drinks downed.

Pressure groups show up at conference time to exert indirect influence on the leading members of the party, who may be government ministers or have the potential to be so in the future. This tactic is subtle but it can help move opinions among leading politicians and over time influence political debate.

Taking it to the streets: Direct action

Direct action means demonstrations, marches and rallies. The idea is to bring members of the pressure group together in one place to show the politicians, the public at large and the media that the group is organised and has strong feelings about a particular issue. People have a legal right to gather together and express their views and direct action makes the most of this right.

Thousands of peaceful demonstrations take place across the UK each year. These gatherings represent pressure group politics at its most raw, and they can have a real effect on government policy if the views of the pressure group strike a chord with the public, the media and the politicians.

Direct action can go further than simple demonstrations. Trade unions, for example, have organised sit-ins and strikes. In the 1980s CND held large-scale protests outside the American nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common. For a discussion about more extreme direct action, check out the nearby sidebar ‘Taking in the dark side of direct action’.

The increasing use of social media has proved key to direct action. During the Arab Spring of 2011, for instance, much of the street protests that helped topple several regimes in the Middle East were organised via social media. See Chapter 11 for more on social media and politics.

Appealing over the heads of politicians

Many pressure groups don’t target politicians directly, and instead try to mould public opinion to their way of thinking. Usually, this approach simply involves trying to get the press to cover the issues they’re concerned about or paying for advertising campaigns to generate support and perhaps attract extra members.

Members of pressure groups have also on occasion decided to influence things by standing for election themselves, perhaps feeling that to beat the politicians they have to join them. In 2001, for instance, retired doctor Richard Taylor stood for parliament. As the Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern candidate, he was part of a local group worried about the closure of a local hospital. Mr Taylor overturned a substantial Labour majority in the Wyre Forest seat to win by a landslide.

Placing Pressure Groups in the System

Political lobbying involves large sums of money and much of the conversation between pressure group lobbyists and politicians goes on behind closed doors. Now that seems like a recipe for potential corruption! However, MPs have to declare in the Register of Members’ Interests – a public document – any gifts given to them. Whether the reporting requirement is a factor or not, Britain’s politicians generally are considered to be honest and corruption in public life is a rarity – unlike in the case of politicians in many other countries.

When multi-million pound contracts are at stake, however, a little bit of what you and I call corruption to oil the wheels may be very tempting – and politicians do enjoy a fair few freebies from friendly lobbyists. For the lobbyist, the idea is to get access to the politician, which in turn helps the client.

Unfortunately, instances exist in the EU of politicians allegedly (yes, I’m being careful for the lawyers!) accepting gifts or freebies from lobbyists in return for the politicians looking favourably on the arguments of the pressure group.

Looking at the downsides of pressure groups

Not everyone thinks that pressure groups are all good. In fact, some people believe that pressure groups can have a detrimental impact on the country’s democracy, aside from the potential for corruption among politicians through the well-funded lobbying system.

Here are some of the main criticisms of pressure groups:

• They’re too powerful. Pressure groups try to exert influence on politicians with a variety of means. When they’re very successful they themselves become powerful and their voices may drown out those of other groups or the wider general public.
• They’re too limiting. Some pressure groups have lots of power through the scale of their membership and the specialist skills of those members. For example, the British Medical Association represents doctors; if the government wants to reform health care and see its plans carried through, it has to consult with the BMA, which makes that group very powerful indeed.
• They’re too disruptive. Some pressure groups stop at little to see their objectives met – even committing violent and illegal acts. Their behaviour can have an unsettling effect on wider society.

In the US, pressure groups and the lobbyists they employ are believed to exert huge influence on politicians. According to some reports, lobbyists representing oil companies and motor manufacturers had a strong influence on the Bush administration’s (2000–2008) take on environmental policy: for much of his presidency, George W. Bush denied the existence of climate change. Similarly, President Obama’s administration (from 2008) faced dogged opposition to its reforms to provide more free health care from lobbyists working for private health companies, who feared a loss of revenue.

Taking in the plus points of pressure groups

Every argument has its flip side and this is particularly true of whether pressure groups are good for society or bad. The main arguments for the existence of pressure groups include the following:

• They keep politicians grounded. Pressure groups can keep politicians informed about the opinions of the wider public or a section of society.
• They help debate. Pressure groups can inform political debate within groups of politicians or in the country as a whole, often through the media.
• They protect minorities. By their nature, many groups represent a section of society. They allow the voice of this part of society to be heard more effectively and stop it from being drowned out completely.
• They provide expertise. Pressure groups have access to committed and knowledgeable individuals as well as useful information about their area of expertise. This bank of knowledge can be very important when the government wants to consult over the formation of policy.

Identifying the UK’s Big Pressure Groups

Thousands of pressure groups operate in the UK. However, not all pressure groups are equal in terms of public appeal or political influence. Although a golden league of pressure groups doesn’t exactly dictate government policy, they definitely have influence in the corridors of power in Whitehall (the civil service) and among the electorate as a whole.

The following sections provide an overview of some of the pressure groups that politicians ignore at their peril.

Bossing for business

The most prominent business pressure group is the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), but other bodies represent the interests of those who own businesses in the UK as well, including the British Chambers of Commerce and, in the agricultural sector, the influential National Farmers’ Union.

Members of these bodies employ millions of people and the wealth they create pays the taxes to fund schools and hospitals. As a result, they have access to leading politicians and what the group leaders say garners substantial media coverage.

Powerful multinational companies employ professional lobbyists to make contact with leading politicians in order to try to influence government policy as it relates to their particular firm. For example, an oil or gas company may want ministers to ignore objections from environmentalists and local residents over a proposed drill site in a beauty spot; they argue that the greater good dictates that the work should go ahead.

Charting the influence of charities

A staggering 16,000 charities are registered in the UK. Most of these are tiny – some quite literally consist of one person stuffing envelopes and producing newsletters at home. But whether the charity is big (and some multi-million pound charities exist) or small, they all dream of persuading the public and politicians to adopt their cause.

Some of these charities are well-resourced and help the government carry out its policies or perform a wider social service – for example, the National Childbirth Trust runs antenatal clinics and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals runs animal shelters. These bodies often have direct access to ministers and civil servants.

Another way of exerting influence is through possessing expertise in a particular field and receiving lots of media coverage.

Other notable charity pressure groups include the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Which?, the Wellcome Trust (which carries out biomedical research), Cancer Research UK and Mencap (representing people with learning disabilities and their families).

Advocating human rights

Since the terror attacks on America in 2001 and the anti-terrorism legislation that followed in the US, UK and other European countries, civil liberties have gradually risen up the political agenda. Human rights groups have been lobbying for the repeal of anti-terror laws and the continuation of what once seemed guaranteed liberties such as the right not to be imprisoned without due legal process.

The pressure group Liberty campaigns for greater civil liberties and has come to the fore in recent years as the government has sought to impose anti-terrorism laws in the face of Islamic extremism. Although it has a relatively small membership, Liberty attracted widespread publicity as it fought the government over anti-terrorism laws in the courts.

Amnesty International is another prominent human rights pressure group. However, it focuses most of its energies on helping to draw attention to the human rights abuses of foreign governments. Amnesty has a particularly strong pull for students and other young people.

Pulling for the planet

Climate change is now a widely recognised reality, and the influence of the environmental lobby has grown apace with increasing knowledge.

Groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have many thousands of members in the UK and abroad. The reports they issue and policy statements they make can attract considerable media coverage, and more politicians than ever are now adopting green policies. As well as lobbying and using the media, environmental groups also often deploy direct action – refer to the section ‘Taking it to the streets: Direct action’ earlier in the chapter.

Promoting professions

One of the key types of pressure group is that which represents a section of society. The UK has a long history of professions forming their own pressure groups to protect their own interests and those of their clients. These groups are normally associated with the public services, such as education or health care. Groups exist for every type of profession but some of the most influential include the Law Society, the British Medical Association (BMA), the Royal College of Nursing and the National Union of Teachers.

If the government wants to enact policy in, say, the NHS or the courts, it usually consults the relevant professional body, because it represents the people who have to enforce new government initiatives.

Working for the workers

Around six million people belong to a trade union in the UK. These members pay subscriptions, making unions wealthy. A trade union’s main job is protecting the pay and working conditions of its members, but it also gets involved in general aspects of promoting greater social justice.

Most trade unions actively support the Labour Party, and this overt party political alignment means that they tend to exert more influence when Labour rather than the Conservatives are in power. In recent years, though, Labour and the trade unions have drifted apart – particularly during the prime ministership of Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. Nevertheless, the Labour Party still draws a lot of its financing from the unions (flip to Chapter 8 for more on the key role that the unions played in the development of the Labour Party).

Labour is reforming its financial links with the unions, with leader Ed Miliband trying to move away from union members being compelled to pay a levy to the Labour Party. Again, Chapter 8 has more on these potentially historic reforms.

Working on a Bigger Stage: Pressure Groups and the EU

Much of the law affecting the lives of Britons is passed by the parliament of the European Union (EU) rather than the UK parliament based in Westminster. From labour relations to weights and measures, the EU passes hundreds of laws each year. Therefore, if big British pressure groups want to get their messages across and see their ambitions reflected in new laws, they need to have influence not just at Westminster but also at the European parliament in Strasbourg and among the European Council of Ministers in Brussels.

Ever since the passing of the Single European Act in 1986, EU laws have exactly the same weight in UK law as those made by the UK parliament.

UK-based pressure groups are unlikely to have large numbers of members across the whole EU, and organising demonstrations, marches or other direct action overseas is thus difficult. What’s more, no significant European-wide media exists; instead, each country has its own unique media culture (though some overarching international newsgathering organisations such as the BBC and CNN have an international presence). Therefore, putting pressure on EU politicians through a media-savvy campaign isn’t easy.

What tends to happen as a result of these difficulties is that pressure groups employ professional lobbyists to get their views across to members of the European parliament and politicians sitting on the European Council of Ministers.

Pressure groups looking to gain influence in the EU often need to gain good contacts with groups of politicians from across the EU, particularly those who sit in the European parliament, because they can amend proposed legislation. The key is that member states of the EU agree to abide by the laws that its legislative bodies draw up. Any groups wanting to see a change in the law have two avenues: their own country’s parliament, and the EU legislative bodies. In effect, pressure groups get two bites at the cherry of influencing lawmakers: national politicians, and those such as Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who make laws for all 28 member states of the EU.

Many UK pressure groups have an office in Brussels or Strasbourg or are part of a bigger European-wide pressure group that shares resources and costs. For example, the UK Law Society is a member of the EU’s International Bar Association and the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses is part of the European Small Business Alliance.

Some of the bigger, more well-resourced pressure groups operate a mixed approach to lobbying, which means that they lobby both UK-based politicians and media as well as politicians from the EU. These groups hope to maximise their chances of success by putting their message across to as many politicians as possible. Sometimes a pressure group can see itself ignored in relation to a particular issue in the UK but its feelings reflected in EU law, and the converse is also true.

Pushing the Intellectual Envelope: Think Tanks

A think tank is an organisation that carries out research and formulates policy ideas that may be adopted by the government. In effect, as the name suggests, think tanks are all about idea generation.

Think tanks have been around for a long time. The left-leaning Fabian Society, for instance, was formed way back in 1884. Generally, most think tanks are seen as being either left leaning – supporting the idea of greater social justice and equality – or right leaning – wanting to see more free market solutions adopted to meet the challenges of government.

Putting a finger on how powerful a particular think tank is isn’t easy because it often depends on which political party is in power. For example, think tanks that are perceived as left leaning may not have that much influence when a Conservative government is in power. Conversely, think tanks that are seen as more right leaning may not have the ear of government ministers when the Labour Party is in office.

Think tanks generally take a long-term view. What they propose right now may not carry much weight in government but a few years down the line, perhaps after a change of government or in different economic and social circumstances, suddenly the policy change proposals or insights made by the think tank can be in vogue.

The UK has hundreds of think tanks. Some are big operations with dozens of staff, who produce lots of policies and studies for politicians, the media and the wider general public to mull over. Others have only a handful of people working for them, aren’t so well resourced and produce papers of variable quality. In practice, some of these smaller think tanks are barely disguised pressure groups or even have strong links to a particular political party, and what they say can be seen as a bit biased.

Here’s my rundown of some of the major UK think tanks:

• Adam Smith Institute (www.adamsmith.org): This think tank is named after the great Scottish economist Adam Smith, who believed in the free market over state intervention. Unsurprisingly, the Adam Smith Institute suggests free-market solutions to society’s and the economy’s problems. According to its president, Madsen Pirie, ‘We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.’
• Centre for Policy Studies (www.cps.org.uk): This right-leaning group proposes how public services can be reformed while reducing the size and expenses of the UK government. The CPS approaches some of the big issues of the day from the perspective that the country needs less not more government interference in people’s lives.
• Institute for Fiscal Studies (www.ifs.org.uk): This impartial think tank looks at how well government finances are being run, personal debts and the prospects for the UK and international economy.
• Institute of Public Policy Research (www.ippr.org): The IPPR is often referred to as Labour’s favourite think tank. It has a big staff and its papers on all matters of British life, from financial inclusion to welfare reform – even to the spread of the Internet – often hit the headlines and draw the attention of politicians.
• National Institute of Economic and Social Research (www.niesr.ac.uk): This think tank receives government financing and is charged with looking at the prospects for the UK economy, as well as tracking important social trends.
• The King’s Fund (www.kingsfund.org.uk): This group looks at the provision of health care in the UK, monitors efficiency within the NHS and proposes changes to it to bring about improvements.

This list is just a small sample of the UK’s think tanks. At least one dedicated think tank, and sometimes more, inform and review nearly every aspect of public policy, from transport to crime. Some think tanks, including the IPPR and the Adam Smith Institute, conduct research and make proposals in a huge variety of different areas of UK life.

Think tanks don’t just advise on policy or carry out research on British matters. Some, such as the International Institute of Strategic Studies, also look at foreign relations and Britain’s place in the world.