The Birmingham Brief - intelligent thought on policy issues.
- Description
- This week as part of the ESRC's Festival of Social Science 2011, I will be hosting the event, "Faith in the City: communities, regeneration, interaction". The event sets out to explore the way in which faith inspires and influences people to live, work and act in the diverse, vibrant urban space that is today's Birmingham. Despite Alastair Campbell stating the British "don't do God", the event is interesting to many.
- Date:
- Tuesday 1st November 2011
- Categories:
- Social Sciences
- Description
- Counterfactual analysis, the art of assessing how the world might look if something had not happened, is notoriously difficult and highly sensitive to the assumptions one makes about the alternative scenarios. Forecasting the impact of a major policy reversal is fraught with similar difficulties.
- Date:
- Tuesday 1st November 2011
- Categories:
- Social Sciences
- Description
- Rarely out of the headlines in recent months, the Bill has achieved a rather unenviable feat: it seems to have brought together an impressive array of normally uneasy bedfellows in opposition to the proposed changes. Clinicians, managers, policy makers, researchers, think tanks, charities and others rarely all agree – but all seem united in their hostility to the Bill and increasingly unafraid to voice their concerns. Even the businessman, Gerry Robinson, popped up on Panorama to tell the Health Secretary that the changes won't work and could spell the end of the NHS as we know it – that the lack of strategic planning and accountability inherent in the proposed new system was simply bad business and bad management.
- Date:
- Friday 7th October 2011
- Categories:
- Social Sciences
- Description
- As Colonel Gaddafi's 42 years in charge of Libya draw to a seemingly climactic end – the dramatic scenes in Tripolil leave a series of questions that need to be urgently answered.
- Date:
- Tuesday 23rd August 2011
- Categories:
- Research, Social Sciences