The Birmingham Brief - intelligent thought on policy issues.
- 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
- Description
- Last week thousands of young people spontaneously rioted in a number of English cities for no apparent reason. In the aftermarth of the riots there have been many calls for the renewal of public and private virtues. We appear to want to change people for the better and so improve the quality of public life.
- Date:
- Thursday 18th August 2011
- Categories:
- Social Sciences