In October 2022, members of the protest group Led by Donkeys climbed the wall of the Georgian townhouse at 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, home to the offices of a number of ‘think tanks’ close to Liz Truss’s new Conservative government. They mounted a large blue plaque – mimicking the London scheme designed to celebrate historic achievement – which read:
The UK economy was crashed here
23rd September 2022
(mini budget day)
On that date, the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had announced a short-lived budget that promised unfunded tax cuts that quickly forced up mortgage rates for millions of voters. It led to a collapse in popular support for the Conservatives.
Supporters and critics of Truss’s government alike had raised concerns about the influence of a variety of right-wing think tanks on her government. The Spectator columnist Steerpike wrote of ‘a Tufton Street mafia’ driving forward policy, while Alan Simpson in The Morning Star claimed that Truss’s ‘strings are pulled by free-trade fundamentalists in the “Tufton Street Taliban”’.
Claims about the influence of think tanks are not new. The journalist Richard Cockett argued that think tanks of the ‘New Right’ – including the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute – played a crucial role in bringing about the “economic counter-revolution” that ushered in Thatcherism. By the end of the 1980s, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) had been set up by people involved in the ‘modernisation’ of the Labour Party to mirror this success for the centre left. These older generations of think tanks have now been joined by scores of new players across the spectrum, notably Labour Together, whose influence on Keir Starmer’s government is the subject of much contemporary discussion. Yet, despite the debates about their influence, it is unclear what brings together these disparate organisations under one heading.
Contested definitions
The term ‘think tank’ has been used to cover a huge variety of organisations involved in public policy, from august academic research centres (such as Chatham House or the Institute for Fiscal Studies) to poorly disguised lobbying groups. Indeed, the conflation of very different organisations under the term ‘think tank’ is a significant reason for much of the widespread negativity towards the term.
One common response in the academic literature to this ambiguity is to draw up typologies. These might contrast, for example, ‘academic’ think tanks (staffed by credentialed academics and producing high quality research) with ‘advocacy’ think tanks (which are strongly linked to particular ideological positions or interests). There are difficulties with this approach. For example, it ignores the fluid nature of think tanks over time; or the way in which one organisation can simultaneously carry out different kinds of work; while it also neglects important questions about the changing context and networks within which think tanks operate.
The think tank ecosystem
Geoff Mulgan – the former head of the think tank, Demos, and a Downing Street advisor – argued that, “To understand how think tanks work, and why they thrive or wane, they have to be considered as part of an intellectual ecology”, which depends on critical factors. I argue that four of these factors are particularly important.
1) Agendas: what is the organisation trying to achieve?
Political and intellectual agendas matter. The IEA, for example, drew – above all – on the ideas of the ‘neoliberal’ thinker Friedrich Hayek. A generation later, the intellectual agenda of the IPPR was less explicit. There was agreement that by the 1990s Britain had entered ‘New Times’, and needed new solutions, but it was less clear where those ideas were coming from. At times, the IPPR drew on John Rawls or Anthony Giddens, but the intellectual agenda was more eclectic and less evangelical. The organisation was focused on providing feasible policy advice to help ‘modernise’ the Labour Party. Similarly, Labour Together, by far the most significant contemporary player, has an agenda more closely aligned to Labour’s electoral and party politics and less on a specific ideological agenda than the earlier think tanks of the right.
2) People: who is involved?
Antony Fisher ploughed his profits as an entrepreneur – importing battery chicken farming methods into the UK – to set up and fund the IEA. Ralph Harris, who became the IEA’s first director in 1957, and remained in the role for over 30 years, linked together a network of right-wing organisations. These figures had an almost religious zeal about the benefits of the market and little hope (or desire) of securing government roles.
By contrast, in the 1990s and 2000s the personnel involved in think tanks of the left and centre tended to be younger and focused on the demands of party politics. It became a common criticism of the social democratic think tanks that they acted as a route to careers in party politics or parliament – “preparatory schools for spin doctors”. Various IPPR figures moved from think tanks to key positions in the Labour government after 1997, including – among many others – Patricia Hewitt, David Miliband and James Purnell.
Today key players in Labour Together are even more closely aligned with the needs of party politics. Former Director, Morgan McSweeney, was Starmer’s Director of Campaigns in the run up to the general election and is now Head of Political Strategy; his successor as Director, Josh Simmons, was elected to parliament in 2024. After losing his seat in July, former MP Jonathan Ashworth now acts as Labour Together’s Director.
3) Funding: where is the money from and where does it go?
Think tanks are expensive to run. There are wages to pay, offices to rent, event spaces to hire, and so on. The extent and source of that funding significantly affects the nature of the organisation. There are important differences in funding models for think tanks.
The ideal for many groups was core funding, where an organisation is given money from a sympathetic benefactor to pursue its goals unhindered by worry about the next pay run. For many years, the IEA enjoyed core funding from large business, such as Fisher’s. By contrast, researchers found that organisations on the left and centre-left increasingly “resemble ‘contract research organisations’ funded … by project income.” Despite formal independence, this often means that outputs are a compromise between the agendas of the people involved and the sponsoring organisation.
Since 2020, Labour Together has fundamentally changed the model of think tank funding in the UK. While most think tanks have been charities, which gives certain tax breaks, but limits partisanship, Labour Together quickly evolved from more traditional roots to something many commentators have compared to a US-style ‘Super PAC’ (a political action committee allowed to raise and spend larger amounts of money for ‘independent’ political activity). The closeness of the group to Starmer and the high likelihood Labour would win this summer’s election meant that the organisation was able to hoover up donations, increasingly its income from £165,000 in 2022/2023 to £1.74 million a year later. The organisation has now expanded its role to supply sympathetic researchers to senior Labour figures. In the overtly partisan nature of its work and its scope, this organisation reaches far beyond the practice of earlier think tanks.
4) Demand and opportunity: what is wanted and by whom?
Ideas articulated at the wrong time get nowhere. Although the IEA was established in 1955, it was not until the collapse of the Keynesian consensus that there was a window of opportunity for their ideas. The culmination of that crisis in the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978/79 provided a new opportunity for the IEA to get their views heard. The IEA existed for two decades, before their ideas found fertile ground among politicians close to Margaret Thatcher.
By the 1990s, both the demands and the opportunities afforded to think tanks had changed. For IPPR, the demand for new ideas came from a Labour leadership that broadly accepted the growth model bequeathed to them by the Thatcher/Major governments, and which was interested in electorally feasible approaches to social justice. Today, the demands and opportunity for Labour Together have come about with Starmer’s leadership, intimately linking the think tank to the battle within Labour politics.
A new environment?
The term ‘think tank’ has been used to cover a wide range of very different institutions. Rather than focus on definitions, we should see them as organisations which operate within a particular environment, and which need different resources to survive – including agendas, people and funding; and the contextual demand for their work and the opportunities to provide it. The election of a Labour government under Keir Starmer provides one example of this. Labour Together is stretching the traditional role of think tanks, drawing on US-style approaches in a more overtly partisan way than ever before; intimately linking party politics with think tankers; and carrying out work and providing resources that go far beyond the scope of earlier policy organisations in the UK.
Simon Griffiths.
Simon is a Reader in British Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London where he was, until recently, Head of Department. His work is focused on the relationships between ideologies, party politics and public policy.
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