On 09-Mar-05 Humphrey Southall wrote:
> At 16:28 09/03/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>>The "new report" referred to in You&Yours in fact seems
>>to be "The Essential Guide to British Quangos 2005", author
>>Dan Lewis, Director of the Efficiency in Government
>>Unit which is sponsored by the Centre for Policy Studies
>>and the Economic Research Council,
>>...
>>[*] And one of the 9 most useless is the Economic and Social
>> Research Council.
>
> I suspect the Centre for Policy Studies dislike the ESRC
> precisely because it sometimes funds people like us. Whatever
> exactly you think about the ESRC, putting it among the 9 most
> useless is ridiculous. There is a strong political agenda in
> that report and I was astonished at how the BBC, for example,
> reported it:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4255709.stm
>
> Humphrey Southall
Precisely so ... which is why I decided to let RadSats
know about it (in a somewhat coat-trailing fashion),
having been alerted to it by the You&Yours program.
There has been some adverse reaction to this report
by interested parties on the other side (i.e. people
associated with and supportive of quangos), but on
the whole the press coverage I have come across has
generally reported it with some glee, as a somewhat
juicy item ("just look what we're spending our money
on"). And again, whatever one thinks of the Statistics
Commission, my hackles rose a bit what I heard it
being mentioned in the same breath as the Zoos Forum
(whatever, again, one may think of the latter).
Best wishes to all,
Ted.
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Date: 09-Mar-05 Time: 19:33:26
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