The right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over its report, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, for making allegations in the report that it now admits were unsubstantiated. In late 2007 Policy Exchange published the report, reported in the right-wing press without any further fact-checking, that around a quarter of Mosques and

For obvious political reasons, David Cameron had to run a mile from Policy Exchange’s report on northern cities. But as John Rentoul argues in an excellent column in The Independent on Sunday, the report was actually right about certain things:  the striking thing about the Policy Exchange report is that its analysis is broadly correct. It specifically said that Liverpool, Roc...

The Policy Exchange report "Cities Unlimited - making urban regeneration work" can be read in full here. It is perhaps well summed up by this passage from the executive summary: There is no realistic prospect that our regeneration towns and cities can converge with London and the South East. There is, however, a very real prospect of encouraging significant numbers of people to move from those

Anyone who remembers the furore over the Policy Exchange report The Hijacking of British Islam: How extremist literature is subverting mosques in the UK will remember that at the time there was fair criticism of Policy Exchange’s response to accusations that some of the receipts that they later provided to BBC’s Newsnight looked a bit

The Tories and the media have missed the big story about Cities Unlimited, the Policy Exchange report on regional development policies. (You can download a PDF copy of it from the think tank's website.) As James Graham pointed out this morning, the report's lead author Tim Leunig is a Liberal Democrat. Indeed, during my days on the party's federal policy committee he was something o...

Could the media row with the Tories over the ‘Cities Unlimited’ report have been deliberately engineered by the Policy Exchange to help avoid any risk of an investigation by the Charity Commission. The Smith Institute has had a pretty uncomfortable year, partly thanks to Guido, with the Charity Commission breathing down its neck regarding its relationship with the Labour party. The Policy

Press tarnish Tories with Policy Exchange report One cannot help but think that the national and local press are having a bit of fun at the expense of david Cameron and the Conservative Party over the rather daft Policy Exchange report that recommended that we all head for the greener pastures of Oxfordshire. Purely a case

Muslim prisoners at a Cambridgeshire jail are acting in gangs and making concerted efforts to convert fellow inmates to radical Islam, an inspection report has found.

More antitrust. The Commission has released its Annual report on competition policy for 2007. You can find it here. The Annual report is an immensely valuable resource and it goes through all the salient (and some not so exciting) developments...

David Cameron today called the latest report from Policy Exchange 'insane'. As well he might. But for the modern Conservative Party, the only thing insane, was to say this stuff out loud. Because for the think tank, the ranks of which make up a large chunk of the new Tory establishment, these views are nothing out of the ordinary. The report which basically suggests that government should concentr...