Wednesday 11 February 2009

is this anti-NW bias?

I'm currently doing a round-up of the work of think-tanks at the moment, and the inescapable man-of-the-hour is Philip Blond, who's work on a book Red Tory which is due out later this year is already seen as one of the political events of the year, because David Cameron is said to be basing a lot of his philosophy on the Progressive Conservatism that Blond is now "rediscovering"/espousing/creating.
The Progressive Conservative project is run by Demos, and I think it's interesting to note the prevalence of Demos in the run up to Tony Blair's 1997 election victory and their apparent resurface after years of silence (remember Perry 6?).
However, something about the situation has really offended me. Below is a link to Philip Blond's profile on the Demos website:
http://www.demos.co.uk/people/phillipblond

Fair enough, except the next link is his profile on the University of Cumbria's website:
http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/AboutUs/Faculties/FacultyofTheArts/Ourschools/Humanities/Humanities%20Staff/Phillip%20Blond.aspx

In other words, the University of Cumbria has been deemed not important enough to be mentioned by Demos. Fair enough, it isn't the University of Cambridge - but I think it's a real coup for UoC(umbria) and we should be pointing out that Demos' decision is yet another reinforcement of the idea that us oop 'ere cannae ha' big ideas.

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