News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
With the European Union’s latest extension of the United Kingdom’s membership in the bloc, onlookers around the world are right to wonder why the Brexit process has proved so intractable. The short answer is that the UK’s government and parliament are trying to achieve three incompatible goals: preserving the country’s […]
Whether by historical standards, or compared with other parts of the public sector, the financial settlement awarded to English local government in 2010 was undoubtedly tough. As the Coalition Government sought to manage a perilous fiscal situation through a combination of modest tax rises and far more significant spending cuts, grants to […]
Throughout history, technological advances have put politicians and regulators in a difficult balancing act between embracing the benefits of the transformational changes brought by new technologies, versus providing reassurance to citizens that change can be managed and stability maintained. Take for example the advent of the self-propelled vehicles (cars), which […]
Now that British Prime Minister Theresa May, facing certain defeat, has postponed Parliament’s vote on the deal she concluded with the European Union last month on the United Kingdom’s departure from the bloc, the case for a “people’s vote” – a second Brexit referendum – is gaining ground. But is […]
After the local election of the state of Hesse last October, Angela Merkel announced that she would step down as head of the conservative party (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), but remain Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany until 2021, thereby retiring step by step. With the recent election of […]
Ahmad Alhendawi, originally from Jordan, served as the first-ever United Nations Secretary General Envoy on Youth. Alhendawi is a strong advocate for youth empowerment, having held the responsibility to represent 1.8 billion young people globally as the UN Youth Envoy from 2013 to 2017. He voiced the issues and concerns […]
Earlier this month the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights hosted a conference entitled Confronting Illiberalism to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The day prior to the conference, Mansfield College erected a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, the highly political US First Lady who, following her […]
It is often said that the US and China – superpowers at economic, geopolitical, and ideological loggerheads – are heading toward a new cold war. And the rhetoric – at least from one side – has come to resemble that of Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, one of the inaugural events of […]