2008 is crunch time for British academics, as the first research assessment exercise (RAE) in seven years gets under way. Since 1986, the RAE has been one of academia's most crucial measures. This year, it will allocate £1.5bn—a fifth of all governmental higher education funding—to institutions based on a peer-reviewed assessment of research. Things are soon to change, however. By 2006, the system had become so Byzantine and unpopular that the treasury announced a move to a "metrics-based" system. After 2008, it declared, research should be assessed by measurable outcomes—such as how many citations a paper receives—rather than by subjective evaluation.
But this rational ambition has run into troubles. Last year, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) decided it could assess only scientific subjects on a metrical basis; arts would have to remain peer-reviewed. In February, Hefce's proposals were heavily criticised by Britain's seven research councils. Their concerns include the facts that the new system for sciences begins in 2010 while arts don't start until 2013; that metrics will damage fields that are not publication-rich, like engineering; and that measuring scientific research purely by metrics may discourage academics from taking on public policy work.
Hefce has yet to publish its response. But time is short and passions are running high. In real terms, higher education spending has risen greatly since 1997, yet Labour's emphasis on delivering value for money has left some concerned that universities are in thrall to market imperatives. Hefce, thus far, has failed to set their minds at ease.
EU doesn't rule us
One of the most enduring myths about the EU is that it enables meddlesome technocrats to burden us with excessive and pointless rules and regulations. "It is unacceptable that 50 per cent or more of regulations come from the European Union," thundered Gordon Brown in 2002. But in fact the figure is a lot lower than that. Despite Jacques Delors's 1988 prediction that 80 per cent of national legislation would come from the EU within ten years, less than 10 per cent of all legislation and regulations passed by the British parliament derives from Brussels, according to the House of Commons library. Furthermore, just 1 per cent of the gross national income of EU member states goes to Brussels—which promptly sends 85 per cent of it back. Eurosceptics will doubtless breathe a heavy sigh of relief.
A woman watches the pack of riders in the village of Muro during the Mallorca challenge 2008
Shiv Malik trouble
As Prospect went to press, we heard that the Greater Manchester police were threatening to serve a "production order" on Shiv Malik, writer and expert on Islamic extremism. Production orders require the disclosure of notes, recordings and other journalistic material to the police. Malik wrote "My brother the bomber" (Prospect, June 2007), a controversial piece about 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. He is working on a book, Leaving al Qaeda (Constable), with the former extremist Hassan Butt. It is assumed that the police are seeking material relating to Butt's former extremist activities. Let's hope their actions don't discourage other ex-jihadis from going straight.
Lily turns Orange
Every year, exactly the same charge gets levelled against the Orange prize. How can a women-only literary award be justified when it is emphatically not the case that women are discriminated against in publishing? This year's complainant-in-chief was novelist Tim Lott, who described the existence of the prize as like having an "affirmative action scheme for Oxbridge graduates at the BBC." AS Byatt, meanwhile, described the prize as "sexist" and revealed that she refused to let her publisher enter her books for it. But such attacks miss the point. The real problem with the Orange prize is not its sexual bias, but its ridiculous capitulation to the forces of celebrity, exemplified by this year's appointment of the 22-year-old pop star Lily Allen as one of the five judges. Allen, Prospect learns, was so committed to the judging process that she sent along her mother when she couldn't make it to meetings.
Is comment free?
Prospect has learned that one of the writers granted posting rights by the Guardian for its Comment is Free site is suing the newspaper after he was banned for leaving comments that violated its regulations.
Comment is Free seemed like a noble experiment in online democracy: here was a place where the public could discuss the paper's print and online opinion pieces without intrusion. But things haven't quite worked out as planned. The sheer viciousness of many of the comments—with threads often descending into relentless personal attacks on writers—has forced the paper to moderate its original "open doors" stance. These days discussions are moderated, and there are guidelines on what can and can't be said (with a warning system leading to a ban for repeat offenders). But these strictures have only created fresh problems.
On the face of it, it's hard to see what legal redress could be open to someone ejected from Comment is Free. Any institution providing online space for public discussion, like the Guardian, obviously needs enforceable rules, including the right to ban abusive or defamatory commenters. But this is just one example of the many kinds of legal dilemma being thrown up by the internet. The most important of these will revolve around the degree to which libel laws apply to online content. So far, attempts to sue websites—or individuals who post on them—for defamation have met with limited success. But this will change as the internet becomes more of a public realm like any other. (A victim of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to sue the website Mumsnet described, amusingly, her ordeal in Prospect's October 2006 issue.) Some interesting battles lie ahead.
Jennifer Moses's decision to leave her job running Centre-Forum to work at No 10 is a reminder of how feminised the centre-left think tank world has become. Most big centre-left tanks are run by women: Ann Rossiter at the SMF, Catherine Fieschi at Demos and the job-sharing Lisa Harker (pictured, right, wearing the famous Prospect tank top for the top tank) and Carey Oppenheim at the IPPR. With the partial exception of the IPPR duo, these women are less strongly aligned to Labour than their male predecessors, such as Philip Collins, Nick Pearce and Geoff Mulgan. They also seem ready to do things differently, Demos, for example, is this year putting as much effort into the Hay literary festival as it is into the party conferences.
Some of this non-Labourist spirit will be carried by Moses into No 10, as apparatchiks like Spencer Livermore quit. She is after all an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who ran a Lib Dem tank. Moses is also rich enough not to take a salary. But don't liberal bankers already have enough influence on Gordon Brown?
Don't dilly, Dalai
The gods must be smiling on Bloomsbury, which has a hot literary property on its hands thanks to the turmoil in Tibet—Pico Iyer's The Open Road, a biography of the Dalai Lama. Based on three decades of conversations with the Lama, Iyer's book offers numerous insights into the state of modern Tibet—including one description of an unlikely flash of rage from the Lama at the Chinese labelling him a "living Buddha." This, his holiness says, insults Tibetans' understanding of a Lama as a man worthy of respect because of his wisdom (rather than his godliness). There is also, bizarrely, a legal aspect to the dispute, because Chinese law decrees that all reincarnations of living Buddhas must receive government approval or be deemed "illegal or invalid." All reincarnation applications must be submitted to the religious affairs department of the provincial and regional governments and the state council. The Dalai Lama, one suspects, will be in no hurry to hand in his forms.
Sci-fi competition
We were sad to hear about the death of the great Arthur C Clarke, at the age of 90. His work inspired many who went on to transform the world of science; among other things, he conceived the idea of geostationary satellites, on which modern global communications are based. In his honour—and inspired by Michio Kaku's piece on "impossible physics" on page 20—Prospect invites you to explain to us what invention or concept from the annals of fiction you would most like to see leave the page and enter actuality. A stellar sci-fi prize to the winner. Answers to info@prospect-magazine.co.uk
The rise of the green conservatives
Green conservatism is in the air. Cameron's Tories are out-greening new Labour; in the US, former Bush speechwriter David Frum has outlined an eco-friendly agenda to help renew Republicanism. But it is in Germany, writes Hans Kundnani, that a right-green alliance is actually taking root. In the city-state of Hamburg, the Christian Democrats and Greens are negotiating a "black-green" coalition that could redraw Germany's political map much as the "red-green" experiment of the 1980s and 1990s did. This development is largely a consequence of the new arithmetic of power in Germany. Since Oskar Lafontaine's left-wing party merged with the PDS (the former East German communists) last year, a five-party system has emerged in which it is increasingly difficult for either of the two traditional blocs—the Christian Democrats/Free Democrats on the right and the Social Democrats/Greens on the left—to form a stable coalition.
The Greens are keen to reduce their dependence on the Social Democrats—and they have more in common with the Christian Democrats than one might think. When the German environmental movement emerged out of "citizens' initiatives" against nuclear power in the late 1970s, it included Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, and drew heavily on a right-wing, anti-modernist tradition going back to the German Romantics. One influential figure who now straddles this divide is Thomas Schmid, a former comrade of Joschka Fischer, and now editor of the conservative daily Die Welt. Moreover, the Greens, unlike the Social Democrats, have always been a middle-class party with a liberal economic wing. Until recently, a major stumbling block to a black-green alliance was the Christian Democrats' anti-immigrant rhetoric. But that now seems to be in retreat. If so, the new alliance could have a future beyond Hamburg.
