Globalisation:Taxpayers' Alliance: Democracy and Think Tanks
According to Gerry Hassan (2008) these think tanks work better for the right than they do for the left, in much the same way as they do in America. He also argues that the post democratic world of think tanks has blurred the boundaries between government and business, resulting in bad policy and government and resulting in the pushing of marketisation, privatisation and corporate influence into unannounced areas of public life. Therefore according to Hassan, ‘after the Thatcher revolution the think tank industry became a means by which the political class outsourced policy and built a new anti-democratic way of consolidating the new consensus which emerged’. [1]
Hassan (2008) therefore argues that ‘we need to ask penetrating questions about whose interests have been aided by the emergence of this new order, who gains from its maintenance, and who is paying for and perpetuating its existence?’ It is Hassan’s argument therefore that this leads towards the corporatisation of politics and the ultimate outsourcing: the privatisation of policy making. [2]
