ABSTRACT
The period since the late 1980s has seen the emergence of a plethora of new think-tanks in Britain, some of which have already won a high media profile. One reason for this development is the assumption that New Right groups such as the IEA, the CPS and the ASI succeeded, at least to some extent, in transforming the substance of political debate in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. As Richard Cockett has noted, whereas only a generation ago bodies such as the IEA were widely seen as a refuge for cranks and eccentrics, it is now “almost de rigeur for all political parties, let alone individual politicians, to have at least a couple of think-tanks under their wing to demonstrate any pretensions to intellectual and political vitality”; the proliferation in think-tank numbers that has occurred in Britain since the late 1980s also means that “any new think-tank, of whatever ideological hue, now has to operate in a very crowded field” (Cockett 1996:87). Most importantly, whatever success the think-tanks achieved was gained at very little expense; unlike the situation in the United States, the possibility opened up that in Britain one could win media prominence with nothing more than one or two creative minds, an eye-catching name, and a typewriter.
