Kittens Are Evil II: Little Heresies in Public Policy

The 'Little Heresies' seminars - this is the second published collection of the talks given at them - provide an important public platform to debate the future of public services. Now more than ever it seems vital to challenge the 'received wisdom', 'zombie thinking' and old, tired and outdated habits and practices that continue to infest important aspects of our public services. For, as the authors demonstrate, what appear to be well-intentioned policies not only create perverse incentives but frequently cause lasting damage to the social fabric. Private sector management methods, underpinned by neoliberal thinking, were introduced into UK public services by Margaret Thatcher. Many other countries have adopted the same approach. And successive governments continue to be duped into believing, against plenty of evidence to the contrary, that New Public Management, as it is now called, works. It doesn't. In this second publication from the Little Heresies series, nine heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners in their professional fields, explain the disastrous effects of wrong thinking and ineffective practice in areas like standardisation, professionalisation and measurement in public services, so-called evidence-based policy-making, money creation and, looking more widely, in the troubled waters of philanthropy and the third/charitable sector.