Prospect in the news

Phillip Blond’s provocative demand for a ‘red tory moment’  in the latest edition of Prospect has continued to make waves over the last week.

At the Observer’s Food Monthly blog, Alex Renton applies Blond’s critique of corporate monopolies to the farming sector, and asks “Is Britain  running out of food?”

Beliefnet's 'Crunchy Conservative' Rod Dreher also quotes us at length, and recommends that "[i]f you read nothing else today, make it Blond's essay".

Over at the Spectator, Alex Massie is more sceptical of Blond's anti-Thatcherite credentials: “Self-improvement? Check. Small businesses? The grocer's daughter was all in favour of them”.

The Royal Society's Matthew Taylor takes a positively anthropological approach, explaining the piece as a product of a "social dialectic...partly rooted in the collective expression of our cognitive predisposition to a limited array of comparative responses to the social world". Gramsci would be proud.

Peter Bazalgette's proposal for public service 'narrowcasting' also preempted the thrust of Lord Carter's  Digitial Britain interim report, presented to parliament last week. Bazalgette's conviction that public service broadcasting needs to radical change in order to survive is a crucial contribution to the debate.

Going a little further back, our piece on autism by Kamran Nazeer last year is still attracting praise: Magnus Linklater at the Times Online calls on Nazeer’s work as part of an impassioned defence of high functioning autistics and their contribution to society.