 Oxford University Press Influence without Responsibility? Think-Tanks in Britain BY ANDREW DENHAM AND MARK GARNETT In Britain, think-tank is a fairly new term for a long-established phenomenon. It was imported from the United States as a more accessible name for the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), established by Edward Heath in 1970 to provide his government with specialist advice across departmental boundaries. Members of the CPRS were civil servants, although their relationship with the rest of Whitehall was uneasy from the start. However, since its abolition in 1983 the term has been applied to independent bodies which provide information and ideas with the intention of assisting government decision-makers. In this sense there have been think-tanks in Britain since the eight- eenth century at the latest. As a response to the increasing demands placed on central government by social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution, individuals and informal groups began to offer advice on a range of subjects, including population trends, the electoral franchise and the legal system. Sometimes this advice was solicited (as in the case of Dr Richard Price’s actuarial work for Pitt the Younger); on other occasions it was decidedly unwelcome to governments (e.g. Dr Richard Price’s ideas on electoral reform). The Philosophic Radicals of the early nineteenth century constituted the first group in Britain which could be described as an organised think-tank; disciples of the philo- sopher Jeremy Bentham, they disseminated Utilitarian ideas in print and tried to give them practical effect as civil servants or as MPs. In a predemocratic political culture, where parliamentary alliances owed more to family connections than to ideology, the dynamic Ben- thamites were able to achieve far more influence than the numbers of convinced supporters might have suggested. The historian A.V Dicey called the years from 1825 to 1870 the period of Benthamism or Individualism. For many years Bentham’s work was ignored; his popu- larity began late in his life, when Napoleon was dead and the political classes were confident enough to carry through the radical changes which he had demanded since the time of the French Revolution. Specific government measures, such as the first Reform Act (1832), the New Poor Law of 1834 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1848, have been attributed to Benthamism and the efforts of associated political economists, notably David Ricardo and Thomas R Malthus. These writers provided a rationale for the policy of ‘laissez-faire’ which won the assent of most politicians in Victorian England. But even Dicey