Clash of the wonks

Last night the Southbank Centre hosted its second “Think Tank Clash”.  As last year, it was a sell out event, and saw representatives of six of the country’s top think tanks take each other on in three debates.  These debates were ably and wittily compared by writer John O’Farrell and the winners determined by audience vote.  The winners of each “clash” then competed in a three-way discussion to determine the overall top tank.

Round 1: “Revenge” – Res Publica v Demos

Res Publica founder and director Phillip Blond commenced by making the case for breaking up the banks. He argued that the current system does not distribute capital, but rather concentrates it, thereby “strangling real business”. Blond’s proposed solution is not, he was keen to emphasise, a smaller banking system but rather a more diverse one, in which banks have many different sources of capital and many different ways of investing it.