Good news for London - The Jewish Chronicle

Guido writes, quite rightly, about the renaissance in free market think tanks.

One of the liveliest and most infuential is, of course, Policy Exchange, and it's something of a coup for Boris Johnson to have lured its director, Anthony Browne, to be his policy director.

It's also very good news for London to have so able a man directing policy.

What a change from the Socialist Action cell which took charge under Livingstone.

Incidentally, Guido writes:

Michael Gove's advocacy of the Swedish model of "free schools" may owe a little to another recent ASI report Open Access for UK Schools: What Britain can learn from Swedish Education Reform.

I'm sure that's correct, but I've been banging on about the Swedish model (and other similar schemes) for more than a decade and wrote a much earlier ASI paper in 2001. Here's some of what I wrote:

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If Denmark has a long history of choice, the situation in Sweden could not have been more different. High tax rates meant that school fees were unaffordable to all but a tiny number of parents; so as recently as 1990 less than one per cent of pupils attended independent schools