Think-tanks have been behind the massive effort to deny global warming, and lacking even a basic standard of ethics – nothing is important but getting their own desires met – they are undermining our political, intellectual and physical integrity. Same for ‘government by lobby’ – it subverts the whole ethos of democracy and threatens us with worse than a return to the days of aristocratic rule: we’ll have the full nightmare of Plato’s fantasy world made real.

Scholarship in the true sense can’t exist in a think-tank atmosphere without distortion and manipulation.