From an article in The Guardian, a known columnist (Madeleine Bunting) leaves to set up a think tank:


"However, other issues are still floundering on the margins of public debate - or worse. Some I plan to devote more attention to in my new capacity: for example, the regeneration of an intellectual grounding for centre-left politics beyond the tired managerialism and bankrupted concept of choice. For several decades the left has failed to mount a challenge to Thatcher's ambition that "the economy is the means, the goal is to remake the soul". Another example is the vexed and embittered debate around the entangled questions of the representations of Islam in the west, the boundaries of freedom of expression and what the sociologist Richard Sennett calls the "pivotal concept" of respect.

But where I feel the wrench from daily journalism most keenly is in a debate that shows all the signs of being strangled at birth. For the first time in a generation, religion is part of the national conversation; people want to talk and read about it. This is in large part due to Islam, which is prompting in a western audience a combination of fear and bewildered fascination (how can women want to wear veils, and have arranged marriages; how can Muslims still believe in angels and a divinely inspired scripture?). But there is another, albeit less pronounced, driver to this debate, which is that the collapse of communism and decline of socialism has left a vacuum of purpose, value and meaning on both the left and the right."

The full article in http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1800709,00.html