ARCHIVED The Politics of Governmental Reform in Japan and the UK, with Bronwen Maddox and Koji Tsuruoka
Date
Wednesday 23 September 2020
Time
12.00noon - 1.00pm (BST)
Booking Details
Free – Donations Welcome
Registration essential
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In this webinar, to consider the course of governmental reform and the politics around it, Japan Society Chairman, Bill Emmott, will be joined in the UK by Bronwen Maddox, director of the Institute for Government, and by our old friend Ambassador Koji Tsuruoka in Japan.
Ideas and ambitions for governmental reform tend not to register large for most citizens, while fuelling heated and sometimes acrimonious debate among policy makers.
Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s new prime minister, is known domestically as the man who steered through the centralisation of control over Japan's civil service, and one who has already made governmental reform central to his administration. In the UK, we have seen beginning in recent months a big shake-up of the civil service, a merger of the FCO and DFID, a spate of resignations among top civil servants and plans in last December’s Conservative Party manifesto for wide-ranging constitutional reform.
So our webinar will ask what such governmental reform is likely to lead to, what are the politics around it, and what implications it might have for our countries' foreign stances.
Bronwen Maddox is the director of the Institute for Government, a leading independent think tank, which works to promote better government by focusing on how it is led, how decisions are made and how it is scrutinised. From 2010–16 Bronwen was editor and chief executive of Prospect, a leading monthly current affairs magazine. Prior to that she was chief foreign commentator, foreign editor and US editor of The Times, having previously written for the Financial Times and worked in the City as an investment analyst.
Koji Tsuruoka, Ambassador of Japan in London from 2016 – 2019, joined the Foreign Ministry after graduating in Law from the University of Tokyo. Immediately prior to his arrival in London he led the government team for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, involving 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific. Before that, he was the personal representative of the Prime Minister to the G8 and G20 meetings and also served as Deputy Vice Minister in charge of foreign policy. He has extensive experience working in Japanese diplomatic missions in areas as diverse as Indonesia, Washington D.C and Moscow.
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