About

Purpose

The idea behind this blog site is that political ideas are important – they shape our politics, and citizens and politicians invoke them all the time – political philosophers take political ideas very seriously so we should be able to say interesting things about political or policy issues.

Who am I?

My name is Dean Machin. I am (or was) a political philosopher who now works on public policy, public affairs, and strategy.

Since May 2016 I have worked for the University of Portsmouth as the Vice-Chancellor’s adviser on public policy issues.

From 2012-15 I taught in the Philosophy Department at UCL and from 2009-12 I was a Leverhulme Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Warwick.

My academic specialism was political philosophy particularly the relationship between political equality and social and economic equality.

From 2012-15 I also worked for David (now Lord) Willetts, mostly on his book ‘A University Education’.

I used to sit on the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee (NSDEC), and in 2015 I wrote a report for the Social Mobility Commission on data-sharing.