No fashionable organisation is complete these days without a website to call its own. So it is with the positively Blairite New Health Network, which, though not yet in cyberspace, certainly has something trundling towards the launch pad.

Once there, New Labour's latest space cadets will have to find themselves a clear orbit, picking their way through increasingly crowded skies to beam their message down to planet earth.

There is certainly no shortage of think tanks eager to impress, persuade and influence us with their ideas already up there.

At least the equally Blairite Institute for Public Policy Research is likely to be orbiting in approximately the same direction. It launched a health policy forum last year to research 'the gap between policy and implementation'. Not that it is giving much away - you will have to pay to find out what it thinks.

Thought is, of course, a strength in a think tank.

Which puts the Adam Smith Institute at something of a disadvantage. Its main preoccupation appears to be selling T-shirts, mouse mats, busts of Adam Smith 'beautifully crafted in a former Soviet Union weapons factory' and William Hague-style baseball caps.

Clearly in a decaying orbit, it can only be a matter of time before it burns up on re-entry. To be fair, it did manage a sour comment on the Royal Commission on Long-term Care, but it has not had a lot to say about health down the years - unlike its ideological soul-mate, the Institute for Economic Affairs.

There is something other-wordly about most think tanks when it comes down to it. But at least the Nuffield Trust can claim to have once been at the centre of things with its influential 1984 Reflections on the Management of the NHS.

And unlike most, it doesn't charge the earth for access to its ideas.