When Labour came to power in 1997, Crick was appointed by his former student David Blunkett to head up an advisory group on citizenship education.

[9] Crick co-authored, with David Millar, an influential pamphlet entitled Making Scotland's Parliament Work.

[11] Despite his frail health at that time, Crick delivered a series of widely praised and very popular public lectures.

[12] Crick made many other contributions to Scottish political life, from participating in his local Labour Party, to defending Glenogle Baths from closure, to, in his last weeks of life, penning a humorous Op-Ed for The Scotsman on the chaos caused by the tram line delays in Edinburgh.

Glasgow University also recognised Sir Bernard's contribution by establishing an annual memorial lecture series.

The hardback edition rights were used to set up a grant in conjunction with Birkbeck College to fund projects by new writers that would have interested Orwell.

Due to a lack of discernible projects, after five years the fund was diverted to produce an annual memorial lecture at Birkbeck College and the University of Sheffield, and also to provide small departmental grants.

The first awards in 1994 were received by Anatol Lieven for his book The Baltic Revolution and to The Independent on Sunday journalist Neal Ascherson.

According to Crick, the ideologically driven leader practises a form of anti-politics in which the goal is the mobilisation of the populace towards a common end—even on pain of death.

He identified and rejected their basic premises: that research can discover uniformities in human behaviour, that these uniformities could be confirmed by empirical tests and measurements, that quantitative data was of the highest quality, and should be analysed statistically, that political science should be empirical and predictive, downplaying the philosophical and historical dimensions, and the value-free research was the ideal, with the goal of social science to be a macro theory covering all the social sciences, as opposed to applied issues of practical reform.