The Project was the brainchild of Nick Butler, an economist at BP, who at that time was also a prospective Labour Party parliamentary candidate.
[3] The British-American Project is affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
[4][dubious – discuss] Nick Cohen, writing in The Observer in 1999, criticised the scheme on the grounds that it encouraged the adoption in Europe of policy from the United States.
[4][dubious – discuss][better source needed] Andy Beckett, writing in The Guardian in 2004, said of the organisation "You won't have heard of the British-American Project, but its members include some of the most powerful men and women in the UK".
[1] He writes that in the work of the organisation "a process of political education can be discerned of which J Howard Pew would have approved", and that "American notions such as less regulated capitalism, a smaller 'enabling state' and a world kept safe by the Pentagon came to be regarded as sensible, inevitable".