Yesterday I was at the launch of a new initiative, called the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). The event was chaired (and the centre is run) by Professor Tim Jackson, one of the country’s leading thinkers on sustainable economics, and the author of one of the best (and most accessible) books on
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About a year ago I published a blog post lamenting the lack of real protest and action being taken against the (still extant) Government’s attempts to dismantle some of our most cherished and respected institutions – including the NHS, education system, welfare state and BBC. Since that post, the severity of the situation seems to
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There’s been a lot in the press about tax recently. The leak of data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca confirms my view that tax is more of a moral issue than a practical one – and that paying tax fairly is a moral duty. Let’s start by defining what tax is. It’s about
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The possibility of Donald Trump becoming the world’s most powerful person may have seemed like a joke a year ago (at least, to anyone but him), but now the reality is dawning that it might actually happen. He looks like a shoe-in for the Republican nomination now and will certainly give Hilary Clinton a run
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A short post this time – just to flag up a very good article from Owen Jones in The Guardian about the various ways that the Tories have successfully manipulated the truth in various issues over recent years. My favourite quote from the article is below: “Illusions are what the Tories excel at. They back Labour’s spending – down
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The General Election result in May 2015 was a shock for anyone of a vaguely progressive bent. It was more than just a shock though – it brought about a sense of profound dread as to what this group of Conservatives would do to our country and society once they had disentangled themselves from the
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I’ve just caught up with a very interesting post by Neal Lawson on OpenDemocracy today. The article asks how the Labour Party should move forward in the light of it’s devastating defeat in the 2015 General Election – not simply as a votewinning machine but as a true political force that can deliver a progressive,
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I was at the Compass Change:How? conference today and was struck by a few things in a discussion we had about ‘why it’s so hard getting people to change’. By this it meant getting members of the public to take action for a more progressive, sustainable (etc.) world. The first thing that struck me was
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This interesting article in the New York Times got me thinking again about something I’d been working on a few years ago – the question of how to we can gain the level of change needed to tackle big global issues like global warming and just what role we as individuals can play in this.
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Recently, the New Economics Foundation (nef) published a follow up to their influential 2005 ‘Clone Town Britain’ report. The updated report has surveyed Britain again and found that 41 per cent of UK towns are clone towns and a further 23 per cent are on the verge of becoming clone towns. The original report explored
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