Initiatives that are in progress, right now.
In response to the shock of COVID-19, 3 friends wrote 33 poems in 3 months: the new volume, Plague Poems, is the result. In the midst of COVID-19, we need moments to reflect, to pay attention to things that matter, things we hadn’t noticed before, to new terrors and...
‘Badvertising’ is a new campaign to stop adverts fuelling the climate emergency. This includes ads for cars, airline flights and fossil fuels. We ended tobacco advertising when we understood the harm done by smoking. Now we know the damage done by fossil...
It's not what most people want to hear at the moment, but the impact of Covid19 on society and economy is a gentle breeze compared to the hurricane that global heating and ensuing climate breakdown will ultimately bring. Some problems, when examined closely, simply...
In the sorry tale of the UK’s response to the corona virus there are many lessons. The current unfolding illumination is how test and trace is destined to fail because of the actions of this and previous governments which have rendered a sensible response to testing...
Sometimes we are enabled to see clearly. A light shines and we have the ‘intake of breath’ moment. One such widely shared moment has been revelations about the brazen breaking by members of the government of their own public safety measures. Another such a moment,...
In a recent poll only nine percent of respondents said they wanted to return to the world as it was pre-Covid19. We need to be preparing that new world now. So let us imagine it, this new world. The kindness of neighbours we can leave on one side for the moment - it’s...
How often are ideas that once seemed radical and to some, even preposterous, made tame by the turn of events? That is the case now with the suggestion that Britain should experiment with National Gardening Leave, an idea suggested in a 2012 pamphlet I wrote with my...
It wasn't clear at the time, but a couple of weeks ago I gave what is likely to be my last public talk for a while, reproduced below, at an event called Human Nature, organised by the Experimental Thought Co. Already it seems an age away, but even then our...
Nothing like the current upheavals around the world in the wake of the novel coronavirus, COVID19, have been experienced in peacetime. But societies have mobilised like this during conflict and mass conflagrations. Are there lessons to be learned, and could it lead to...
Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms explore how crises reveal fundamental flaws in underlying political and economic models and call for a new approach It looks like it’s going to be a national emergency, or, in Whitehall terms, a very grave civil contingency. Novel...