I’ve always believed that fairy tales have a role in understanding the contemporary world, and therefore of politics. This sounds a little sceptical or satirical, but I don’t mean it like that. You can use fairy tales as a positive way of extracting the underlying...
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Not So Sweet
A roomy green estate of 150 houses has been rapidly cleared of its residents, now scattered to other boroughs, other schools, other towns. A tiny number have taken over one house and are mounting a resistance to the ‘social cleansing’ they claim has happened in...
Our Allotted Span
A document dropped through my door on Saturday. It was from the Allotments Association asking for our help in protecting the site of 50 allotments in the village.Apparently we need to get our allotments designated as a Local Green Space to protect them from the...
Where are the resources going to come from?
Take the NHS for example. The political narrative is always about the dearth of resources available – and of course this is bound to be a problem. But it is odd, nonetheless, given that so much of what needs doing requires no obvious training – visiting,...
The underlying causes of an unbalanced economy
We don't live in a very literate age when it comes to economics. There are still people in Whitehall, even the Treasury, who believe that somehow – if cities decline or fall, if one place succumbs to grinding poverty – that is it the ‘market’ that did it. However...
Delivering What Exactly?
I had just finished reading the wonderful second volume of Alan Johnson's autobiography, Please Mr Postman, when an advert popped up on the computer for a company called Doddle. Doddle joins Yodel and Whistl, other delivery companies with babyish names, which are...
Latest Publication
This pamphlet looks at how the UK is unprepared for a new era of crises and disasters. To illuminate the national predicament we look at lessons from recent history, and what we can learn, often from countries in the Global South, about the kind of local planning required and resources needed to be ready for when storms and other disasters strike near where we live.
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