In the middle of a heatwave and drought, it’s not just the leakage allowed by private water companies (as much as people actually use), but the money they drain from a vital piece of our national infrastructure that’s the problem, writes Miriam Stewart, from the...
So the NHS is 70 years old, and – perhaps it is because it is currently under threat from serious underfunding – the coverage has been self-congratulatory. There is a lot to be congratulatory about, of course: free at the point of use and the egalitarian ethos. It...
A record-breaking heatwave hints at a lethal new climate normal, writes Prof Bill McGuire, but you wouldn’t know as the obsession with Brexit drowns out real news Nostalgia is gripping the political agenda and not in a good way, with Brexit harking back to an imagined...
This week is the 70th anniversary of the NHS. It was an extraordinary promise by a society to care for all its members, free at the point of use. It went rapidly from plan to reality in just three years and, decades later, as a mark of its success, the NHS still comes...
Everything we make includes an element of design. But design isn't limited to household objects, clothes or buildings, it influences whole systems that shape the way we live. The climate crisis and corrosive inequality tell us that the systems we have need a redesign,...
The giant services firm Carillion collapsed under the weight of its own greed, hubris and mismanagement in January this year. Earlier this month the excellent Joint Work and Pensions and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Parliamentary produced one of those...
It is one of the great ironies of history that, east and west, the liberation of the agricultural slaves and serfs happened almost at the same time. The people who carried out most of the work in the fields of Russia and eastern Europe and the plantations of the...
New Weather's Sarah Woods adapts Das Kapital for BBC Radio 4, broadcast on the bicentenary of Karl Marx's birth... LISTEN HERE: Das Kapital, the drama, until 4th June on BBC Radio i-player Marx's Das Kapital is one of the most influential books of the modern world. It...
One of the peculiar implications of our obsession with oil and fossil fuels is the strange way the UK has decided to pay for the decommissioning of the vast swathes of concrete and steel that now litters the North Sea. READ THE NEW REPORT HERE: Rigged: how the UK oil...
Ripping-up his bank account as he writes, Bill McGuire says that banks are still pouring money into 'extreme fossil fuels' in the face of common sense, and what they already know about global warming, wrecking the climate for everyone, themselves included... It hasn't...