Fancy going to Accident and Emergency with conjunctivitis. I mean, what kind of feckless, ignorant type would do that? That was the sort of attitude I felt from the handful of medical staff I encountered there early on Saturday morning. It wasn't even bad...
Our blogs
Desperately seeking… a human solution from a universal credit robot
It was nine o'clock in the morning on the second day of Universal Credit running in my borough. After some confusion at the main desk I was directed to the room now designated as Universal Credit area. It was surreal: fresh paint, brand-coloured balloons, everyone...
An open letter to my MP who voted to turn away 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from the war in Syria
Dear Jane Ellison MP, When I travel from your constituency where I live to visit family members outside London, I pass through Liverpool Street station. Perched near the steps that bring you up from the Underground is a statue so modest that most commuters pass it...
Desperately Seeking… Our New Blog from the World of Work
Meet our heroine – talented, lively, hard working, striving and ambitious. A Londoner. With a deal of bad luck in her life but also acts of kindness and support, for instance a lot of random but interesting internships. A desire to do well and to change the world for...
Should we aspire to a Japanese economy?
I am just back from Japan, where I concentrated on eating as much rice and sushi as I could. It was a fabulous trip and I learned a great deal, and perhaps the most important lesson I learned is about Japanese growth. Put simply, there isn't any but it doesn't appear...
Cancelling Hinkley C would save Britain at least £30–£40 billion in energy bills, with switch to renewables
Nuclear plans pass high costs, economic and other risks to future generations, it's time for new design criteria for the energy system. Cancelling the troubled plan for the French state-owned energy company EDF to build the proposed new Hinkley Point C nuclear plants...
Towards a narrative-based economics
Trisha Greenhalgh and other health writers developed the idea of narrative-based medicine to explain the importance of what patients tell doctors that can't, or doesn't, tend to get included in data. In fact, the idea of stories as a policy-making tool has developed...
Why policy-makers don’t see the next local economic revolution coming
New Weather has published a book including eight important narratives to explain the next local economic revolution. Instead of waiting for economic salvation by outside investors or Whitehall grants, local people are beginning to innovate themselves. The trouble is,...
Telling the stories of the future of local regeneration (24 March)
There is a small earthquake going on, but we can barely feel it yet – a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. But it is below the radar of policy-makers. It suggests that the force that will eventually take our struggling local economies by the scruff of their necks...









