Why are large companies trying to distance themselves so much from their customers? Listen, starting at 20 minutes 28 seconds: the BBC World Business Report explores the Absent Corporation Our second ideas pamphlet, thanks to the Polden Puckham Foundation, identifies...
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Zero Carbon Britain: Making It Happen
Zero Carbon Britain: Making it Happen - charts a huge range of positive opportunities for innovation, for both Britain’s economy and for its people. Paul Allen explains how the zero carbon transition offers a wide range of co-benefits including; better housing,...
They’re still not getting it: the upside down economy
Two ongoing stories demonstrate with pellucid clarity how populism gains first a foothold and then strength against a political elite which seems to have lost its way entirely. First is the new business rates. Due to start in April, the new rates are widely predicted...
A very British betrayal: how the promise to ‘take back control’ was captured by a hard-line elite
In a week when Parliament is making an attempt to widen and deepen the discussion around Brexit and the conditions of our departure from the EU, a new report from the New Weather Institute - Brexit - The Blackbird Leys Memo - warns that the government is now taking...
The Screwtape economy
Sometimes, you have to reach for metaphysics to explain the sheer idiocy of large centralised systems. I speak of the way that government policy seems designed to undermine the economic self-determination of our cities and regions. This is reproduced from my localism...
‘A cat in hell’s chance’ – why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2°C and need to be feisty cats
A global rise in temperature of just 2°C would be enough to threaten life as we know it. But leading climate scientists think even this universally agreed target will be missed. Could dramatic action help? The New Weather Institute teamed up with The Guardian to take...
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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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