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...
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...
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 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...
In a rolling Utopian 'Think Tank', hosted by Utopia 2016 Artistic Advisor and co-founder of bread, print & roses, Ruth Potts, and Andrew Simms from co-operative think-tank, the New Weather Institute, at Somerset House in London, the only rule is that you have to...
New readers start here. Listening to the BBC, you might easily believe that the crisis involving rail services across Sussex and Surrey was just about industrial action. For the poor benighted passengers, that really isn’t the case – the serious chaos has now been...
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.
