Time banks.  Edgar Cahn launched the first six in the USA in 1987.  Martin Simon launched the first one in the UK at the end of 1998, but you can find them now all over Europe. When I was writing our new report for the European Commission's research centre on...

This blog was meant to be about the recipes of William Cobbett and so it will be but I want to take a short deviation about the way we eat our food now. As long as I live, may I never read another restaurant review. There are two minor problems with them. One is the...

This blog was meant to be about the recipes of William Cobbett and so it will be but I want to take a short deviation about the way we eat our food now. As long as I live, may I never read another restaurant review. There are two minor problems with them. One is the...

This is cross-posted from New Banking UK Financial regulators have to be adept at shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted – and especially so in England, where decades of persuasion are usually required to persuade politicians that the horse has left the...

Over the past six months, and thanks to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, and others, I’ve immersed myself in the issue of local banks. It can be a frustrating business, because politicians often prefer the convenience of people to blame (greedy bankers) rather...

There is a central moral conundrum at the heart of the payday loan phenomenon, as our report Can You Imagine an Ethical Wonga? sets out. It is that payday loan companies are designed to help people through what are intended to be unusual and temporary periods of...