We have been working with the New Banking group, and the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, to develop practical policy detail about how to develop a more effective banking system in the UK - one that works for SMEs and local economies. The present banking system is...
The term ‘inner cities’ seems to have disappeared from the vocabulary of educated debate. The Guardian itself says so. Why, given that it dominated political discussion in the 1980s? The answer is, I think, that – certainly in London – the poor don’t live there any...
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...
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.
