Each year the Financial Times newspaper investigates the UK’s upcoming economic prospects with a survey of economic analysts. New Weather’s Andrew Simms took part. The survey’s predictions often prove highly accurate but after such an extraordinary year, and with...
By David Boyle, Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms “We created 400 clone towns nobody loves. We shouldn’t get upset - job losses aside - about changing them.” So said Mark Robinson, co-founder of landlords Ellandi and chair of the government’s High Streets Task Force, on...
Andrew Simms and Sarah Woods reflect on the accidental relevance of their performance-lecture Neoliberalism: The Break-Up Tour for the launch of Digital Theatre+'s new filmed discussion. “A pandemic spreads'' are the first three words of our participatory show...
Outsourcing and privatisation died at 15:18 on Wednesday 4 November 2020. Or thereabouts. That was of course a misquotation of the great architectural critic Charles Jencks who passed judgement on the failures of inhuman, modernist buildings. It was also when the...
Lindsay Mackie, Andrew Simms and David Boyle argue that the UK test and trace debacle shows why capitalism - critics of which are now banned from school educational materials - isn't working The testing crisis in which we are now engulfed could easily - like the...
In my just published eco-thriller, Skyseed, the untimely eruption of an obscure volcano in Bolivia dooms an illicit programme to engineer the climate to failure – and worse. The events that follow are pure fiction and hopefully will stay that way. Nonetheless,...
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.
