The coalition’s economic blind spot
Critics of Blair’s suggest that one of his faults was his keenness for neoliberal free-market economics in which corporations and the rich got richer at the expense of people and the planet. But where is the coalition on this? Read the Orange book and you can’t help but hear Thatcher’s voice muttering agreement in the...
Democracy rising
Labour and the Conservatives are trying to cling on to the sinking ship of two-party politics. They’ve got so used to the Punch and Judy, ya-ya, yo-yo politics that they assumed it would rule for ever. So they are falling over each other to tell us how much we would regret a hung Parliament, despite...
Woe to the rich
Photo by Norbert Löv I saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism – a Love Story last night. I liked it. Yes I agree with the many critics that it’s low on solutions and bombastic. But that’s Moore’s style. Its real strength for me was the insight into the lives of disillusioned Americans who bought into a myth...
The Decade of the Citizen
As we remain firmly rooted in our Western economic bath-tub and emerge from the dusts of Copenhagen, it seems ever clearer that Citizens are the missing link for 2010. The Citizen Renaissance message for 2010 is this: Be the change. Aspire not to have more but be more. Do more. Together. Politics continue to fail...
Looking Again at The State We’re In
I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking around the subject and nature of Trust, as we prepare to launch the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer in London and in Davos this week. It will come as no surprise to many to learn that – as with the interim Barometer, published in the summer...
Copenhagen – a gathering of the peasants of the earth
So we didn’t get a deal. Yes, this is a catastrophic failure of the thousands of negotiators, media, world leaders and informed experts who crammed into the Bella Centre for two weeks in December. But this is a failure too for civil society, and not only those who travelled to Copenhagen formally (as NGO representatives,...
Citizens / Climate change / Communications / Individuality / Leadership / New Economics / Trust / Wellbeing
Inverting The Power Pyramid
Preparing some notes for a panel session at next week’s CBI forum on Climate Change, I am struck by how top-down the world still really is and suddenly alarmed that I remain in a narrow minority of those wishing and willing to embrace bottom-up democracy and ride the chaos of new networks. The CBI intro...
Vampires squids and supermarket bitches
The other day I heard someone singing to a friend on the tube. The song was from the hilarious Bill Bailey sketch where he talks about turning down money from Asda because of their reputation on human rights and other issues. This is one more example of where sustainability issues are becoming deeply embedded in...
Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons
One of the final myths holding us back from a much needed updating of corporate-consumer-growth-capitalism has now been debunked with Professor Elinor Ostrom becoming the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. Ostrom’s work won the prize for the way it debunks The Tragedy of the Commons which has long been used as...
