News

My Life in Fragments, Zygmunt Bauman (edited by Izabela Wagner), Review

Six years after his death, Zygmunt Bauman can still eviscerate – disembowel the claims of others and skin them of their intellectual pretensions.

World population projections: Just little bits of history repeating?

The world population is expected to peak in the summer of 2086. But do the official United Nations estimates give enough consideration to human behaviour?

Scotland is showing us the route to a fairer society

I am not pessimistic when it comes to global trends. But closer to home the statistics are a lot less rosy.

Council Housing: time to Invest (now, more than ever), submission of evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Council Housing

In 2010, the Parliamentary Council Housing Group of MPs and Defend Council Housing (DCH) published “Council Housing: Time to Invest, fair funding, investment and building council housing”.

Growth which makes everyone, not just a few, better off

In 2023, when discussing what might be possible with levelling up, Peter John quoted the July 2021 words of the Prime Minister said a year before he was forced to resign from office

The crises combine: austerity, cost-of-living, public sector jobs and pay

The UK government may be taxing people more (other than the very well off) than it has done in many decades, but

Weakened by a decade of austerity: why the UK’s covid-19 inquiry is right to look at policies since 2010

Any concerns that the UK’s covid-19 inquiry would give ministers an easy ride seem to have been dispelled by the determination with which its chair, Heather Hallett, has pursued information held by former prime minister Boris Johnson.

Slowdown means the end of pervasive capitalism

Danny Dorling discusses the end of the age of speed in his book Slowdown.

The long shadow of the cost of living emergency

In ‘The long shadow of the cost-of-living emergency’, Amy Baker and Hannah Paylor revealed that:

Sir, Is Lord Sumption aware that the Roundheads won?

In Response to: Oxford Magazine, No. 452, 0th Week, TT, “The New Roundheads”

Most people in the UK now share Robert Owen’s views

From 1798 to 1822 Britain suffered it longest ever fall in wages and a huge drop in living conditions

What would it take to persuade Rishi Sunak to join the Patriotic Millionaires?

I suspect they would agree to him joining, were he to ask. He is, after all, both patriotic and a multi-millionaire.

Why Finland is the happiest country in the world – an expert explains

Finland has been the happiest country on earth for the past six years, according to the World Happiness Survey.

Are things about to get better?

The gap between rich and poor is wider than it has been for a century. We think that change is impossible, but it may have already begun