In a Right State
Martin Earnshaw | 20 October 2009 Is being fat a lifestyle choice or is it caused by circumstances beyond your control? Will the recession create a nation of alcoholics? Across a range of issues, it seems, the recession is taking a devastating toll on our well-being. One in ten have been drinking more heavily because of the recession the Telegraph reported in June while a Which? survey reported in March that the recession could...
Building Resilience
‘The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster’ by J. Coaffee, D. Murkami-Wood and P. Rogers; Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008. 304pp Reviewed by Alastair Donald | 28 September 2009 Whether through ecological breakdown, terrorism, pandemics or crime, cities are now widely perceived as permanently ‘under threat’. Consequently, creating ‘resilience’ has become a key concept in public policy, and...
Broken Communities: Is state intervention part of the cause or the solution?
Dave Clements | 12 February 2009 Facing criticism from all sides for proposing draconian welfare reforms during a recession, the Prime Minister said – as if responding to another question – that ‘doing nothing is not an option’ (1). In a way, of course, he’s right the benefits system is in a mess and needs sorting out. But sometimes it is better to just leave things alone until you’ve got something...
The Future of Community
Speech given at Belfast Salon, Northern Ireland launch of The Future of Community Alastair Donald | 25 November 2008 For obvious reasons British identity has long been a contested subject in Northern Ireland. However, today national identity has become a problematic issue on a much wider scale, with society’s elite no longer able to secure support for, or even articulate an agreed set of collective values. This was confirmed...
Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: social order revisited
Dave Clements | 25 October 2008 This event at the LSE was billed as a ‘look at classic urban themes as they are manifested in the contemporary city, focusing on social reproduction of inequality, the meanings of disorder, and the link between the two’. Such scholarly intercourse between sociological heavyweights might have promised much, but it delivered little in the way of insight. Indeed, the indecipherable verboseness of the...
Young People and Social Exclusion
A review of a Royal Society of Arts event held on 8th October 2008 Dave Clements | 15 October 2008 Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts, on his way to Radio 4’s Moral Maze, found time to leave us with his thoughts on what he clearly felt was one of the hottest of topics, even in the eye of the economic storm. What once seemed impossible now seems possible, he said. Certainly, the world financial crisis had just...
More than Bricks and Mortar
Dave Clements | November 2007 In a speech given at Battle of Ideas 2007, Dave Clements argues that housing has become a vehicle for contemporary prejudices, anxieties and orthodoxies about how we live. The figures … The government’s plan is to build three million homes by 2020 The annual target is to build 200,000 homes a year We are already falling short by around 30,000 a year The target will increase to 240,000 a year from 2016...
The Islamist
‘The Islamist’ by Ed Husain; Penguin, 2007. 288pp Reviewed By Martin Earnshaw | November 2007 Since 7/7 made us aware that Islamist terrorism is as more likely to be produced at home than abroad, there has been a hardening of attitude towards the “extremists” in our midst and calls for “moderate” Muslims to disown them. Ed Husain’s book is a well-timed intervention in these debates, billed as an insider’s account of what...
ESSAY: The political engagement’s off
Austin Williams | October 2007 The e:petitions web page was launched on Number 10’s website in November 2006 ‘enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.’ Presumably, someone thought that it would be a good wheeze to minimise the photo opportunities for aggreived members of the public to present a paper petition to the Prime Minister in full view of the waiting media. Oh well, back to the drawing...
Fear of the modern mob
Austin Williams | 26 March 2007 Peter Roberts’ petition on Number 10’s website (‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy’) has caused something of a hoo-hah. It closed with 1.8 million people signing up within only a few weeks. Surely the government must have be chuffed about its much-vaunted e:participatory democracy. Back in the days when Blair’s ex-policy...
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