The Greenhouse
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Straying from the script
William Bradley responds to some of the online comments about our Annual Lecture with Amartya Sen.
It’s not often that you find the politicians in the audience rather than onstage at a think-tank event, but at Demos’ annual lecture on Monday, I turned around to see that the voice agreeing with Sen’s argument behind me was in fact Patricia Hewitt. Evan Davis was just in front and Henry Porter behind, a testament to the sustained influence of one of the worlds great public intellectuals. Even those on the panel were in awe, Ed Milliband admitting that he felt like an O-Le...
Consumer Care
Pippa Read says we need more than just enlightened consumer choice.
To mark this year’s fairtrade fortnight The New Statesman held a debate on whether UK consumer choices actually make a difference in the Third World. Perfectly reducing UK consumer choices into a single location, it was held at a Starbucks on Oxford Street. Amongst the fairtrade coffee, bananas and brownies a loan voice dared to question the sanctity of fairtrade. Believing it to be little more than a conscience salvaging measure, he argued that we need to ‘focus on our duty as ...
A sour taste
Marcus Fergusson says that supermarkets' demands on dairy farmers are turning the milk sour.
Nocton Dairies Ltd in Lincolnshire has submitted a planning application to build the largest dairy farm in Western Europe. 8,100 cows will produce up to 430,000 pints of milk a day while their slurry will generate enough electricity to power the farm and 2000 homes. But there is a catch. Nocton Dairies will be a battery farm. The cows will spend the majority of their lives in eight vast indoor hangars, with limited access to pasture and sunshine. They will be milked three times a day ...
Evidence based conservatism
Max Wind-Cowie argues that progressive conservatism has its roots in solid evidence.
Ever since the Conservative party decided that it needed to ‘change to win’ we have had successive attempts to find a name or a brand that would help to define that transition. Off the top of my head I can think of ‘compassionate conservatism’, ‘liberal conservatism’, ‘a return to One Nation conservatism’ and, most recently, ‘modern conservatism’. Not unfairly many, especially critics from the left, reacted to the use o...
"A broadside of Wagnerian proportions"
Richard Reeves dares to suggest that orchestra funding could be better spent elsewhere.
I recently learned a lesson most people are quicker to learn: mess with the music lobby at your peril. A suggestion I made in the FT that the £6.3 million being spent by the Arts Council on London’s orchestras in 2010/11 could be better spent elsewhere provoked a torrent of e-mails and letters. This is not a group to trifle with. (I am reliably informed that John Major backed off plans to cut the subsidy to one London orchestra when a party donor – also a friend of the orc...
Cameron’s Hurt Locker
Max Wind-Cowie warns that David Cameron mustn't make the same mistakes as James.
It is a tale of David and Goliath proportions. A juggernaut stopped in its tracks and trounced, gloriously, by the underdog. News that Hurt Locker has defeated Avatar at this year’s Oscars is warming to all of us who like to believe that the ‘little man’ is capable of victory against seemingly insurmountable odds. All that money spent on marketing, lobbying and PR, it seems, could not sway the Academy jury in James Cameron’s direction. Here in Brit...
Condemn a little more and understand a little less
Lousie Bazalgette looks at the controversial case of Jon Venables.
This week has seen an outpouring of anger towards Jon Venables, one of the two boys responsible for James Bulger’s murder in 1993, who (now aged 27) has reportedly breached the terms of his parole and been recalled to prison. Since this information was released, home secretary Alan Johnson and justice secretary Jack Straw have made contradictory statements on whether there is a ‘public right to know’ the details of Venables’s breach and public attention has primarily...
Chile: A resilient nation
Beatrice Karol Burks looks at the role social networking is playing in the Chilean earthquake.
On hearing the news that an 8.8 magnitude earthquake had hit Chile on Sunday morning my first thought was log on to Facebook and look for news from friends I made while living there in 2007. They beat me to it: despite the fact that many telephone lines and water mains were out of action, Facebook was a hive of activity with people reporting that they and their families were safe and well. They used Facebook to communicate not only with absent friends and siblings living abroad, but ...
Miliband's work in progress
Dan Leighton comments on David Miliband's speech to Demos.
Foreign secretary David Miliband gave the latest installment of Demos’s politics 2010 lecture. The speech provided an eloquent skewering of the Tories desire to will progressive ends through conservative means but provided a less than convincing argument about the meaning and relevance of progressivism itself. Jorge Luis Borges once quipped that the Falkland’s war was like watching two bald men fighting over a comb. At its worst the tussle between Labour an...
Early intervention to prevent the NEET issue
Sonia Sodha outlines the key findings from our new report, Ex Curricula.
The current generation of young people that are not in employment, education and training (NEET) has confounded policy makers – despite huge efforts to bring numbers down, almost one in seven young people aged 16-18 are NEET. The personal and social costs are enormous- the costs to society are estimated to be in the region of £4.6bn a year. Too often, it is assumed that all the answers lie in post-16 services and jobs. Of course, these are important. But our new report ...
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