Praising Parliamentary Watchdogs
The giant services firm Carillion collapsed under the weight of its own greed, hubris and mismanagement in January this year. Earlier this month the excellent Joint Work and Pensions and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Parliamentary produced one of those...
Running to stand still in the North Sea clean-up
One of the peculiar implications of our obsession with oil and fossil fuels is the strange way the UK has decided to pay for the decommissioning of the vast swathes of concrete and steel that now litters the North Sea. READ THE NEW REPORT HERE: Rigged: how the UK oil...
The economics of gobbling
Shouting ‘look over there’ while getting on with something nefarious over here is a tried and true tactic. So as the genuine scandal of the appalling Cambridge Analytica unfolds, it’s worth looking at what else is happening. Which brings us to Melrose. This company is...
Crapitalism: & the alternatives to ‘big’ outsourcing
Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms ask why we're not using proven alternatives to 'big' outsourcing News last week that Capita was in difficulties led to a near 50 percent drop in its share price as anxiety about its stability surged following the disclosure of net debts...
Is a different kind of trade deal possible?
It is one of the great ironies of history that, east and west, the liberation of the agricultural slaves and serfs happened almost at the same time. The people who carried out most of the work in the fields of Russia and eastern Europe and the plantations of the...
Banking on denial: the investment rush to climate catastrophe
Ripping-up his bank account as he writes, Bill McGuire says that banks are still pouring money into 'extreme fossil fuels' in the face of common sense, and what they already know about global warming, wrecking the climate for everyone, themselves included... It hasn't...
Why a warming world blows hot and cold
Bill McGuire writes that as weather extremes increase, even some new, more optimistic projections show the world busting climate safety lines... While the UK and much of Europe was in the grip of the beast from the east, the high Arctic basked in unprecedented...
‘Das Kapital’ in 60 mins: Sarah Woods’ new BBC Radio play
New Weather's Sarah Woods adapts Das Kapital for BBC Radio 4, broadcast on the bicentenary of Karl Marx's birth... LISTEN HERE: Das Kapital, the drama, until 4th June on BBC Radio i-player Marx's Das Kapital is one of the most influential books of the modern world. It...
‘Deconomisation’: the growing conversation on economics reformation
Economics associations from Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic stage the first international conference on the 33 Theses 'Deconomisation' - definition - noun: undoing the hold over society of a single, dominant economic approach It was 29 years since I...
March tale: what would you do, in the cold, cold Winter?
Folk tales often grow from periods of great hardship. The tale of Hansel and Gretel, though first written down much later, is thought to stem from the onset of the medieval cold period, known as the Little Ice Age and the Great Famine in Europe of the early...