Cancelling Hinkley C would save Britain at least £30–£40 billion in energy bills, with switch to renewables
Nuclear plans pass high costs, economic and other risks to future generations, it's time for new design criteria for the energy system. Cancelling the troubled plan for the French state-owned energy company EDF to build the proposed new Hinkley Point C nuclear plants...
Towards a narrative-based economics
Trisha Greenhalgh and other health writers developed the idea of narrative-based medicine to explain the importance of what patients tell doctors that can't, or doesn't, tend to get included in data. In fact, the idea of stories as a policy-making tool has developed...
Why policy-makers don’t see the next local economic revolution coming
New Weather has published a book including eight important narratives to explain the next local economic revolution. Instead of waiting for economic salvation by outside investors or Whitehall grants, local people are beginning to innovate themselves. The trouble is,...
Telling the stories of the future of local regeneration (24 March)
There is a small earthquake going on, but we can barely feel it yet – a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. But it is below the radar of policy-makers. It suggests that the force that will eventually take our struggling local economies by the scruff of their necks...
How to Exclude and Expel Most of the World – Call it Growth
Towards a people-powered prosperity
“Manchester is to get its own directly elected mayor with powers over transport, housing, planning and policing in a devolution deal worth more than £1bn.” Guardian, 3 Nov 2014 The trouble with economic recovery is that someone else always has to do it - the...
‘Wait here, someone’s gone to get help’ Part 2 of the 2016 New Weather Economic Forecast
A New Weather Economic Forecast for 2016
Each year the Financial Times surveys around 100 economists about what the paper considers the key issues for the upcoming year. The results are reported today with the main story highlighted being broad support for continued membership of the European Union, but many...
A Year of Still Living Dangerously
The politics and economics of energy and climate change - two, huge, linked themes - dominated the year. And nowhere, from governments to anti-austerity oppositions on the left, are the full implications for economies being appreciated. The Paris climate talks fell in...
An Exercising Tale
This is the story of a failure, albeit a highly instructive one. I wrote a couple of months back about the fight between customers of LA Fitness and the new owners of the chain, Pure Gym, who wanted to close the pools and facilities of 30 of the 43 LA Fitness gyms....