Do No Evil Lobbying
There is nothing wrong with lobbying. It is not evil. The ability of interest groups – of whatever persuasion – to make their representations to government is the sign of a healthy democracy. Even on matters of tax. The key issues are ones of transparency and democratic access; the remote leadership of those elected to...
Citizens / Communications / Consumerism / Digital Democracy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Trust
Five Ways Business Leaders Can Embrace The Citizen State Within
Citizen-centric leadership in business asks that leaders embrace the citizen state within. This means co-creating ideas, strategies and programmes with networks of real people, increasingly active and vocal, and shaping the organisation around their needs and aspirations, to help better define common purpose. This may sound revolutionary, but it is an axiomatic consequence of the...
The future of business: what are the alternatives to capitalism?
In this Guardian article Jules asks what the implications of limits to growth are for capitalist theory, the alternatives, and what it means for business Evidence shows its very clear we have reached the safe limits to growth in terms of the most pressing threat to human civilisation – that of a stable atmosphere. Therefore,...
Citizens / Consumerism / Digital Democracy / Individuality / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Politics / Trust / Wellbeing
Who Leads The State? (Part One)
The State has fallen from fashion and from grace. For many, it now encapsulates everything that is wrong in life: pointless bureaucracy; nannying interference; needless cost. The social democrats among us – too many falsely seduced by the Reagan/ Thatcher legacy – have failed to persuade, while market fundamentalists have filled the intellectual vacuum by...
Polising the State of Media
Neil Wallis (formerly of the News of the World and, briefly, the Metropolitan Police) accidentally said that “what we see in the media, we see in all the other institutions of society”. Speaking at #PolisTrust at the London School of Economics, Wallis was referring to the issue of trust. He is of course correct –...
Citizens / Digital Democracy / Individuality / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Trust / Wellbeing
The Indecency of Power
Plato famously believed that philosophers should rule. Aristotle argued that the political class must be led by ‘men of virtue’. They both had a point. “Much of what is amiss in our world”, as Judt commented, “can best be captured in the language of classical political thought”. In today’s city states, nation states and business...
Ill Fares The Land: The Book I Wish I Had Written
Possibly one of the finest treatises on politics, Tony Judt’s ‘Ill Fares The Land’ is the one book I wish that I had written. Polemical and passionate in equal measure – and despite Judt’s untimely death – this is in many ways the book for our times: the perfect re-artuclation of social democracy and the...
Bright Ideas: On Creative Spaces, the Citizen State & Sex as Science Fact
Three short, ‘Bright Ideas’, as featured in today’s eI Individual Digest. These are thoughts collected amid the peaceful beauty of Aldeburgh, Thorpeness and Snape – home to Names Not Numbers 2013, a symposium created by @juliahobsbawm and dedicated to discusing the role of individuality in a mass age. Also billed as “like Davos, but with...
Three (more) things they don’t tell you about capitalism
Professor Ha-Joon Chang has two things in common with Karl Marx. Firstly he’s right in much of his economic analysis of the ills of capitalism and secondly his prescriptions of the solutions to these ills are lacking. Chang’s best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism is a timely and important addition to...
