Ireland’s efforts to break a political deadlock over its de facto ban on abortion inspired a bold response – the creation of a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle on the issue. During five weekends spread over five months, a random selection of Irish people deliberated on the highly divisive and controversial issue. Their conclusion, in April […]
Great job by the Guardian reporter Gary Younge in nailing the US white supremacist Richard B Spencer in an interview. Exposing spectacular ignorance is the best defence against champions of racism. Spencer would be comical if he weren’t so dangerous. “If Africans had never existed, world history would have been almost exactly the same as […]
I’m a migrant. I left my native Scotland at 18 and haven’t lived there since. Having moved between a few different countries for study and work I now live in rural southwest France. I’ve been here for 12 years and counting. The experiences of all that moving has both exposed me to many foreigners and […]
George Monbiot doesn’t always get things right – I disagreed with his arguments urging Britons to vote “no” in the Brexit referendum, for instance. Yet he hits the proverbial bullseye more often than most commentators. This recent column on media failures to communicate climate change is a belter, the most relevant paragraphs being the last […]
Frome ex-mayor Peter Macfadyen (not the current mayor, as incorrectly stated in the interview) talks in this audio interview of how a group of ordinary people in southwest England took control of their local government by standing as non-party, independent candidates. His story involves a group of local residents – meeting in a pub, of […]
I love what John Harris and John Domokos have been doing with their ad hoc video journalism project “Anywhere but Westminster” for the Guardian. Theirs was an inspired decision four years ago: to travel around the UK to cover national politics rather than stagnate among the self-absorbed and self-obsessed of London’s media and political pools. […]
How ordinary people could become decision makers in their own right by way of citizen policy juries, replacing politicians.
Iain goes beyond conventional ideas about why Western representative democracies are suffering a collapse of public trust.
I was asked this week by Harald Schendera, an editor, web designer, and internet marketer, what were my 10 Steps to Improve Our Governance Systems. He put the question out of personal interest and also to help me clarify what I’m trying to do in re-designing my various web presences. I was intrigued. No one […]
It’s easy to rail about the failures of our governance systems – the unfairness of elections, the unaccountable behaviour of our governments or the grotesque abuse of democracy unfolding with Greece’s fiscal evisceration by fellow eurozone governments, the European Commission and the IMF. These sorts of failures increasingly bumped up against my conventional understanding of […]
