Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

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I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics. I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere. Just in […]

Stand aside George

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People’s budgets The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames. News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with […]

People’s budgets or the same-old unaccountable ones?

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      The basic message of Fraudcast News is pretty simple, you sort of can’t miss it in the subtitle – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies. Working from back to front – the bogusness of our democracies is that ordinary citizens get nothing like the influence implied by the word “democracy” – […]

Collaborative news anyone?

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I posted this in response to a LinkedIn question about reporter, collaboratively owned news operations. I dream of these as alternatives to the status quo. I’m sure their time will come.   The best one I came across, before it expired, was this: http://www.newstandardnews.net/ This is what it said about itself: The NewStandard was a […]

What role for government in changing our behaviour?

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Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31. Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global. There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging […]

Worse than “cock-ups and casualties” at Thomson Reuters

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I wrote this comment in response to a commentary piece by ex-colleague and current friend Paul Holmes about recent editorial changes being for the better at Thomson Reuters, despite the recent “cock-ups and casualties”. I disagreed. Patrick Chalmers • I have a great deal of respect for Paul Holmes as an ex-colleague and as a […]

Setting The People Free – a meeting with the author

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I was delighted to spend a couple of hours today talking democracy with John Dunn, emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Dunn wrote the excellent “Setting the People Free“, a book that helped me nail down my thinking on the evolution of “democracy” since the Ancient Greeks coined a term for […]