What We Saved For With Austerity Cuts
With the near certainty With austerity the hot topic of a ‘new’ Conservative government, lets look at what cuts bought us first time round and the way it impacts people on a day-to-day basis
The Things We can(‘t) Afford
The economy is a bizarre thing. The word alone is as useful as a magic spell is to a movie franchise superhero. It’s brought into action by politicians and pundits to justify everything from the atrocious to the strange. Stick on a channel, any channel, and you’ll very often hear—we simply can’t afford adequate (one week) foodbank stocks right now. We just don’t have the money. Healthcare, justice, policing, and education have been wrung-dry for over the last decade for…
A New Model
During a particularly strange period of unusual and unprecedented measures, perhaps the strangest of all is the shift of the newspaper industry to begin self-censoring its data. The industry dedicated to frequent fact publishing very suddenly decided to stop. In an era that should be defined by transparent and open media, the centuries-old institution has gone suddenly coy on its own facts and figures. In the final weeks of 2019, the last published figures revealed a freefall in distribution numbers….
Doubling Down In A Crisis
The way we respond to crises and adverse events is perhaps the most telling and the most interesting into our own behaviour we have. It’s certainly a lot more revealing than a social media photograph of our own meal or a selfie taken in a queue. It’s the way we do act weighed against the way we wish we, and others around us, acted instead. It’s tempting to imagine we’re highly adaptable creatures who can weather most storms—even pull through…
Woeful Response
It would be useful to know how close to home a lesson has to be to learn anything from it at all. Does a near-crash prevent you from speeding in the future? What if it happens to the car in front or the one behind? Does near-death illness prevent drinking, smoking, or drugs? We now know China is too far from home, too remote, and too different to apply lessons learnt from the outbreak to our reaction here. With over…
Virus Vs Viral
While much of the world self-isolates from viral contamination, we seem to remain willingly compliant and almost eager to spread an entirely different kind of virus globally. As the first major pandemic to strike in the social media age, it’s hard to argue the technology has had a profoundly positive effect on an acute and growing crisis. A quick browse of the usual feeds and sources churns up a truly staggering amount of misinformation, outright lies, and apathy to responsible…