Blogs

The journalist Jeremy Seabrook once researched how people felt about social change in their life time. ‘Had life generally improved or worsened during their lives’, he asked. His conclusion was that people felt things had got better but people had got worse!

Looking back over history we now talk about the ‘Dark Ages’, ‘Middle Ages’, ‘Reformation’, Time of Enlightenment? So how will future generations view and label our own era?

Sadly, one candidate could be ‘An Age of Loss’.

There is much to suggest our contemporary society has no direction or purpose. Some...

In recent years politicians and decision makers around the world have been drawn to appealing to the human emotions of fear and hatred for their backing and support. It is clear that motivations such as ‘tribalism’ (expressed in prejudicial racism, sexism, nationalism, etc.) and ‘desire’ (culminating in global consumerism) have been woven into political discourse in ways maybe not so generally seen since the 1920s.

This rhetoric has coincided with enormous austerity cuts to welfare services, lower wages and also widespread deregulation of rules governing corporate economic...

Maybe it’s because of the Guy Fawkes season, but I sense this time of year is one of compelling challenge and radical change – a chance to talk of reforming the structures we have created; a time ( kairos ) to believe differently…. Recently, one of the local Baptist churches hosted a showing of ‘The Divide’. Based on Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s book ‘The Spirit Level’, through personal stories this film illustrates the chasms which now face our broken society. There are the lives of the very rich – the ‘have-a-lots’, contrasted to ‘the haves’ but especially to ‘the ‘have-nots’....

Britain has no transport policy and nowhere more is this obvious than in Exeter. Our country has stop-start history of short-sightedness which has left us in the present mess, and which will need brave political decisions to address. Recent traffic congestion in and around the city is a symptom of this malaise, so where is the leadership needed to take us in a different direction?!

In short, we have adopted American-style poor planning practices in a country which is small, overcrowded and polluted. We have encouraged huge developments which depend on car access and road-based...