Numeracy and innumeracy in public life
When Boris Johnson’s government published its long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper last year, it signalled a renewed interest in the well-worn concept of ‘social capital’ – the norms and networks that tie communities together. “For levelling up to mean something to people in their daily lives’, it wrote, ‘we need to reach into every community in the country,…
In the heady days of the Truss premiership last October, a group of 70 people from all over the United Kingdom gathered at the Friends’ Meeting House in Manchester. Among their number were a clutch of senior civil servants, senior local government officers and academics from leading universities. The event had been organised by the…
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it. Malcolm X, 1965 There are many in the third sector who find themselves deeply uncomfortable with the notion of “empowerment”. It brings with it an implicit assumption of noblesse oblige. After all, if power…
On 30 April, former Cabinet Secretary Lord Gus O’Donnell wrote an article for the Sunday Mirror making the case for up to £7 billion of asset transfers from local authorities to the community. Let me tell you the strange story behind this number. Local councils in England own buildings worth £81.5 billion; they own land and…
Budget days and autumn statements are always occasions of great drama: rabbits are pulled from hats, little red books are tossed across the dispatch box, and soundbites abound. Yesterday’s budget was no exception. Alongside four references to the “long term economic plan”, there were at least six exhortations to “act now so we don’t pay…