It feels like a moment for redefinitions. Looking across the global scene right now, we are seeing previously buried possibilities bubbling up into the mainstream, from the fight for racial justice to the end of policing, and from the potentialities of a larger state to huge questions about the future…

Can you all, please, stop being so cheerful? I’m serious. I keep seeing people online and in my own social and professional circles suggesting that the Covid-19 crisis contains within it the seeds of everything from renewed public services to a green new deal. I can see where this sense…

I’ve tried to avoid writing about Dominic Cummings. He is clearly a brilliant campaigner, but intellectually he leaves me cold. The idea of the genius outsider transforming politics has a certain romance to it, but it feels like an old story. It was the sort of thing that worked in…

Love and rage: three words often used as a sign-off to messages by Extinction Rebellion, but perhaps more than that, because it seems to me that this is the mood that might define the 2020s. Predictions are always fraught with risk, but I think we might be entering the decade…

Adam Lent, my excellent successor as director at NLGN, thinks we do. In a blog post today he sparked a really useful discussion about what it takes to make community power a reality. If you’re reading this, you probably agree with Adam that we need to radically shift our model…

I’ve been diving deep into a load of interesting new ideas recently. These mostly come from what we might call the Emerge scene, in reference to a podcast which seems to be a rallying point for interesting thinking. To call it a scene isn’t strictly accurate though. It’s at the…

I want to propose a shift in the way we see ourselves as public servants. At the moment, one of the most common terms people apply to us is technocrat, implying that we are decision makers selected for our special expertise in a particular area. We can debate whether this…

This is the text of a story I wrote for Nesta’s Radical Visions of Government collection. It’s currently published only in pdf form, so this is by way of an attempt to make it more accessible and interactive. It is of course licensed under creative commons. The story is…

The past fortnight has been furiously busy on the facilitation front. We’re trying to get from a standing start to a balanced budget in two weeks. This has involved locking most of the senior people in the organisation into our hub for a fortnight, for a series of open sessions…