Welcome to the Green Room: Boris needs to finally deliver Net Zero October 6, 2021 As Boris Johnson strides onto the stage at Tory Party Conference he’ll promise the earth – and talk about saving it. The environment is front and centre of British politics now and Boris has made no secret of his ambitions to go green. Last year, in typical style, the PM vowed that Britain could become [...]
Fuel prices going up, green energy getting cheap: now it’s time for a flexible energy grid October 6, 2021 The ongoing gas crisis has highlighted that our current energy system is unsustainable. As fuel prices have tripled in a year, our dependence on it seems more and more risky. It has also become clear that the unhappy history of geopolitics and fossil fuels – brought home by Putin withholding gas supplies into Europe over [...]
Grenfell should stand as a reminder that we have a long way to go on housing October 6, 2021 Housing is at the centre of today’s political conversation. The electorate is acutely aware of the housing crisis, and is demanding sincere policies to solve it. At the Conservative Party Conference this week, Michael Gove talked about raising living standards and making homes a safe and decent place to live in this country. Gove has [...]
Editorial: The City’s values endure in its buildings – old and new October 6, 2021 If we have learnt one thing from the last year, it’s that the City of London is perhaps a more fragile thing than some of us thought. Resilient, yes; able to bounce-back, that too. But nonetheless, as a community, as a place dripping with both history and innovation, we can never take it for granted [...]
Scantily clad CMA guidelines will do little to fend off greenwashing on our high streets and in our banks October 5, 2021 restore it. The term greenwashing wasn’t invented by the environmentally active Gen Z or even the older cohort of millenials. It dates back to 1986 when American environmentalist Jay Westerveld used it to describe hotels asking their customers to reuse towels to limit water usage while they abused neighbouring nature areas for their premises. Washing [...]
Save Bevis Marks: Skyscraper plans are a menace to the City’s heritage October 5, 2021 The business of London is business. So it has always been. The earliest surviving piece of writing from the city, inscribed on a wooden tablet barely a decade after its foundation by the Romans in AD 43, is an IOU. For two millennia, people have been coming to London to make money. It is the [...]
Britain’s pay gap standards are outdated and threaten an equal future October 5, 2021 The continual disparity between men’s and women’s pay remains the starkest illustration of gender inequality in the UK. For several years now, we’ve had the data showing the harsh reality that female workers are valued less – but simply shining a light on a problem is not always enough to fix it. We only know [...]
Editorial: Crisis? What crisis? Sunak and his party would be wise to avoid complacency October 5, 2021 The year is 1979, and rubbish bags are piling up in Leicester Square. Lorry drivers are striking leading to queues at fuel pumps, and Brits are panic-buying bread. Prime Minister Jim Callaghan returns to Britain from a conference in Guadeloupe and declares airily that “I don’t think other people in the world would share the [...]
Time to fly: our space highways are just as important for security as those on the ground October 5, 2021 Much has been said about the poor timing of Government announcements, and the launch of the National Space Strategy last week was no exception. As Britain sent the first satellites from European soil in 2022 the country was grappling with fuel shortages and fears of a “winter of discontent”. However, the criticism is little in [...]
Michael Gove vows to enact ‘real change’ on a local level to fulfil levelling up agenda October 4, 2021 Michael Gove, the newly appointed Housing Secretary, attempted to finally add flesh to the bones of the levelling up agenda at Conservative Party Conference yesterday. In his keynote speech in Manchester, Gove, the head of the freshly renamed department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities vowed to provide “real change” for downtrodden regions of the [...]