Posts under ‘Politics’

So I’m under pressure this morning. Lots of meetings as ever and a deadline of around 17 minutes to get a post out about Blog Action Day. There’s also a bunch of bloggers across my company that are taking part as well, which is nice (see below). I’m clearly not going to match the level [...]

As something of a theatre nut it’s been an odd few weeks. I managed to perform a double, namely walking out of consecutive performance (during the intervals, of course – I am English after all). The two offending articles? First up was Mother Courage and Her Children at the National Theatre, which annoyed me from [...]

The past week has seen a bout of navel gazing amongst probably the two crucial professions at the front end of dealing with energy use in buildings, namely architects and services engineers. In the architecture corner David Nixon, originally a founder of influential firm Future Systems, issued a rallying call to the profession to take [...]

Sometimes you leave an event brimming with ideas, energy and enthusiasm. Other times it’s exactly the opposite. I experienced the latter after wandering out of the Reboot Britain event yesterday. Billed as pointing the way forward for our beleaguered nation after a year or so of economic and political disarray I found it rather flabby [...]

Un-related sentences that have grabbed me:
How different this country is compared to 1946, when I first arrived here.. Politics mattered, the welfare state was invented.. the church was still strong. We were a very deferential society. There hierarchy and values and obedience. All that’s gone.. Politics is a public utility and a bit of a [...]

I have something rather shocking to report. I went to see a dramatisation of climate change last week – a play called Resilience – which was eerily accurate, funny, pointed, powerful and moving. For me there’s always been a mixture of dread and guilt as one is presented with a documentary or fictional account of [...]

Expecting what appears an increasingly worn-out government to tackle what amounts to a fundamental shift in policy and approach to our built environment is too much to ask. The piffling amounts offer by penniless Alistair Darling to address existing properties is pathetic. It’s not even clear quite how much was actually on offer – Building [...]

Interesting update on my post earlier in the week on PFI. BD columnist Paul Morrell puts forward a modest proposal for the government to adopt in relation to the Building Schools for the Future programme. He worries about Whitehall’s commitment to Keynesian principles of spending our way of the recession , compared to the reality [...]

So the wheels are coming off the PFI movement. The government’s solution to building a lot of stuff we need without having to fork out too much of its own cash is now at a crossroads – the latest analysis I saw on this was in yesterday’s Observer. Given that the middle word in PFI [...]

Just had a quick spin through the Tories energy policy paper. Lots of sensible ideas – decentralising energy supply, expanding EPCs and DECs to more buildings, feed-in tariffs, existing stock ideas etc etc. Cameron speaks about them below, believing that being Conservative and green are not mutually exclusive. And there’s a webchat tomorrow you can [...]