Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Helping People Help Themselves

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“Development” is a strange word. It’s been prefixed to so many other words – community, economic, rural, regional, social, urban – that we t...
Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Ivan Illich’s neglected influence on my generation

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  How did a priest manage to captivate me (and others) for the best part of a decade in the 1970s? I was, after all, a politician – if a re...
Monday, June 7, 2021

Important Notice

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This blog has been using “Feedburner” to have posts sent automatically to those readers who have requested this service. But Feedburner wi...
Thursday, June 3, 2021

Adulation and Narcissism in Leaders

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It is too easy these days to fault politicians. They have become the go-to scapegoat. And we should always be suspicious when a scapegoat is...
Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Amazon arrogance - they actually couldn't care less about customers

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I’m delighted to report that Amazon have locked me out of my account. I used Amazon these past few years only when I’m in my summer house in...
Monday, May 31, 2021

Assessing a government’s record

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Is a balanced judgement on a government ever possible? I’ve just finished a book about New Labour under Tony Blair. He was PM for 10 years...
Tuesday, May 25, 2021

In Transit

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One of the books of which I’m most proud is In Transit – notes on good governance which I drafted in 1998 - after almost a decade of experi...
Sunday, May 23, 2021

The Fourth Dimension?

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It’s strange how our mind operates on single tracks but suddenly makes a connection with an idea that has been travelling on a parallel trac...