There’ve been some interesting posts around about the launch of the Big Society, from Harpy Marx and Anna Raccoon’s pieces on how it’s all to be funded, to the typically naive optimism of Left Foot Forward. Ed West at the Telegraph has an interesting spate of religion-bashing, though not half so daft as the knee-jerk [...]
Ok so I have just made what I hope will be the first in a series of Third Estate video blogs. I hope you enjoy .
A while ago The Third Estate carried a piece by Salman, Roland and Ambika detailing the socially destructive impact of meat consumption. The authors argued that a great deal of grain which could be used to feed humans was being used to feed animals, and more importantly that the process was wasteful: grain can feed [...]
Last month, I wrote a piece for The Times of India on the impact of the over consumption and production of meat on the environment. Recently, I came across this article by farmer Eliot Coleman, arguing that the problem is not meat consumption itself, rather corporate/industrial agriculture and its methods. It is Coleman’s contention that [...]
This article, which I co-authored with environmental lawyers Ambika Hiranandani and Roland Miller McCall, was first published in The Times of India What do George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Leonardo Da Vinci, Paul McCartney, and Pythagoras have in common? If your answer is they’re all towering figures of European culture, you’re only [...]
Somehow a punnet of mushrooms appeared in my house today. They bore the name “Mini Portabella mushrooms”. I should admit now that I’m not an expert on mushrooms, but the name struck me as rather odd. On closer examination the pack made very clear that these were just normal chestnut mushrooms. So I thought to [...]
This week is the final of BBC’s Masterchef. Why am I writing about this on a blog about politics? Well I think the series, which has been consistently getting viewing figures of over 4.5 million, has rather a lot to tell us about culture. Oh how the middle classes scorned all those people for watching [...]
