11/03/10 - "Food for thought"
Sometimes a couple of individuals, who are not in the national spotlight, can highlight political issues more effectively than exchanges taking place in parliament. So it is with John Hughes and Christine Shawcroft. Neither figure in television news coverage.
28/06/08 - "Frankenfoods ride again"
In any crisis there is always someone wanting to make a fast buck. The trick is to exploit the weak, the vulnerable and the insecure. You just don’t expect leaders of rich industrial nations to fall into this category.
In every town and city across the UK the picture was the same. Queues of people snaked their way down the high street. Not since the Tories paid people to queue in their infamous ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster have we seen
anything like it.
25/07/07 - "Adrift in the deathly hollows"
After two months of torrential downpours, Britain seems mesmerised by the floods that have swept the country. As the final Harry Potter novel hits the streets at the same time the rivers do, it is as through Lord Voldemort himself had decided to create....
25/04/07 - "More urgent than oil (liquid gold)"
For the last 20 years the free‐market Right have dominated the global political agenda to an extent where arrogance vastly outstripped intellect. They were able to do so partly because the Left failed to address the ways in which capital was seeking to disengage....
21/03/07 - Green Budget Debate
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): It is normal on these occasions for me to follow the Chancellor’s Budget statement and fill in the conventional gaps that I feel he has overlooked. I pay tribute to the Chancellor.....
12/03/07 - "Food for thought"
I'm bored with most of the arguments still going on about climate change. How much is down to man and how much to solar cycles is somewhat academic. The question is what are we going to do about the crises that are already in the pipeline?
22/02/07 - "Picking up the bills for climate change"
I had intended to write this week’s column as a demolition job on carbon emissions trading, but it will have to wait a bit. The announcement of my decision not to stand again in the next general election probably demands the more
urgent explanation.
26/10/06 "Markets, myths, and the climate change muddle"
In the early part of next week a pillar of the establishment, Sir Nicholas Stern, is set to drop a bombshell into the corridors of the Treasury. Its implications are far more
devastating than anything al Qaida threatens. Stern, who was a former chief economist.... read more | back to top
16/05/06 - "The price of a leak"
Even if you are reading this in one of Britain’s rain soaked regions it is worth thinking carefully about the hosepipe ban and water crisis in the South of England. The implications
are far reaching.
28/04/06 "Resurgence Article - The long & winding road"
I suppose I grew up with John, Paul, George, Ringo and ‘Resurgence’. It just took me a while to catch up with the seeds of exciting irreverence that Resurgence was to plant in my life. The magazine’s explorations turned conventional ideas......
22/03/06 - Budget Debate Speech 2006
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): Budget debates are
often conducted within a strange sense of time. The short term is
about whether the Budget will survive the press headlines and analysis tomorrow.
01/01/06 - "A different Commonwealth"
On January 6th each year La Befana, a magical character in Italian folklore, brings children one of two gifts. If they have been good in the previous year, she leaves them sweets. If not, they get charcoal. Looking out across the hills to Siena.......
27/10/05 - The burning fuse of sustainability
It is very British that a revolution that will change our lives profoundly over the coming years actually began its course almost 200 years ago. This is a revolution in energy policy, and it will leave the nuclear debate looking like a discussion between sad......
16/07/05 - Food & Energy Security: Local systems, global solidarity
It’s the strange nature of our times that’s defining a quite different politics. The defining difference now is between those who want to address, with a degree of urgency, the challenges of climate change and the way it is going to rewrite.....
11/07/05 - "House Magazine - GM crops"
If it weren't for the lobbying power of biotech corporations, the case for GM crops would have never got off the ground. The public won't buy them. The supermarkets won't sell them. Agriculture doesn't need them.
When world leaders get together at the G8 summit no one will have a bad word to say about Jeffrey Sachs. The economics professor responsible for the UN’s anti‐poverty report, ‘Investing in Development’, has asked rich nations to.....
11/05/05 - "Leading Labour"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer. To make sense of it may require a different....
15/03/05 - Budget Debate 2005
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): At the end of every Budget debate, Members stream out of the Chamber and are greeted by those in the press, who want to know whether or not we thought it a good Budget. Usually.....
10/03/05 - "Dangerous manouevers in the dark"
The abrupt withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from the Lebanon fills me with mixed emotions. Press headlines celebrating the end of an era of foreign military occupation it uneasily against daily efforts to justify the 150,000 US
troops in current occupation of Iraq.
26/11/04 - "Gordon and the Gekko fallacy"
There was a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a firebrand of Labour radicalism. Gordon Brown, then, was unafraid to make the case for economic interventionism, universal entitlements, and an internationalism rooted....
22/11/04 - Biotechnology
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): The letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State about consultation mentions co‐existence, and I have no doubt that it will address issues relating to thresholds and separation distances.
29/10/04 - "Terra Madre - The mother of all movements"
In the modern world, democracy gets killed off more in parmesan shavings that para‐military coups. Little bits get sliced off the system of public accountability and, before you know it, social authoritarianism has replaced social
democracy; the democratic cheese has.....
27/06/04 - "GM Foods"
If you struggle to understand the scientific issues relating to the genetic modification of crops, do not despair. There is an easier route to understanding what lies behind the national debate on whether we should allow the commercial planting of GM crops....
16/06/04 - "The politic of patronage"
Here is the irony. I've spent the best part of the last year arguing for taxes on saturated fats, sugar and salt, and I could barely get any part of the press to take an interest. Then, one weekend in Portugal and everyone in the press anted to talk about obesity.....
10/06/04 - "The day we all lost"
I am going to give today a miss. News coverage will no doubt be dominated by makeover explanations of the EU election results in Britain and the Reagan funeral in America . I can already feel the nausea of organised dishonesty beginning to
overwhelm me.
16/03/04 - "GM Foods"
After the problems over Iraq, Foundation hospitals, tuition fees, asylum rights and access to justice you would have thought that Labour's pre‐election planning would be simple – no more needless own goals.
August 2003 - "The hand of God"
Good on Michael Meacher. Labour's former Environment Minister has always expressed a healthy scepticism about the case for commercial cultivation of GM crops. Now, his first hand account of the disastrous experiment in Canada.....
May 2003 - "Corporate manipulation of the GM debate"
It would be easy to poke fun out of the farmers from Kwazulu Natal who are part of the Monsanto road show promoting GM crops as Africa's salvation. They have been whisked from their small holdings, flown in to 5 star hotels....
July 2003 - "Feasts. famines and war zones"
The connections between food, health and conflict have begun to make their way back onto the agenda of geo-political debate. In a few small steps they will become enmeshed in the politics of greed. President Bush took a break from his war on terror....
"Soft spots and hard messages"
Ok, I have a soft spot for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anyone who will stand up and describe this week’s G8 Summit, in Edinburgh as a meeting at which the leaders of the world’s richest and most powerful nations decide what they might do....
