Disraeli Room

"...Consider as an example the highway from Kabul to Kandahar that was completed in less than a year. To achieve this “quick win”, contractors placed such a thin layer of asphalt in some places that it washed away when snows melted the following spring. Or consider the cobblestone roads requiring extensive manual labour to build, and seen as a source of employment for locals who might otherwise find their way into the poppy-cultivating business. Sadly what local Afghan leaders really wanted was gravel and asphalt roads because the cobblestones hurt their camels' hooves..."
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"...we ought to avoid turning the civic realm into a sectarian power play for ghettoised interest groups, and instead encourage an associative realm in which diversity is embraced as a healthy corollary of the system, rather than an absolutised foundation of it..."...

"...Roger is lead author of a major ResPublica project entitled 'A Force for The Greater Good,' which examines the role of ethics in business and economics more widely..."...

"...Websites like Zopa are more like cutting-edge credit unions, resting on the simple but radical notion of mutual assistance. Consumers may not be tied by geography, as they were in the days of Victorian mutuality, and still are in the microfinance schemes of the Mo Yunus' Grameen bank. Yet the principle is the same, updated for the 21st century..."...

"...The managerial trend within government, that began in the 1980's, during the feverish days of Thatcherism, has gradually spread and infiltrated to every facet of public services. This has become sometimes onerously evident for workers in the public sector with the emphasis on meeting targets. For the broad mass of the population, the trend has perhaps become notable in a subtle even seemingly insignificant way as there has been a change in the way we find ourselves addressed when using public services. We have now, it seems, become the customer..." ...