About the talk:

Should businesses operate in ‘challenging contexts’ such as countries affected by conflict or dictatorship, and if so, how?  Vicky Bowman spent over a decade encouraging responsible business in Myanmar, before ending up imprisoned and deported in 2022 after the military coup.  She will reflect on her experience of putting the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights into practice – and share a few recollections of an unexpected detention by the military junta.

About Vicky Bowman:

Vicky was a British diplomat for over twenty years, serving in Brussels as UK spokesman and in the Office of the EU External Relations Commissioner and in Rangoon, including as Britain’s youngest – at least at the time – ever Ambassador. She then worked for Rio Tinto, before returning to Myanmar in 2013 to found the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business when the country began to democratise.  She is now a Senior Adviser at the Institute for Human Rights and Business, chair of the Global Network Initiative  and on the board of ICoCA, the Responsible Security Association.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Times:

Starting at 7:30pm till 9:30pm

About the talk:

Do you think you understand people? Think again.

Most of us have a completely inaccurate picture of how we, and other human beings, think and behave. This leads us to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, build societies that actually harm us, and struggle to solve the major problems facing our species.

Richard Docwra wants to challenge our most cherished beliefs about ourselves and argues that we need to humanise the societies and institutions we have built around us if we are to flourish and survive as a species.

Join Richard as he attempts to reveal the truth about how human beings think and behave and shows how this knowledge could help us address some of our biggest challenges, from violence to climate change, and build a better future.

About Richard Docwra:

Richard is a writer, coach and consultant with an academic background in psychology and philosophy and over 25 years’ experience of providing strategic and creative consultancy to a wide range of progressive causes, such as Oxfam and the Green Party. He also built and leads the social change agency ChangeStar and the not-for-profit Life Squared.

He has written many books on the topics of psychology, philosophy, and the art of living, including ‘Life – And How To Think About It‘, ‘The Life Trap’ and ‘Modern life – As Good As It Gets?’. Richard is also the host of the podcasts ‘Humans & Hope‘ and ‘’ with Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK. See richarddocwra.com for more details and resources.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Times:

Starting at 7:30pm till 9:30pm

About the talk:
Elizabeth will talk about the 1990 Environment Act and how legislation and planning
regulations are currently working in the UK in relation to the ticking time bomb of
contaminated land and water. The risks to human health, our fellow creatures, and
our environment, due to climate change and the increased risk of flooding, are of
growing concern.
Elizabeth is currently organising a summit on contaminated land and water at
Westminster in response to the growing call for a ‘Zane’s Law’ to amend and make fit
for purpose our environmental legislation, bringing it in line with other European
countries and with the UN Resolution, passed in July 2022, establishing the human
right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. She will talk about her
involvement with the campaign for Zane’s Law and how the related UK Landfills
Campaign is growing exponentially, with over 20 different local campaigns from all
over England and Wales, lobbying for action at both a local and national level.
Elizabeth was a near neighbour of the Gbangbola family, when Zane Gbangbola,
aged 7, died in the terrible Thames flooding of 2014. She‘s been actively
campaigning for the truth about his death to be uncovered, ever since. Zane’s family
and supporters, along with politicians of all persuasions, and several trade unions,
including Unison, Unite, the TUC and the Fire Brigades Union, believe that Zane
died of Hydrogen Cyanide poisoning from contaminated land next to his home.
Some of you may have watched the Netflix mini-series Toxic Town, and/or the BBC
Documentary Britain’s Toxic Secret, but if not, and if you’re interested, here are the
links:
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81372304
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0028ypp

About Elizabeth Mansfield:
Elizabeth trained at the Elmhurst Ballet School, the Guildhall School of Music &
Drama, and later at the City of Leeds College of Music. She has spent her working
life in the theatre as an actress, singer and producer. In 2002, she founded her own
theatre company, Ensemble, together with her partner Steve Trafford, dedicated to
touring new, thoughtful work to communities, alongside educational programms.
She has been a political activist since her teenage years, when she joined the mass
demonstrations in London against the Vietnam War, alongside fellow, American
drama students dodging the draft, including the Battle of Grosvenor Square in 1968
Elizabeth has lived in Lewes since 2019.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Times:

Starting at 7:30pm till 9:30pm

About the talk:

Angus reveals how much of the UK is now US-owned and how this “Anschluss” has happened progressively.

He will show how we are all endlessly working for American corporations in our daily lives – when we shop, pay for anything, use platforms like eBay or Airbnb, or communicate on social media, and how the three prongs of American capitalism have gobbled up our economy –  multinationals, big tech, and US private equity. And why does this matter? 

It’s making us much poorer, we are losing control, and there is an exodus of people and treasure.

So what can the UK do in the face of Donald Trump – a rampant, unpredictable and highly transactional US President?

About Angus Hanton:

Angus Hanton, 65, has lived through many changes in Britain’s economic fortunes:

1960s in the period of the UK giving back the colonies – Angus was a child in South London

1970s as de-industrialisation began – Angus, as a teenager, became interested in public policy

1980s with Thatcher’s privatisations – he studied politics and economics and started a conservation business

1990s witnessed Major and Blair sticking close to the US – he and his wife started a family, and investing seriously

2000s started with the WTC attack and US/UK retaliations – he expanded his self-storage and forestry enterprises

2010s had Cameron, 2016 Brexit vote and a financial crash – Angus co-founded a Think Tank for younger people

2020s saw a European war and increased US imperialism – Angus wrote “Vassal State – how America runs Britain”

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Times:

Starting at 7:30pm till 9:30pm

About the talk:
Is a diplomat’s life really as glamorous as a royal visit, or as dramatic as a coup
d’état in Turkey? Leigh Turner is a former British ambassador who led posts in
Ukraine, Turkey and Austria. In a witty globe-trotting adventure through one of the
most intriguing careers a person can have, Leigh will talk about his interactions with
royalty of both the aristocratic and celebrity kinds, and with brilliant and extraordinary
people, and the lessons we all can draw from this – whether aspiring diplomats or
non-diplomats. Based on his new book “Lessons in Diplomacy: Politics, Power and
Parties” (Bristol University Press, September 2024) Leigh will do a deep dive into key
lessons such as “How to survive a crisis”, “How to handle politicians”, “How to know
people”, and “How to grapple with a legacy of colonialism”. Have you ever wondered
what diplomats and ambassadors really do, or how to become one? Leigh Turner will
be happy to explain.

About Leigh Turner:
Leigh Turner is a writer based in London. He was UK Ambassador to Austria and UK
Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Vienna from September 2016 to
September 2021. Leigh’s previous roles were as HM Consul General Istanbul and
Director General for Trade and Investment Turkey, Central Asia and South
Caucasus; HM Ambassador in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Director of Overseas Territories in
London, responsible for territories including St Helena, the Falklands and Bermuda. 
Leigh grew up in Nigeria, Exeter and Lesotho, before education in Swaziland,
Manchester and Cambridge. After hitch-hiking around 27 of the United States in
1979, Leigh had a 42-year diplomatic career, lessons from which he draws in his
September 2024 book “Lessons in Diplomacy”. He is the author of three thrillers,
including “Blood Summit”, set in Berlin, and a collection of feminist black comedies,
”Seven Hotel Stories”. He is also a former writer for the Financial Times. Leigh has
lectured at the Oxford University Diplomatic Studies Programme, King’s College,
Cambridge, the LSE, UCL, Universities of York, Loughborough, St Andrews and
Edinburgh, Strathclyde University, Vienna University, the Free University (VU)
Amsterdam and the Danube University Krems, and is a Visiting Professor at Graz
University.
Leigh will also be prepared to sign copies of “Lessons in Diplomacy” after his talk.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Times:

Starting at 7:30pm till 9:30pm

About the talk

In Europe, around 25% of men and 20% of women remain childless, though mainstream discussion focuses on women who have or have not become mothers. The experiences of men who have not become fathers have been minimised, dismissed, and, for the most part, ignored.

Some people are content to remain childless, though people who do not meet the social expectations of parenthood may suffer stereotypical labelling, discrimination, exclusion, isolation, mistrust, and stigmatisation. Infertility research shows that failure to achieve the high social status of parenthood has similar effects on mental and physical health as a diagnosis of a life-threatening disease. The losses surrounding unwanted childlessness include grief, impact on mental and physical health and well-being, social and economic stress, and stigma.

There are wider impacts on society. The UK relies on family members (adult children/partners) to provide the bulk of adult informal care. Many of those ageing without children/family lack obvious sources of support. Older men tend to have smaller social networks, do not access health care, are more likely to be estranged from family than women, and are twice as likely to be found long after death.

In this talk Robin Hadley will examine the wider implications, both personal and societal, of male childlessness. Are childless men the invisible MAWFIOSA: Men Ageing Without Family: Isolated, Ostracized, Stigmatised and Alienated?

About the speaker:

Robin Hadley is an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, his main interests concern male childlessness and ageing across the life course and raising the profile of the ‘known unknown’ population of people aging without children and/or family. His book, ‘How is a Man Supposed to be a Man? Male Childlessness – a Life Course Disrupted’ has won critical acclaim. He has provided evidence of the impact of excluding people ageing without children or family from policy to a range of House of Lords and House of Commons committees, and his briefing document on the need for parity in data collection at birth registration was taken up by several MP’s.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Times:

Starting at 7:30pm till 9:30pm

About the talk:

The climate crisis is at the intersection of two sets of injustice. The first is the obvious one,
concerning how “the West” has caused the majority of carbon emissions. These affect the majority
of people in the world who have played little or no part in causing it yet experience the worst of its
impacts – the first injustice.
The second injustice is strangely less obvious and hardly discussed. Most of those same people who
are badly affected by climate change are already poor and vulnerable. Climate change has not
caused that poverty but is then seen as an intensifier or magnifier of existing poverty, vulnerability
and inequality. But this avoids the need to analyse the causes of their longstanding poverty and
vulnerability, which are related to power that allocates resources and income unfairly. If climate
change is thought of simply as a magnifier of existing poverty and vulnerability, the causes tend to
be disguised and effectively forgotten.
This is very convenient for those who have power and who want to avoid accepting that they are
part of the problem. Governments of the ‘global South’ willingly emphasise the first injustice to
avoid taking responsibility for the second. “Donors” (including the World Bank, Asian Development
Bank) from the ‘global North’ join in this game. They do not want to comment on the causes of
poverty and vulnerability in countries that suffer, because of their alliances with the governments.
And yet it should be clear that dealing with climate change injustice without reducing or even
eradicating existing causes of poverty and vulnerability is completely meaningless.
So long as the international politics of climate change is regarded as about relations between
countries rather than a consequence of class and elite behaviour then it will be impossible to resolve
it, especially as we move from the goal of Net Zero to the next hundred years of Adaptation and Loss
& Damage.

About the speaker:

Terry Cannon is Emeritus Research Fellow of IDS, and honorary Professor at the Department of Risk
and Disaster Reduction at UCL. His research focus is rural adaptation to climate change in the ‘global
South’. He is co-author of one of the most widely cited books on vulnerability and disasters (At Risk:
Natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disasters) and was lead author and editor of the
International Red Cross World Disasters Report: focus on culture and risk (Geneva 2014).More information will be added in due course

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

About the speaker:

Alasdair Smith is an economist, specialising in international trade and public finance. He has written extensively on the economics of the European single market, both at its inception and during the Brexit process. He has been a Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex since 1981 (emeritus since 2015) and was Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1998 to 2007. He has served on several public sector pay review bodies (and was chair of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body for three years. He was a member of the Scottish Fiscal Commission, a panel member at the Pensions Regulator, deputy chair of the Competition Commission (then the Competition and Markets Authority), and a senior adviser to the Payment Systems Regulator, and he is now a member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

About the talk:

Public debt – what’s the problem?

The global financial crisis of 2008 had a big bad effect of the UK’s public finances. More recently, the Covid pandemic had a further big negative effect and the Starmer-Reeves government says it is committed to prudent management of the public finances. Successive governments have adopted fiscal rules that are intended to keep public debt under control and the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) was set up to give independent oversight of government tax and spend.

Public debt is not like household debt, and analogies with family budgeting (‘maxing out the nation’s credit card’) have led to bad policy, notably the Cameron-Osborne austerity programme of 2010-16. It is sensible for governments to borrow within limits, and there’s no evidence that the UK government has been at risk of losing the confidence of financial markets (except during the brief Truss-Kwarteng episode).

[There’s too much focus on misleading measures of the public debt. PFI (the private finance initiative) was more expensive than public finance, but hid the burden being passed on to future taxpayers. There’s no recognition of the fact that public expenditure on long-term assets like schools and hospitals generates income for future generations. Unfunded public pensions (both state pensions and the pensions of public sector employees) are public debt but are left out of most discussion.]

The important issue is how to balance the interests of current and future generations. Government spending financed by borrowing may be good for current generations but it passes the bill on to our children and grandchildren. If we want more public expenditure but don’t want to pass the bill on, we have to pay higher taxes. Demographic change is driving up the costs of public provision of health and social care and society needs to face up to the real choices which face us.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

 

About the talk:

The fact that public services are in crisis is now commonly acknowledged.  The long term impacts of austerity have combined with already growing demographic shifts and create unmanageable pressures around social care and housing which in term reduce capacity for the myriad of other services which the public sector contributes to place.  These are known problems – the real question is what has stopped public services reimagining themselves to serve a world which is very different to the one which they were born into.  Rather than looking at this as a challenge to preserve the services we needed in the past, reimagining public services needs us to think about what we need to sustain our communities and social fabric in the future – what would it mean to reimagine public services with forward looking and long term relevance rather than based on the skills and stories of the past?  And importantly, who is best placed to lead that work of imagination – how could we imagine our democracy and decision making systems in parallel to bring about a more hopeful future for public services?

 

About the speaker:

Dr Catherine Howe is Chief Executive of Adur and Worthing Councils. She is an expert in digital innovation, focusing on the area of digital democracy and systems practice and has a background which connects together technology, community and social change.

Catherine has worked across a number of different sectors including education, not for profit and the technology industry. Catherine was CEO of a successful SME, Public-i Group Ltd, before moving to Capita to redevelop Capita’s digital transformation approach and then to Cancer Research UK to lead work on technology strategy and transformation. Before becoming CEX she was Director for Communities which she described as ‘helping communities direct themselves’.

She has worked with new collaborative technologies and social networking tools for over 15 years. Her research interests cover digital civic space, citizenship and systems thinking and she is a Trustee of the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny.

The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.