Friday, 9 September it is: Paul Myles on ‘The Rise of Thomas Paine’

About the speaker
Paul is the treasurer of the Thomas Paine Society UK, and has authored The Rise of Thomas Paine and co authored Thomas Paine in Lewes 1768 – 1774. He runs the society’s website www.thomaspaineuk.com
Paul has given many talks on the above subjects, notably for the American Philosophical Society, the Benjamin Franklin House in London, The Samuel Johnson Society and the Working Class Museum and Library in Manchester.
Paul was born and bred in Lewes and lived here for 67 years, recently becoming more nomadic, based in Plymouth.
Paul returns to Lewes regularly to support Human Nature in building a Thomas Paine bridge over the Ouse, help Bull House open as a visitor centre and assist Westgate Chapel as chair of Trustees.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 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.

An introduction to cryptocurrency

Update! Due to COVID, the speaker will no longer be available on the 17th June. A new date will be posted asap

About the talk
Dave will talk about crypto. What it is, a brief history, a look at today’s landscape and some of the key trends. He’ll offer opinion only, no financial advice, and will aim to provide you with a foundational understanding with which to proceed on your own journey of exploration into this exciting and challenging technology.

About the speaker
Dave Lockie’s interests lie in WordPress, open source and technology trends, especially web3. He founded Pragmatic in 2012 which merged in 2020 with Angry Creative where he worked as CMO until early 2022.

Dave is a deep thinker about how technology can help us to create a better world and loves to share his research and thoughts. He is an advisor to Adnode and WordProof and is just finishing up a role as WordPress ambassador for Grant for the Web.

Outside of work, Dave currently lives in Brighton, UK and loves mountain biking, cooking, reading (Goodreads profile, don’t judge me), photography and travel. I hang out on social media @divydovy (mainly Twitter but also a bit of Insta).

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

Tickets:
They are £3 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.

Does the Monarchy have a future?-13th May 2022

About the talk

Norman Baker will be discussing the future of the British monarchy.

About the speaker

Norman Baker was the Lib Dem MP for Lewes for 18 years from 1997-2015, and a government minister from 2010 to 2014. For three and a half years he served at the Department for Transport with a portfolio that covered public transport and active travel. He was then promoted to be a deputy to Theresa May in the Home Office as Crime Prevention Minister.

Prior to his parliamentary service, he was the first ever Lib Dem leader of Lewes District Council from 1991 until 1997 and also served as a county councillor for 8 years, and for 16 years as a Glynde and Beddingham parish councillor.

In 2014 he was inducted into the Privy Council.

After leaving Parliament, Norman became managing director of The Big Lemon, an environmentally friendly bus and coach company in Brighton where he won many new contracts for the company and updated the fleet. He is a qualified transport manager. He now acts as advisor to the Campaign for Better Transport, is a regular columnist and broadcaster, and undertakes a wide range of consultancy and lecturing work.

He is a published author of three books, the most recent being the well received And What Do You Do? – What The Royal Family Don’t Want You To Know.

He is also a singer-songwriter and has released three albums and an EP. He hosts three weekly music shows on the local FM radio station, Seahaven FM.

He has a degree in German from Royal Holloway College.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 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.

Community wealth building and building a democratic economy – 14th February 2020

About the speaker:

First elected to Preston City Council to represent the Tulketh ward in 2002, Councillor Matthew Brown has since taken on portfolios that include Community Engagement, Inclusion, Social Justice and Policy Initiatives.

Matthew has been widely credited as the driving force behind the ‘Preston model’, an economic model that re-directs procurement from external suppliers to local producers as a response to central government funding cuts that have slashed the city’s budgets since 2011. Recently, Matthew and the Preston model have gained traction with economists searching for alternative economic theory and practice.

About the talk:
For decades it has been the case the current economic model has been less geared toward working in the interests of working people. This failure has been exacerbated by the global financial crisis of over a decade ago and from that deep austerity which has raised a debate about the need for new approaches with this systemic failure.

Community Wealth Building offers a response at a local and regional level which seeks to address issues around ownership and control of local economies. It is a growing international movement looking to create more democratic local communities in which a variety of approaches are adopted including public procurement, worker ownership, municipal enterprise including insourcing, living wage strategies, impact investing from local government and public pension funds and community banking.

Within the U.K. the ‘Preston Model’ has received substantial coverage as one of the first adopters but now over 50 areas in the U.K. are adopting community wealth building strategies ranging from the Scottish and Welsh Governments, Liverpool and Greater Manchester City Regions and a growing number of local authorities including a number now in London. This is a movement likely to grow stronger in coming years so come along to hear more at Headstrong.


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

Tickets:
They are £3 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.

How does Politics affect our health? – 17th January 2019

About Rebecca Cooper:

Dr Rebecca Cooper is a Public Health Consultant who lives just down the Coast in Worthing. Rebecca undertook specialty training in Public Health in the NHS following completion of a Masters of International Public Health in Sydney, Australia. As well as the NHS, Rebecca has also worked in UK Local Authorities, with the World Health Organisation and international NGOs. Her most recent work is in the development of health programmes with BIMA Milvik, an innovative company that seeks to provide health insurance to people on low incomes, in countries where there is very little or no Public Health System.

Alongside her Public Health work, Rebecca has a keen interest in Politics and 2 years ago, became the first Labour Councillor to be elected to Worthing Borough Council in 41 years! She is now the Leader of a group of 10 Labour Councillors, and hopes to increase that number again in next May’s election. Rebecca was the Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Worthing West in the last General Election, and has applied to stand again for whenever the next one is called!

About the talk:

How does Politics affect our health? Does it make a difference to our health which Party is running the UK and if so, how? In this presentation and subsequent discussion, Dr Cooper will present several pieces of evidence and perspectives on how politics interacts with key determinants of health, from the level of inequality in our society to the inclination of Governments to enact legislation to keep the population healthy.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before in the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend to buy the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

The Climate Emergency and the case for Non-Violent Direct Action: A discussion with members of Extinction Rebellion. 6th March 2020

About the talk:
Over the course of a single year, civil disobedience campaigns have shifted the climate and ecological crisis back to where it needs to be – at the centre of public debate. Parliament has declared a Climate Emergency and is establishing a Citizens’ Assembly to discuss the issue. Some media organisations, notably the Guardian and the Mirror, have upped their game, exposing the polluters and connecting the dots between biodiversity loss and human extinction. People are listening to the science. A recent YouGov poll found 56% of people now back the total decarbonisation of the UK economy by 2030. As the world wakes up to the existential threat of a sixth mass extinction event and we head into an election in the UK, the climate crisis is the elephant in the room.
Those who are economically responsible for this situation, along with their political advocates, are growing anxious. The bungled attempt by the Metropolitan Police to deny Extinction Rebellion’s right to peaceful protest has been met with humiliation in the courts. So far so good, but there is still much to do and we have very little time. Extinction Rebellion invite you to discuss with us our strategy of peaceful non-violent direct action and consider what needs to be done to ensure the political establishment listens to the science and acts in time to save the planet.

About the speakers:

Dr Mark Slater: Mark is a retired university academic and the regional training coordinator for Extinction Rebellion.

Helen Frederick: Helen works in children’s services and joined the Rebellion in April, after the London uprising.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before in the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend to buy the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

The Victorian (Com)modification of the Female Body and its current consequences – 25th November 2019

About Catherine Pope:

In 2014, Catherine was awarded a PhD by the University of Sussex for her research on how trashy Victorian fiction was used to promote radical feminist ideas. Since then, she has written a monograph on the novelist Florence Marryat and contributed chapters to several edited collections.

A decade ago, she established Victorian Secrets, an independent press dedicated to publishing books from and about the nineteenth century. Popular titles include the biography of a Prussian strongman and a novel about a bisexual psychic vampire.

Catherine Pope has enjoyed a diverse career as a web developer, academic, and workshop facilitator. She now works as a financial coach, helping clients to understand their relationship with money and achieve financial wellbeing.

Catherine loves Victorian novels, technology, and big books about pensions. You can find out more at www.catherinepope.com.

About the talk:

Victorian women are often perceived as paragons of virtue. However, to nineteenth-century doctors, their unruly, problematic bodies required control – often in extreme ways. While we might think of FGM as a recent problem for the UK, this type of mutilation was practised in the era of our great-grandparents. In this talk, Catherine Pope argues that the commodification of women’s bodies 150 years ago has profound consequences for how female sexuality is viewed in the 21st century.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before in the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend to buy the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

The Case for a Real Living Wage Friday – Dr Sonya Baksi – 11th October 2019

About Dr Sonya Baksi:

Sonya Baksi worked over a 40 period in the NHS and was a consultant community paediatrician. Her early work was in inner London during a period of urban regeneration and service development. This was followed by retrenchment and the introduction of the business ethics into the NHS with cutbacks in support services for families. Sonya has served on national committees and served a year on secondment at the Department of Health when guidance was being drawn up for the Children Act of 1989. She has lectured widely in her professional field. Sonya is a Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health and a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health.

About the talk:

Sonya has long been concerned about the effects of poverty on family life. Her first substantive post was in a multi-deprived area of inner London. Later she worked in Sussex and profiled child deprivation here. The significance of child poverty will be discussed. The National Minimum Wage was introduced in 1998 and the National Living Wage in 2016. Sonya will discuss the background to this legislation and the work of the Living Wage Foundation. We are currently seeing an upsurge in family poverty with 70% of the four million children currently in poverty having working parents. Local action by Lewes for a Living Wage will be reviewed and ways forward adopted by other countries will be explored.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before in the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend to buy the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.

Raphie Kaplinsky – The Crisis in Capitalism and the rise of Populism – 5th of July 2019

About the speaker:
Raphie Kaplinsky is a development economist and an Honorary Professor at the Science Policy Research Unit and an Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University. He has published extensively on the related themes of globalisation and equalization. He has also assisted governments, the United Nations, firms and local authorities in developing policies to promote industrial and technological restructuring. More recently he has been working on urban regeneration in Newhaven. He is currently writing a book on the Crisis in Capitalism.

About the talk:
Since the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism has experienced a series of growth surges, each of which has been accompanied by an ensemble of complementary and supportive social relations which include patterns of governance, lifestyles and value systems. Each of these growth surges has degraded and run its course and, and after a period of turmoil, been replaced by a new “socio-technical system”. We are currently witnessing the exhaustion of the post-WW2 growth surge which is proving to be economically, socially and environmentally unsustainable. Although we can envisage what a more sustainable future might look like, we struggle to imagine and manage a peaceful transition between paradigms. This talk will focus on the social unsustainability of the current growth surge, arguing that one of the forms which it is taking is a rise in populism.

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

Tickets:
They are £3 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before in the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend to buy the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.