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.

About the talk:

Do Single People Get a Raw Deal?

Recent decades have seen huge changes in how we live our close relationships. As the extended family has receded from daily life, and the nuclear family has loosened its hold, people have been more free to make the sort of intimate choices that suit them. Women’s greater economic and social independence, and the reshaping of cultural expectations and personal desires by feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, have spread ideals of equality, freedom and self-actualisation throughout the population. Divorce has become easier, and equality legislation has enabled more women to live autonomously. Sex between men has been decriminalised and same-sex marriage legalised. This has contributed to the rising number of people who live and parent alone, and who never marry, divorce, or live apart from their partners and openly form same-sex partnerships. In 2020, it is no longer legally or culturally obligatory for women or men to marry or to stay married – to be or to act heterosexual. Yet against the backdrop of these radical upheavals in personal life, one unchanging aspect of the cultural ordering of intimacy becomes ever clearer: our lives remain profoundly shaped by the couple norm. This is the powerful and ubiquitous force – at once both social and psychological – which maintains that being in a couple is the natural and best way of living.

What does this mean for single people? Do they get a raw deal in a couple-centric society? Have things improved for single people in recent year?

About the speaker:

Professor Sasha Roseneil is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex. Sasha began her term as the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex in August 2022. She is Sussex’s ninth Vice Chancellor and our first female VC. Previously, Sasha was UCL’s first Pro-Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Before that, Professor Roseneil was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex, and held leadership positions at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Leeds. Over more than 30 years as an academic, Professor Roseneil has developed an international reputation for her pioneering research on intimate relationships, citizenship, and social movements. Originally trained as a sociologist, and later as a group analyst and psychotherapist, she has played a leading role in establishing the interdisciplinary fields of Gender Studies and Psychosocial Studies. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a member of the Institute of Group Analysis and a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

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:

Everyone has deeply-held “sacred values”: these may be religious, political or both. Extremism, including that of the violent sort, exists across religions and the political spectrum. Hear about the speaker’s personal journey into, and out of, islamist extremism in a UK and global context since the 1970s. Find out how religious conservatism, fundamentalism, the experience of racism, and the geopolitics between the West and the Muslim world led to the radicalisation of generations of British Muslims. Hear also about how cross-cultural dialogue, friendship, love and shared values can help us to increase resilience and cohesion within our communities.

About the speaker:

Usama is a trained imam and scientist. He has served as a part-time, UK-based imam for over 40 years since the age of 11, is a certified transmitter of the Qur’an and has translated several Islamic texts into English. He is co-author, along with a Jewish professor-rabbi and a Christian theologian, of an Abrahamic dialogue book, “People of the Book: How Jews, Christians & Muslims Understand Their Sacred Scriptures” (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, now part of the Hachette Group, 2019). Since 2012, when he changed career, he has worked full-time in counter-extremism and counter-terrorism, as well as in research and analysis of the geopolitics of the Muslim world and Muslim communities in Western societies. Prior to that, Usama was Senior Lecturer in Engineering at Middlesex University (2003-2012), Planetarium Lecturer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich (2006-8), Associate Professor at the National University of Sciences & Technology, Pakistan (2002-3), and an artificial intelligence consultant in UK industry (1997-2003). He holds a PhD, MSc & MA in Physics and Artificial Intelligence from the Universities of Cambridge & London and is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the International Society for Science & Religion, the London Society for the Study of Religion, and of the Muslim Institute.

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.

Blurb: Volunteering abroad has become hugely popular over the last 30 years. Whether as a rite of passage for young people on a gap year, a learning experience for a family while travelling, a career break, or a retirement focus, lending a hand in a low-income communities
overseas has become a popular and much-lauded activity for those who can afford to do so.
However, much of this $3-billion a year industry is geared around the experience for the
buyer, not the impact on the communities involved. At its worst, voluntourism can be hugely
exploitative; worsening inequalities, and creating new social issues. This talk, grounded in
real-life experience and extensive global research, seeks to challenge conceptions of “giving
back” and “doing good” in other countries and argues that good intentions are not enough.
Speaker: Anna McKeon was old enough to know better when she volunteered abroad for
the first time at an orphanage in Kenya. Changed by her experience, she then spent 6 years
living in South East Asia, and worked with organisations such as Save the Children and
UNICEF to lead a global campaign against voluntourism practices. Anna also led
experiential leadership courses in the region, facilitating learning for adults and young people
on international development. Anna is currently the Director of Capability Building at the
International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, the global alliance for eye health
organisations, supporting sustainable social change through leadership initiatives.

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 latest census revealed that England is no longer a majority-Christian country. Meanwhile, our head of state retains the title of Defender of the Faith; laws requiring Christian worship in schools remain in place; and Church of England bishops retain seats as of right in the legislature. Stephen Evans explores the relationship between religion and state and asks whether time has come to disestablish the Church of England.

About the speaker:

Stephen Evans is the chief executive of the National Secular Society – a campaigning organisation that advocates for a secular democracy where everyone is treated equally, regardless of religion or belief. Stephen is a regular media commentator on religion’s role in public life.