List of UK employers with gender-neutral parental leave
Inequalities in pay and employment between women and men are not going to disappear without tackling inequalities in parenting. At the moment 93% of parents taking time out of work or working...
View ArticleWhy wait til 2035 to ban the most polluting new cars?
Background: “[The UK] Government is seeking views on bringing forward the end to the sale of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars and vans from 2040 to 2035, or earlier if a faster transition appears...
View ArticleCan we make surnames non-sexist?
Surnames in the UK and much of the rest of the world are generally patrilineal. To take a recent example, the Prime Minister’s new son, Wilfred Johnson, has taken his father’s surname, while his...
View ArticleIs this a way to hasten victory over coronavirus?
Thankfully, there seems to have been lots of smart discussion about speeding up the pace of the UK vaccine roll-out. There’s been the debate over prioritising first doses; efforts to remove...
View ArticleThe future according to Metaculus
metaculus.com is a forecasting website, where anyone can have a go at making “quantitative predictions of future events”. Some of the questions on the site ask when a particular event will take, and I...
View ArticleThe philosophy of meat: can we care about animals but also eat them?
You’re living alone on a tropical island paradise. The tasty and varied local plant life provides all the nutrition you need (let’s suppose). You befriend a local family of pigs, often playing with...
View ArticleYeah, processed and red meat is bad for you
I think there are very good ethical reasons to avoid animal-based food (particularly the low-welfare / high-torture majority). And I think there are very good environmental reasons to avoid...
View ArticleDear future Labour MPs…
Probably in October-December 2024, Labour will win the general election with a comfortable majority. They (you) will be able to change our country in countless significant ways. So this article sets...
View ArticleLabour’s Animal Welfare Strategy should be decisive
Defra is supposedly working on a new Animal Welfare Strategy, so I wrote to my local Labour MP: The Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs has said “The Government were elected on a mandate to...
View ArticleDon’t Panic: Britain is not broken
Read the news, full of the latest murders and political drama, and it’s easy to be depressed about the state of the world (to say nothing of hysterical social media). But it’s just possible that this...
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