Raising the Roof addresses one of the key issues of our era – the UK’s housing crisis. Housing costs in the United Kingdom are among the highest on the planet, with London virtually the most expensive major city in the world for renting or buying a home. At the core of this is one of the most centralised planning systems in the democratic world – a system that plainly doesn’t work. A system that has resulted in too few houses, which are too small, which people do not like and which are in ...

Politicians, financiers and bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, yet they have built the most unfree market system ever created. In this Gilded Age, income is funnelled to the owners of property – financial, physical and intellectual – at the expense of society. Wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while broadening the precariat.Now fully updated with an introduction...

Paint Your Town Red tells the story of how one city in the north of England decided to level up without waiting for Whitehall.Across the world, there is a growing recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: more democratic, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. Paint Your Town Red looks at how wealth can be generated and shared at a local level through the experience of one of the main advocates of the new Democratic Economy,...

Britain is beset by a crisis of purpose. For a generation we have been told the route to universal well-being is to abandon the expense of justice and equity and so allow the judgments of the market to go unobstructed. What has been created is not an innovative, productive economy but instead a capitalism that extracts value rather than creates it, massive inequality, shrinking opportunity and a society organised to benefit the top 1%. The capacity to create new jobs and start-ups should n...

The number one bestseller on the hardback list for more than six months, The State We're In is the most explosive analysis of British society to have been published for over thirty years. It is now updated for the paperback edition.

The suddenness and depth of the recession has raised questions about the workability of capitalism not seen since the 1930s. One of the constraints on recovery is the growing belief that if the old model did not work there is no new one on offer. This book sets out to provide one, arguing that reconstructing a bust financial system is not just a technical question. It cannot be done without a wholescale revision of the wider system and values on which it is based. And fairness must be plac...

Countries with smaller governments grow faster.Tobacco taxes are the best way to cut smoking.Government regulation discourages entrepreneurshi****p.Award-winning investigative journalist Tom Bergin digs into eight mantras widely accepted by Western governments and, by talking to the people who promote those ideas and the workers, businesspeople and consumers who have felt their impacts, finds they often don't play out...

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE... BANKING? DRUG REGULATION? NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT? PROSTITUTION? PENSIONS? It's no secret that a myriad of long-term problems facing our society are not effectively dealt with by our current system of government; indeed, many are simply set aside and disappear completely from the short-term political agenda. Why? Because they are 'too difficult' to solve. From immigration to welfare reform, from climate change to media regulation, the biggest issues consisten...

Poverty in Britain is at post-war highs and - even with economic growth -is set to increase yet further. Food bank queues are growing, levels of severe deprivation have been rising, and increasing numbers of children are left with their most basic needs unmet.Based on exclusive access to the largest ever survey of poverty in the UK, and its predecessor surveys in the 1980s and 1990s, Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack track changes in deprivation and paint a devastating picture of the...

Jim Sillars argues convincingly that the referendum gives the Scottish people the power to create a better country, helps renew our belief in socialism as the answer to the economic and social crisis facing the country, and challenges the idea in the Yes campaign that independence means “change but no change” and that a Yes voter endorses Alex Salmond and the SNP. There is a far more radical road, with better policies than those Salmond is offering in the first independence elections in 20...

Why are so many adult children living still living with mum and dad? Why do young people seem so disinterested in politics? And what are the hidden threats to Britain's long-term prosperity lurking in the next few decades?First published in 2010, Ed Howker and Shiv Mailk's Jilted Generation answers fundamental questions about the society you thought you knew. It identified, for the first time, the perilous position of Britain's young adults and, with a title brandished by e...

The UK's chronic housing shortage is lowering the quality of life for millions, turning the British dream of home ownership into a cruel nightmare – not least for 'generation rent'. Countless vulnerable families are meanwhile being deprived of access to decent social housing, causing homelessness to spiral.In this searing polemic, Liam Halligan offers radical solutions to the most urgent political issue of our times. Fully updated, with a foreword from former Chancellor Sajid Javid...