Our Austerity Basics all in one place!
Ever wondered what austerity actually means? Where the idea comes from? Whether it actually works?
austerity
Frances Northrop on how Transition Town Totnes are responding to austerity
For our last piece in our month’s theme of austerity and how Transition responds to it, we head to Totnes, one of the first Transition initiatives.
Felicity Lawrence: How austerity’s “relentless drive to deregulate” impacts the food on our plate
Felicity Lawrence is a food writer and Guardian investigative journalist. When it comes to understanding the dark side of how the food industry works, she is the place to turn…
What can we learn from the austerity of 1939-1945?
Waste nothing. Keep a stock pot going for soups and stews. Use up leftovers. Cook without meat several times a week, using eggs, cheese, lentils, pearl barley, rice. Use seasonal ingredients. Use cheaper cuts of meat, cooked long and slowly. Have fun foraging for wild food: mushrooms, blackberries, nettles; if you live near the sea, mussels etc. Share and barter: if you keep hens, swap eggs for your veg-growing neighbour’s glut of courgettes.
Pam Warhurst: Food banks are “the first response, not the final response”
The most obvious face of austerity is the fact that we’ve got a food bank, food collection point, whatever you want to call it, where about 70 different people, once a month, have to go through the doors to collect food in order to meet some need at their end. That’s the obvious face of austerity.
Meet the young hackers finding new ways to live
If the expectations we’ve been brought up with have now become dreams, how we cope with the shock will affect not just how we can build a better future, but whether we can conceive of a better future at all.
Economics – headlines
• How economic growth has become anti-life
• Guilt-free consumption
• How to protest in the age of austerity
• Six reasons why are stock markets are no longer fit for purpose
• The global economy sinks under its debts as the real cost of energy rises
An interview with Dr Tim Lang: “Dire times are one of the only moments when structures get laid bare”
When looking for insights into food, policy and politics, the first place I would turn is to Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London.
How Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition are responding to austerity
One of the most inspiring Transition initiatives I visited in the US recently was Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition in Boston.
Imagination: an antidote to the plague of austerity
"..We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."
Surviving austerity
In 2010, the Coalition Government began trying to reduce the national deficit through public spending cuts and welfare reform. This – along with the effects of the recession – became the ‘new austerity’.
Keep the faith – a review of the UK’s People’s Assembly
So we assembled, over 4000 of us, for the People’s Assembly against austerity.