Hrkn to .. Thought for the Week

One of the most welcome features of the UK Budget is the encouragement given to entrepreneurs to start their businesses, scale them to full commercial vibrancy, and stay in the UK rather than taking them overseas: and, for us and The Share Foundation, the special 'Young Entrepreneur's Allowance' in England. This should provide an important alternative for the one million young people not in educat...

The news that Anthropic and Elon Musk have committed to make a start in sharing their wealth creation is a significant step towards 'Stock for Data & Creativity'. It's been followed by a frank recognition of the challenge ahead from Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. However, he and Anthropic are basing their ideas on too much intermediation, while Elon Musk is just focused on American recipients....

40th anniversary: in October 1986 the City of London underwent a total transformation in the 'Big Bang', leading to twenty years of dynamic growth which ended in the 2008/9 financial crash, largely as a result of dual capacity and the inability of financial institutions to cope with their conflicts of interest. Today's challenges of Private Equity and the substantial and swiftly growing influence...

Logic should be one of the two main drivers for politics, but it's sadly lacking in today's line-up. In 2026 we've experienced first-hand what climate change is doing to our world, but there has been a persistent move away from 'net zero' in favour of continued reliance on fossil fuels — not clever. The other main driver should be what it means to be human, but while politicians wring their hands...

There are many different interpretations of 'authority', but the sharpest distinction is between a top-down, dictatorial style and an understanding of what 'servant leadership' means. The former disregards the need for empathy, while the latter invites real participation. But for participation to be effective it requires empowerment, which itself relies on knowledge, awareness and a sense of consc...

Quids in — Quids out: last week HM Treasury published its annual savings statistics, including their assessment of 827,000 unclaimed Child Trust Funds as at 5th April. Allowing for unilateral transfers into Junior ISAs by account providers and another six months, the current total is now very close to one million — over £2 billion in value. But the big challenge is to get CTF accounts delivered to...

Unlike gravity, light and time, sound doesn't carry through empty space; its travel relies on the created atmosphere. However speech and singing require language, which is anything but universal. In contrast, instrumental music speaks to everyone and to evry living thing in a common language, a truly authentic integrity which enables us all to move together. Background music: 'Requiem In Cello' by...

The spate of warnings about the existential risks for humanity as a result of insufficiently controlled Artificial Intelligence may remind some listeners of our commentary on 6th November 2023, following the first world leaders' summit on AI at Bletchley Park. Share Alliance has made significant progress since then with its research into 'Stock for Data & Creativity', and we look forward to hear h...

The origins of the looming crisis in world government bond markets started forty years ago; recent challenges such as the pandemic and Trump have turned the screw even harder, and in the United Kindom the dogged application of universal welfare certainly hasn't helped. But the current problem of over-indebtedness can be traced back to the 1980s and the introduction of dual capacity in financial ma...

MPs, led by Alex Sobel, are calling for a national commission to prepare proposals for electoral reform; their talk is about some form of proportional representation. But democracy is faced with much bigger challenges, including short-termism, generational unfairness, and a serious lack of any global integration. Winston Churchill was right about democracy being the least worst system of governmen...

With the summer holidays drawing to a close in the next few days, the new team at HM Treasury will be busy looking at fresh ideas for the Budget on 28th October. The challenging economic situation calls for a fresh look at some of the underlying strategies which have driven debt so high over the past half-century. The really big problem is the extent to which 'universal, free-at-the-point-use' hea...

Months of drought are gradually waking us up to the fact that climate change really is a serious concern: if we're not going to stop it, then we have to take mitigation action seriously. Fresh water is our most critical natural resource: the only alternative to rainfall is desalination. Thames Water was ahead of its time with installing their Beckton plant for London in 2011, but politicians must...

Literacy rates for young people have improved significantly over the past fifteen years following Tony Blair's call for 'Education, Education, Education'; with technical development now rising in importance, we must ensure that it holds onto the priority attached to literacy. Meanwhile Government departments, including HMRC, must ensure that their communication is accessible to all — this includes...

In response to Andy Burnham's invitation to join his cross-party working group on overhauling social care arrangements throughout the United Kingdom, Sir Ed Davey called for diversity while Kemi Badenoch said it mustn't increase public spending. However there are other deep questions to answer as well: such as how to prepare people better for old age; will they be prepared to seize the opportunity...

Not surprisingly, the proposal from Gary Lineker and his millionaire colleagues for a wealth tax has been met with ridicule — Robert Colvile writing in the Sunday Times says, 'The problem isn't that those who've signed the pledge are hypocrites. It's that they're idiots'. However, there is an alternative approach which could bypass gargantuan Government spending. Donating the equivalent sum to a c...

Thomas Jefferson's claim that all are created equal with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness attracts lip service from politicians but not much commitment: they either want to take away liberty in the pursuit of equality, or to deny that wealth polarisation results from the black hole of economics. Will Andy Burnham also turn a Nelsonian blind eye to this challenge, allowing d...

The wish to tackle inter-generational rebalancing — to break the cycle of deprivation — leads directly to establishing long-term savings accounts for disadvantaged young people: that's why the Child Trust Fund included an HMRC-allocated category for those children (mainly low-income) whose families didn't open accounts. However Government needs to not only open these accounts but also monitor and...

The major economic challenges confronting humanity — including the chronic and acute polarisation of wealth — are global in character, just as the major environmental issues. However, nations are too reticent to establish effective global governance to deal with them. All the signs are that Andy Burnham will take quite the opposite approach, with his emphasis on regional devolution within the Unit...

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, what better way for Donald Trump to anchor his legacy in the minds of all young people born during his presidency than granting them a $1,000 contribution when their Trump Account is opened? However, as Michael Dell and other philanthropists have shown, we need to focus on the most disadvantaged in order to break the cycle...

One of the extraordinary sights in nature is starling murmurations — hundreds of thousands of birds in what looks like a co-ordinated dance, but without any central control. It can be seen as a metaphor for humanity: individual freedom means charting your own way through life, but with respect for others. As yet again we face leadership in uncertainty, politicians need to learn that we don't need...

Starmer's clarion call for the 2024 General Election was 'Change', somewhat different from Tony Blair's 'Education, Education, Education'. However, in contrast to Blair's delivery in Government, Starmer has got stuck in a morass of inaction, bogged down by the crisis in public finances and an unwillingness to tackle the big issues. The biggest of these is welfare spending, major changes to which f...

On 29 August 2023 our commentary described the black hole of economics as its failure to recognise the opportunity to use the human life-cycle in order to empower new generations of disadvantaged young people with resources and life skills. Thanks to Cambridge University, we've now taken a major step forward with the Inter-Generational Rebalancing Conference, and it's time to plan the next stage a...

The direct nature of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical took some of his colleagues by surprise: as an AI expert Franciscan friar who has advised the Vatican says, ‘Papal documents usually speak in principles; this one names the structural problem — computational power is concentrated in the hands of a few private actors who answer to no democratic process’. The jury is still out on the impact of Artifi...

There has been a spate of reports on youth unemployment recently, and Alan Milburn will warn of 'a generational, societal and economic catastrophe’ if we don't recognise that the welfare state was built for a different era, and must now change. The impact of such substantial debt, in both personal and public contexts, of Artificial Intelligence and the pervasive influence of social media present r...

Journeys of hope move forwards, not backwards; they need to keep moving, not get stuck in a rut. They need to build progress as we go forward, by discovering more about human capability and understanding. In this context, we somehow need to tackle the major challenges necessary in order to focus on global, not just national or regional, problems. Looking back at European Union membership with rose...