Publisher's Synopsis
'A brilliant book making hope realisable, outlining the passion that is needed.' - Danny Dorling, University of Oxford
In the face of a cost of living crisis, widespread industrial action and mounting inflation, this book offers an incisive analysis of the UK’s problems and a new approach to tackling them.
Economic growth and higher wages alone will not fix these problems. Behind the ‘cost of living crisis’ is a deepening crisis of foundational liveability: not only squeezed residual incomes but also failing public services and decaying social infrastructure.
The only way out of the crisis is through a political practice of adaptive reuse which works around the constraints that frustrate mainstream policies.
Setting out a new model for the three pillars of liveability, When Nothing Works challenges the assumptions of left and right in the UK political classes and offers a fresh approach to the economically visible and politically actionable.
This clever book is a set of visionary proposals from a group of people who actually know what they are talking about! Everyone should be reading it, and most especially our MPs. - Henrietta Moore, Institute of Global Prosperity, UCL
'Commentators, politicians and economists now suddenly agree: Britain isn't working. Yet their suggested fixes usually fall laughably short. Not this book. Its authors have been warning of the brokenness of Britain's politics and economics and business for years, and here they deliver a devastating diagnosis. From how thousands of pounds have been taken from your pay to the nonsense of Westminster's fixation on growth - it's all here, along with practical suggestions of how to use our political system to deliver improvements. Read this and you won't look at a front page the same way again.' - Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian
