Prisons In Crisis
The prison population in England and Wales has doubled since the mid-1990s. Prisons are experiencing huge problems, with rises in violence and self-harm. Suicides behind bars are at their highest levels in a decade. There were more homicides in prison in 2015 than any other year on record. This is an urgent question for today […]
National Shop Stewards Network 2016 – 10th Annual Conference
Unions are under threat. It’s no accident that the Tories announced their (anti) Trade Union Bill at the same time as they roll out yet more cuts. They fully understand that the unions, with 6 million members, can be a major obstacle to another austerity wave and the fight is on. Junior Doctors are striking […]
How David Hume Became the First Modern Humanist
David Hume was one of our greatest philosophers. When he was growing up, the dominant ethical debate in Britain was between the “pessimists”, who believed we are all fundamentally selfish, and the “optimists”, who vehemently denied this. The latter were all devout Christians, and so for those sceptical of orthodox religion (like the young Hume), […]
Trident Renewal – The Arguments
How much will the renewal of Trident actually cost? Have nuclear weapons really kept us safe since the end of World War Two? Is Trident even legal under International Law? The UK professes to be committed to ‘multilateral disarmament’ – but is that actually the case? In this presentation, Quaker peace activist Timmon Wallis summarises […]
Is Humanism Dead?
What can humanism say about the problems we face today? It’s been claimed often enough that humanism is so locked into 19th century patterns of thinking it’s now hopelessly irrelevant. All this talk of progress, believing in ‘man’, and confidence in science and reason? Please! We can at this point either just deny claims of this […]
Psychedelics and Nonduality
To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the journal, Science Magazine published a list of the 125 greatest unsolved questions in science. Top of the list were: 1. What is the Universe made of? 2. What is the biological basis of consciousness? (How does the brain generate consciousness?) Whilst these questions may seem baffling under the […]
Amanda Palmer on Motherhood
In her mid-thirties, singer-songwriter and New York Times bestselling author Amanda Palmer approached a conflicted baby conundrum. She’d always had a hard time shaking the belief that suffering and isolation were important to making art. If she had kids, would she turn into a boring, irrelevant, ignorable artist? Would she suddenly start writing songs about […]
Is London dying?
Novelist and London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair is joined by Katharine Hibbert, founder of affordable housing enterprise Dot Dot Dot and author of Free: Adventures in the Margins of a Wasteful Society, Angus Hanton of Intergenerational Foundation and Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson for a discussion of the social and cultural significance of London’s property price boom. In […]
Love Factually
A fun evening of learning all about love, hosted by CFI UK’s Stephen Law. Find out about God’s secret sex life, exactly what turtles get up to when the lights are out, and a whole lot more. There will be a licensed bar to provide lush libations, and opportunities to buy books by Law, Stavrakopoulou, and Ince, […]