List of The last word Archive

Coming clean about membership

Blog

19 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

Yesterday afternoon saw me in the City leading an NCVO seminar on the future of membership organisations. (I arrived late and, given the name of the venue and the use of blogging and twittering in the seminar, was open to the accusation ‘Taylor couldn’t organise a mash up in The Brewery’.)

Being made a fool of by Peter Mandelson ... and other thoughts on the third sector and recession

Blog

18 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

Peter Mandelson has made a fool of me once again.  There I was in yesterday’s blog, and in a short clip on Newsnight, praising his speech and willingness to address head on the challenges of being in government in recession.  It was only after I had gone on the record that I found that Peter had removed some pre-briefed sections of his speech – presumably as a result of a ticking-off from Downing Street!

Mandelson tells it straight

Blog

17 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

I have known Peter Mandelson for fifteen years. In the early years, before the 1997 election, I worked for him directly as part of the Labour campaign team. Generally, he tolerated me, presumably judging my willingness to work hard and do what I was told unquestioningly almost made up for my inexperience and naivety.

Three massive challenges facing the UK

Blog

16 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

A very short blog this morning as I am on holiday in Scotland.

The significance of a plastic bag

Blog

13 Feb 2009

One of this week’s pleasures – pleasure with a big kick in its tail – was opening the October Gallery’s exhibition of work by Chinese artist Huang Xu, entitled Fragments. Big photographic works featuring plastic bags, tattered and torn and beautiful and fragile. For me these are warnings - plastic bags as a collective memento mori and curiously reminiscent of Dutch seventeenth century paintings of flowers. I’ll never look at a plastic bag in quite the same way. I know they were banned many years ago in Rwanda. How shameful is that? A country recently torn apart and they can think about the environment. And we seem to find that so terribly difficult.

It does what it says on the label

Blog

13 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

Reading Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ I came across a reference to James Hunter’s ‘The death of character’, published in 2000. Haidt describes Hunter’s thesis: as America moved in the twentieth century from being a nation of producers to being a nation of consumers it replaced the intrinsically moral idea of ‘character’ in favour of the amoral term ‘personality’.

The importance of judgement

Blog

12 Feb 2009

My leg is somewhat like the chair I sit in: they are both constituted by atomic particles; they both occupy space-time; they are both to the East of Ireland. How interesting are these similarities? Not very.

One step at a time to saving the planet

Blog

12 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

If we want people to help save the planet we need to start giving them clearer signals and incentives. But the biggest obstacle might be the green movement itself.

Bankers apology - the verdict

Blog

11 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

My friend and blog advisor Matt Cain has come up with a visual representation of apologies scorecard. We can use this again for the current bankers being grilled by the Select Committee.