Opinion

We are in the 8th year of the celebrity shoe auction, now the biggest in the world, with more A-listers taking part in our small charity’s fundraiser than Comic Relief. How? Almost a decade ago when I founded Small Steps Project, helping children surviving off landfill sites, Celebrity endorsed charity events and paraphernalia were not quite as popular as they are today. Many celebrity events these days cost as much as they raise. The infamous Red Campaign by Bono raised...

The 12th century story of King Arthur and his gallant knights is complex, frustrating, and fraught with contradictions and impossibilities. Very few of the names and events recorded in these chronicles exist in the historical record, and so the text represents a huge historical crossword puzzle that is almost impossible to crack. But how can we derive an answer for two-down in this puzzle, if we have not discovered the solution for five-across? Arthurian history is traditionally set in the...

Arm yourself. There is a war raging across our information systems. Whilst no bombs are being dropped, the impacts of this war will have far reaching consequences. At the same time Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America, 2016 witnessed the rise of populist and extremist movements all over the globe. The success of many of these causes, groups and individuals came as an unexpected surprise, even a shock. Many asked ‘how could this happen?’ In...

Britain's prison have become a revolving door for offenders because they're too overcrowded to work as effective forms of rehabilitation. In a scathing interview with The London Economic former prison officer Paul Ward said prisons "do not rehabilitate the vast majority of offenders", merely acting as a way of "keeping people out of harms way for a length of time". Despite the efforts of the staff on the front line prison officers are largely powerless to rehabilitate inmates in a meaningful way because...

Treatments for cancer, arthritis and multiple sclerosis (MS) are among drugs costing the cash-strapped NHS over a billion pounds a year - despite public funding playing a substantial role in the medicines’ development. Our new joint report with Global Justice Now, Pills and Profits: How drug companies make a killing out of public research shines a light on the level of UK public money used to develop new drugs - with two out of five of the NHS’s most expensive...

Around the world around 46 million people are trapped in some form of slavery - the equivalent to the entire population of Spain. Sexual exploitation counts for 54% of all human trafficking victims. As Rebecca Mott’s astonishingly candid story reveals, slavery is actually very close to home. And we can all make a difference to end it.  "For me slavery means when you are doing something against your will - where somebody is controlling you, exploiting you for their gain. You...

The plight of human trafficking victims is being highlighted on Wednesday, October 18th, for Anti-Slavery Day. The UK government estimates that at least 13,000 people across Britain are trapped in modern slavery although police say the figure is likely to be much higher. Kevin Hyland, Britain's anti-slavery tsar, agrees in his annual report that the estimate is too low, and the true number is in the tens of thousands. In 2015, Britain passed the Modern Slavery Act, ushering in the...

New research by The Renewal Trust and Nottingham Trent University has helped to reveal the human cost of modern working practices like zero hours contracts, with the poorest communities often bearing the brunt of the impact. Now, the Renewal Trust is calling for an urgent local response to the issue, as CEO Cherry Underwood explains: “There’s been a lot of talk in the media about modern working practices, following the publication of the Taylor Report. Nationally, the falling levels of...

James Corden landed himself in hot water this weekend after he made jokes about disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein at the AmfAR Gala in Los Angeles. The Late Late Show host was met with as many groans as laughs after he tried to satirise the scandal that has engulfed Hollywood over the past few weeks. Reports that Weinstein sexually harassed, assaulted and raped more than a dozen women were leaked by the New Yorker at the start of the month,...