By exposing the weakness of centralised authority and bureaucracies, the pandemic has once again raised the question of how to harness the energy and collective responsibility of citizens for the common good. It has also exposed grave structural weaknesses in the state and civil society organisations. Continuing to explore Britain’s changing political landscape, The Liverpool Salon invites you to join Maurice Glasman, Dave Clements, Erika Rushton, William Clouston and Ronnie Hughes to debate the contract between citizens and the state, the state of civil society and the possibility of mobilising collective responses that will help to build a better society.

We will send a link to Zoom ahead of the meeting

Speakers

Maurice Glasman is a Labour life peer in the House of Lords. He is director of the Common Good Foundation. Prior to becoming a peer, Baron Glasman worked for ten years for London Citizens on their Living Wage campaign. Baron Glasman is widely known for establishing “Blue Labour”, a conservative form of socialism within the Labour party which encourages a return to community values based on trade unions, the Church and voluntary groups. He is the author of Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia (Verso, 1996), which argues that the commodification of human beings and nature is a nightmare.

Erika Rushton has harnessed creativity and entrepreneurialism as a force for social inclusion, economic growth and place based regeneration across the North West. She has been hugely influential in the renaissance of Liverpool receiving the City Leaders Award from Liverpool University in 2014, the Northern Power Women's Transformational Leader in 2018 and most recently scooped the Insider North West Property Game Changer Award 2020. Her impact in the Creative, Digital, Social and Cultural sectors is evident at Ropewalks, Granby 4 Streets winner of the 2015 Turner Prize, Baltic Creative in the Baltic Triangle, North Liverpool, Birkenhead on Wirral, and at Islington Mill in Salford. Erika is currently supporting change makers and the growth of creative clusters regionally, nationally and internationally. Working with Seebohm Hill and Power To Change on Kindred she has helped secure £6.5M to grow the impact of Socially Trading Organisations in the Liverpool City Region; and with Islington Mill in Salford secured £7M to build The Other City, an Artist Led redevelopment of up to 2 hectares of studios and workspaces and a Creative Enterprise Programme to grow 200 creative adventures across Greater Manchester.

William Clouston is SDP Leader. William joined the SDP in 1982 and campaigned in general elections, local elections and by-elections throughout the 1980’s. By 1989 he was on the SDP’s approved list of Parliamentary Candidates. William later spent four years in the Conservative party, becoming a District Councillor in 1999 and serving on Tynedale Council until 2003. A former Parliamentary Candidate, he presently serves on Corbridge Parish Council in Northumberland. William became leader of the Social Democrats in early 2018 and was re-elected in March 2020 obtaining 89% of votes returned by members. William holds first and Masters degrees in Urban Planning and Property Management respectively and read Philosophy at Durham University at Postgraduate level.

Dave Clements is a local government adviser; chair, AoI Social Policy Forum; writer, Dave Clements is an adviser to local government with over two decades experience writing policy and strategy, and leading community engagement initiatives, amongst other things – predominantly for children’s and adult’s services, and across public and voluntary sector partnership. He co-founded the AoI’s Social Policy Forum in 2008. On the rare occasions when not consulting or bringing up three small children with his wife in the North London suburb where they live, Dave produces, chairs and speaks in public debates and writes widely on contemporary policy culture. An archive of his writing can be found here. He is also contributing co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2008), author of the thinkpiece Social Care for Free Citizens (Manifesto Club, 2010) and a contributor to The Future of the Welfare State (Axess, 2017).

Ronnie Hughes. After 25 self employed years working in and with socially trading and community organisations Ronnie Hughes is now writing his PhD about the work he's been involved in at the University of Liverpool. Currently summed up as "Particular cases of the possible: Empirical case studies of Liverpool activism, including Granby 4 Streets, as particular examples of better future possibilities than the broken concept of utopianism.” He also writes the Liverpool blog A Sense of Place.

Pauline Hadaway will chair the discussion. Pauline has worked in arts and education since 1990 and is co-founder of The Liverpool Salon. In her doctoral research at the University of Manchester, Pauline explored different uses of heritage and culture as tools for peace building and urban regeneration in Northern Ireland. She has been published widely, including Policing the Public Gaze (2009) for the campaign group The Manifesto Club; Re-imagining Titanic, re-imaging Belfast in Relaunching Titanic: memory and marketing in the ‘post -conflict city’ (2013). Her latest publication is Escaping the Panopticon, a chapter in Photography Reframed: visions in photographic culture, published by I.B. Tauris (2019)