Independent conversations with the people building working alternatives in the economy and society — and a clear look at how they actually work.
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The Fair Tax Foundation built the world’s first Fair Tax Mark: a business opens its books to independent scrutiny, and the Mark certifies that it pays the right amount of tax, in the right place, at the right time. I spoke with its Chief Executive and co-founder Paul Monaghan, and its Head of Accreditation Jamie Boswell, about why they celebrate the companies getting it right rather than naming the ones that don’t, why small-business avoidance may be the under-examined half of the story, and what a company’s tax reveals about the kind of organisation, and citizen, it really is. The Foundation
A company can go to court. A river can’t. Brontie Ansell of Lawyers for Nature is working to change that — giving the natural world a voice in law, in policy, and even inside the company boardroom. Brontie is a corporate solicitor and the Managing Director of Lawyers for Nature, a UK-based group of solicitors, barristers and academics who take on no human clients, because they treat nature itself as their client. It began, she says, with a coffee at a 2019 conference and a single thought: nobody speaks for the trees. In this conversation we get into what a nature director actually does on a co
This week, Chris talks to Vera Zamagni, Professor of Economic History at the University of Bologna, Senior Associate Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS Europe, and a former Vice President of the Emilia-Romagna regional government. Since 1948, Article 45 of Italy’s constitution has recognised the social function of cooperation, and no government since has legislated against it. In Emilia-Romagna, that helped build an economy where more than 3,600 cooperatives sit alongside a dense network of small, export-focused private firms — Vera says cooperatives now account for up to a fifth of the
Scotland has become the first country in the world to write community wealth building into law. Neil McInroy — Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative, and previously chief executive of CLES — explains what that actually means: who holds wealth in a place, how to make more of it stay, and the five pillars the approach works through, from fair work and public procurement to community finance, land, and inclusive ownership. He traces the idea from Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives to the Preston model and on to the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 —
