Fabian Society - the UK’s oldest think-tank

The Fabian Society

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London SW1H 9BN

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About Events

The Fabian events programme hosts some of the most prominent public events in British politics. We hold major conferences, lectures and public debates and small invitation only expert policy seminars, including our prestigious Fabian Policy Networks working with a wide range of partner organisations. The events programme can be viewed here , or in our online calendar.

Jemima Olchawski is Events Director, Ed Wallis, Fatima Hassan, Rosie Clayton are Events Managers and Ian Chapman is our Events Assistant. Please contact the Events Team with ideas for future Fabian events and to discuss partnership opportunities.

Events Menu

The NHS at 60

The sixtieth anniversary of the NHS should be used to unleash a wave of political and social imagination similar to that which drove the original concept of a national health service which was freely available to all. Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation and former Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street, argued at a Fabian seminar that only in this way could we address the challenges posed by changing social demographics. The integration of health and social care, which had thus far failed to engage a public and political debate, he stated was "going to absolutely dominate politics for the next twenty years" and required an innovative approach that adopted "an experimental and evolutionary model of change".

There is a deafening silence of public indifference around the issue of child poverty, argued panellist and Fabian research fellow Louise Bamfield at the event.

Bamfield said she believed the challenge lay in a need for concrete policy examples and although gaps had been narrowed under a Labour government there had been no statement of a vision.

Labour PPC Rachel Reeves agreed: "Child Poverty is not in the public consciousness."

As part of our Fighting Poverty in an Age of Affluence project, kindly supported by The Webb Memorial Trust, Professor Peter Townsend gave a lecture to the Fabian Society on 20 May.

Universal child benefit would reduce the abject poverty of many millions of children, said Professor Peter Townsend at a Fabian lecture.

"Social justice is an unending struggle. Just when means are found of subordinating the worst horros of the human condition...the changes taking place in that condition oblidge those rules to be urgently updated and even transformed," said Townsend.

sidney_blumenthal_in_conversation_with_jonathan_freedland.jpg

Barack Obama is not inspiring a new type of politics and may struggle against John McCain, said Hillary Clinton's advisor Sidney Blumenthal at a Fabian event.

“Obama does not represent the so called ‘new politics.’ It’s a model that goes back 35 years to George McGovern and has never worked in the Democratic Party.”

“The problem that Democratic Party has faced in winning elections is the defection and alienation of working-class voters – the Reagan Democrats. Clinton has won these. Obama may not.”

The government must rekindle New Labour's original election winning coalition if it is to hold onto power, John Denham argued in a lecture to the Fabian Society.

"In 2008 we have to revive every part of the coalition. From the lifelong Labour voters to the young voters who have never voted for us but whose support we need."

"Nothing is more pointless than a debate about which group of voters we want."

He also admitted that the government must be more candid about its failings if it is to maintain the voters' trust:

"If you don't talk increasingly openly about the things that haven't gone right yet, people tend not to give you credit for the things that have," he said.

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