James Meadway

The near future is one of grave uncertainty and instability as the new global monetary regime takes shape.

It’s time for some bold thinking on how to fairly protect those in work from the worst of its impact. A £15 an hour minimum wage by 2024 should be the target.

There is little space for optimism in the world we are entering, but instead an urgent need to respond to its demands with a sober sense of its constrained possibilities. Our aim should not be to build utopia, but to lash together a life raft.

Neoliberalism might be dying, but this is no reason for complacency. Some of what is now happening points to a decisively worse world: digitally enabled authoritarianism and overtly discriminatory government policy, for example.

We need to think about COVID-19 as a relatively long-term problem, rather than something that can be dealt with as a short, sharp shock.

US shale oil is unusual, in being privately owned: most of the world’s oil reserves (over 70 percent) are in state hands.