How did you get involved in selling the magazine?  

Well, I was literally sleeping rough, and one of my friends, Claire, was doing the magazine and told me it was a good idea for me to make money to get into shelters and get interested in charity work. And I've always done charity work in Cardiff, where I used to work, and I’ve helped people in youth clubs and the Prince's Trust, where I met the Queen's husband…

Traditional capitalist businesses are dictatorships. Small groups of managers and shareholders make all decisions, and reap most of the profits. In contrast, a workers’ cooperative is a business where the employees own and control everything. Workers are members, which means they have an equal say in decision-making and decide how profits are invested.

The movement of people is as old as humanity. Countries are fundamentally invented shared myths; borders, immigration controls and passports are just a blip in history. For most of human existence, movement was free if you could afford it - although money to move was another problem. People flee war, starvation, and seek better economic prospects in other countries. This is especially true of people coming to the UK, where its rulers have historically looted the world's wealth, resulting in improved living conditions relative to the rest of the world. And these same elites continue to sponsor global war, genocide and invasion, increasing the need for people to flee their homes.

In January 1997, Friends of the Earth called a rally at the construction site of the Newbury Bypass. The plan was for a candlelit vigil, followed by speeches, and then a march to the building site to tie ribbons and messages to the fence. The event was billed as a one-year anniversary reunion for all the activists and campaigners who had spent the previous winter occupying tree houses, dodging vast armies of security guards, attaching themselves to barrels full of concrete and using many other inventive tactics in an attempt to slow or stop the felling of more than 10,000 trees to make way for the construction of the road. The eviction of over 30 different treehouse camps along the route of the planned bypass from January to March of 1996 had become a national cause celebre, attracting thousands of activists in freezing conditions to try and stop the clearances.

Inequality is harmful. People who are discriminated against experience physical, emotional and social effects, which worsen their long-term health and well-being. These are collective traumas. Suffering is experienced in similar ways across communities and social groups living with historical oppression or the injustice of capitalism. One-to-one therapy cannot treat these collective wounds. It is inaccessible for many due to cost, but crucially, individual treatment makes healing a personal responsibility without tackling the social and political sources. 

The Woodcraft Folk is a cooperative youth movement. It was originally established in the 1920s by young people who wanted to create an organisation that facilitated a relationship between children and nature whilst rejecting much of the hierarchy and nationalism of other youth movements at the time. In opposition to the authoritarian tendencies of the Scouts, the Woodcraft Folk aims at more horizontal structures. When the Woodcraft Folk started, children were generally expected to refer to their teachers and guardians by the titles 'Sir' and 'Miss'. However, at Woodcraft, these formalities were avoided. New names and titles were given to both young people and adult volunteers, linguistically signalling an aspiration, if not always a reality, of engaging with one another on more equal terms.

There’s little charm in the current US administration’s version of the American Dream. Look at the original model. Not even its populariser, the financier-cum-historian James Truslow Adams, tied it exclusively to wealth-creation and the accumulation of power. In his version, while the Dream included the promise of cars and high wages, it was underpinned by a Protestant ethic of hard work and a notion of individual flourishing. Adams pictured a people unrestrained by the old world’s fusty ways and class biases, pursuing their happiness by the exploitation of the country’s seemingly inexhaustible natural resources. Enrichment, born of industrialisation, was the Dream’s driver. Liberty and equality were its end. 

Just in the last 24 hours of writing this article storms have smashed both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, while in Jamaica, government officials warned that as Hurricane Melissa intensified into a Category 5 storm, many impacted communities ‘will not survive the flooding’, and that no community in the Jamaican capital Kingston is safe.

The speed with which the hurricane intensified is no longer shocking. Scarcely a day goes by without multiple news stories covering the increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change.