The Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London.

We are almost halfway through the first coalition government that the UK has had in more than 70 years, which seems like an appropriate time to reflect on its successes and its failures.

Thankfully, Professor Robert Hazell (director of the UCL Constitution Unit) and his Research Associate Ben Yong spent the entirety of 2011 doing just that – roaming the halls of Whitehall and Westminster to rack up an impressive number of interviews with all manner of ministers, journalists and civil servants.

Their work was recently published in The Politics of Coalition and, last Wednesday, both authors presented a quick run-down of some of the key findings in the book.

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The economic crisis has brought into sharp focus the relationship between archaeology and public resources. It was within this context that, as part of the UCL Institute of Archaeology’s 75th Anniversary Series, a debate was convened on 27 February to tackle the issue of Archaeology and Politics.

A Question Time-style format brought forth the opinions of the panel which consisted of Bridget Fox (former Deputy Leader of Islington Council), Jenny Jones (ex-archaeologist and member of the London Assembly), Neal Ascherson (journalist and leading commentator on public archaeology) and Tim Schadla-Hall (Reader in Public Archaeology and the Institute’s resident politician-botherer). Wrestling control of the issues in the Chair was Mark D’Arcy, a BBC Parliamentary Correspondent.

The Chair kicked off the debate and hit the main concern head-on when he asked how the panel would campaign for archaeology in an age of austerity.

In response to this and later questions from the audience, archaeology’s clear contribution in relation to education, international relations and local community engagement was discussed.

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Jeremy Rifkin. Photo by Hardeep Bharj

If Jeremy Rifkin isn’t a big picture thinker, I can’t think who is.

His lecture on the third industrial revolution encompassed the full sweep of human history, stopping in on macroeconomics, ecology, thermodynamics and education policy, with asides on the origins of monotheism, and a conclusion demanding no less than a transformation of global consciousness.

Will McDowall, Research Associate, UCL Energy Institute reports on the event.

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It’s not often that the most distinguished attendees of a lecture are seated in the audience and not on stage. On 26 October, Sir Leigh Lewis, chair of the Commission on a Bill of Rights and former Permanent Secretary at the Department of Work and Pensions, along with Anthony Speaight QC and two other members of the Commission, sat quietly in ‘listening mode’ to a debate on a British Bill of Rights put on by UCL’s Institute for Human Rights (Live-tweeted under #BritishBillofRights @humanrightsucl). Avery Hancock, a first-year PhD student in political theory at UCL, reports.

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