RSA - The Return of the Public

The Return of the Public

11th Nov 2010; 13:00

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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RSA Thursday

Are our politicians losing their legitimacy? Can we rely on our financiers, or are they to be forever condemned as morally and intellectually bankrupt?

In their different ways politicians and those who control the private economy system claim to be acting in the public interest. Yet we, the public, have little say in decision-making and almost no power to change the terms of debates about economic and foreign policy. How have we been excluded from so many discussions about the public interest?

Author and journalist Dan Hind visits the RSA to investigate the public's exclusion from political participation. He will argue that the financial crisis, and the ability of those who caused it to preside over policy-making in its aftermath, have made it impossible to ignore what has long been obvious: the institutions on which most of us rely for our knowledge of the wider world have become radically and demonstrably unaccountable and unsafe.

For decades, the public has been told to leave democracy to the experts. Now, Hind outlines a way forwards for a new participator politics, one based on the wholesale reform of the media.

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsahind