By Armida van Rij and Benedict Wilkinson

For policymakers on both sides of the Channel, it is clear that it is in everyone’s interest for the UK and the EU to continue to cooperate on security matters post-Brexit. Until this weekend, however, the big question pending was ‘How?’. Theresa May, speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, attempted to answer this question. Continue reading →

By Laura Jones

Women are in the news! To be clear, that means women are the subject of news reports, not reporting the news. Two months ago, it was revealed that just 25% of front-page stories in daily papers are written by women, and those are mostly about the Royals and TV.

But last Friday was Equal Pay Day, the day that women across the country begin working for free relative to their male peers due to the gender pay gap. You can’t move for reporting on the sexual harassment cases in Hollywood and Westminster. And before that? Revelations about the BBC gender pay gap, reports that British cinema’s gender imbalance is worse now than it was in 1913, of gender discrimination at Uber and sexism across Silicon Valley. Continue reading →

This is the sixth in a series of blogs from the finalists of this year’s Policy Idol competition. These blogs were originally presented as policy pitches at the live final of the competition earlier this year. Policy Idol is an annual competition open to all staff and students at King’s.

By Oliver Marks, Katie-Louise Marvin, Paul Ng and Emma Shleifer

Homelessness is around us all the time yet we barely notice it. Many of us prefer to put the problem down as something out of our control. It is time we face the facts: homelessness is getting worse. Since 2010, it has increased by over 30 per cent nationwide. This is largely due to increased housing costs forcing more people to the streets, and the inefficient management of the issue. Continue reading →

This is the fourth in a series of blogs from the finalists of this year’s Policy Idol competition. These blogs were originally presented as policy pitches at the live final of the competition earlier this year. Policy Idol is an annual competition open to all staff and students at King’s.

By Imran Hyder

Young people’s low civic knowledge and understanding, and their lack of engagement with public issues, are well-detailed problems that plague many Western democracies. Up until the turnaround at the Brexit referendum and the 2017 general election, youth turnout for elections in the UK had been in decline since 1992, from around 66 per cent in the general elections preceding that date, to only 43 per cent of 18–24-year-olds turning out to vote in the 2015 general election. Youth turnout for the preceding 2014 EU parliamentary elections was an appalling 28 per cent. Two years later, around 60 per cent of registered young voters in the UK went to the polls for the Brexit referendum, and a similar percentage of 64 per cent has voted in the 2017 general election. So what was behind the decline and the recent apparent reversal, and how do we move forward? Continue reading →

This is the third in a series of blogs from the finalists of this year’s Policy Idol competition. These blogs were originally presented as policy pitches at the live final of the competition earlier this year. Policy Idol is an annual competition open to all staff and students at King’s.

By Luca Brockmann and Antonio Manzi Gari

Even though Uruguay was picked in 2013 as country of the year by The Economist, mainly due to its progressive social reforms, it still faces deeply entrenched social problems. Among these is the situation of the informal waste collectors, the ‘clasificadores’, whose main source of income is generated by searching for recyclable materials in landfills and residential waste containers which they can take to deposits or recycling plants to be sold. From the limited data available, we estimate that around 4,000 households in Uruguay depend on this ‘trash market’ as their main source of income, which translates to about 18,000 people. Moreover, more than 5,500 of them (28 per cent) are estimated to be children under the age of 14. Continue reading →