Month: June 2016

Clouds Over Europe

Peter Cripps comment , ,

uk and eu flags

This is meant to be a blog about technology not politics but forgive me if I deviate slightly from the norm to comment on probably the most dramatic event in the UK since the war. At around 6am this morning it was officially announced that 51.9% of the UK had voted to leave the European Union. Within minutes the pound went into free fall and the FTSE 100 index fell by more than 8%. Just before 9am the prime minister, David Cameron, resigned saying he would step down in October by the time of the Conservative party conference.

As I sit here typing this, I look out of the window at my garden, the sun is shining and nothing much seems to have changed since yesterday. For my generation, the one that had free university education, final salary pensions and the ability to fairly easily get on the housing ladder probably not a lot will change. In the short term our investments will go down, our houses may decrease in value and our German cars may become more expensive but in what time we have left on this earth I’m pretty sure we will not find ourselves starving or homeless.

For the millennial and subsequent generations however this may not be the case. This is the generation that is already drowning in student debt with little ability to buy their own houses and have a secure future. As a parting blow to that generation* we have now taken away their right to the freedom of movement to live and work in 27 other European countries. We are about to remove the protections they have from European laws covering their human and working rights and we are threatening to cut off the free flow of immigration that has contributed both economically and culturally to the lifeblood of this country, certainly in my lifetime. All for what? To save ourselves £8 Billion a year which for even a higher rate tax payer only equates to something like £100 a year in income tax and National Insurance.

So what to do? As my friend Jeremy Walker says in this post let’s use this time to take stock of where we are and where we want to go as a nation. Let’s not allow the nationalists and “little Englanders”to dictate our future. As this referendum has shown, politics is important and impacts all of our lives. One week ago a British politician was murdered because what she believed in did not tie in with the beliefs of someone else. Hopefully that is an isolated incident that will not be repeated. As a nation we now need to work together more than ever if we are to navigate our way through the choppy waters we are all going to face for the coming months and years.

Just a few short weeks ago I and several hundred other people attended TEDx Brum where the theme was the Power Of Us. In both the speakers and the attendees it was heartening to see such an array of ages, gender, race, genre and opinions – diversity in every spectrum that all fed into the aim of the conference. After yesterdays historic and game changing referendum result we now need more than ever “the power of us” to pull together as a nation and to work with, rather than against each other.

Please can we do that.

* 61% of those over 65 voted to leave whilst for the 18 – 24 year olds 75% voted to remain.

TEDx Brum – Power of Us

Peter Cripps comment, presenting , , , ,

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Last Saturday (11th June) Birmingham held its very own TED conference, TEDx Brum – Power of Us, at its Town Hall in Victoria Square. To say this was one of the most incredibly well organised events I have ever attended is a major, major understatement. Everything about TEDx Brum was just superbly well designed; from the beautifully laid out and printed program of events (below) to the military like precision of the event itself where a continuous stream of speakers and performers came out on stage and wow’ed the audience with their passion and the power of their messages.

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Lauren Currie, one of the speakers at this years conference, has summarised why this event was so different and greater than its #PowerOfUs hashtag here. For me, her point ‘no painting-by-numbers’ really sums up why this was such a different conference from ones I, and I’m sure many others at the event, have attended before.

“It was a conference that wasn’t about ‘meeting new people’ or ‘learning new things’ – which are very middle-class objectives for actions. Nobody had an objective of getting new business cards. No speaker had slides full of ‘tweetable wisdom’. These weren’t presentations that had been done a thousand times before to a thousand different conference halls – this was new and real. There was no existing structures justifying themselves. Only the new, the vibrant and the experimental – at a stage where we can start to test and adjust and adapt and copy.”

Anyone who has watched a TED talk at ted.com will know that the presentation skills of the speakers are absolutely top-notch and something any of us that does public speaking, no matter how small or large the audience, aspires too. I can honestly say that every single one of the speakers and performers at TEDx Brum could easily have presented at a full blown TED and exceeded the very considerable speaking skills of those presenters. Whether it was @AdnanSharif1979 telling us about the horrors of forced organ donation (and why we should all sign up to be organ donors), @AnisaHaghdadi, founder of @beatfreeks telling us we needed to “build the thing that builds more things” or the heartfelt and incredibly brave talk by @JayneHardy, founder of Blurt who got a standing ovation for speaking about her own struggles with depression, everyone spoke with total and absolute passion and dedication to their own cause as well as the wider one of unleashing the #PowerOfUs.

As @ImmyKaur the curator of TEDx Brum says in her introduction to this years conference:

“Birmingham is an archetype of the future many cities face. This future will not come without hard work, disruption and genuine collaboration. We will need to come together across our traditional sectors and divides to create, imagine and build the future together. We must unleash the true #PowerOfUs to catalyse this transformation.”

There are lots of truly amazing things happening in Birmingham right now. I was part of an event a few weeks ago whose aim is to pull together the tech community in Birmingham and its wider surrounds. All of these strands need to come together to make the change that this great city deserves and which is long overdue. Here’s to the #PowerOfUs and all the great people in Birmingham that are making this happen.