By Dominic Browne

The Big Society has a big problem, according to an Ipsos MORI poll last month, 91 per cent of adults don’t want to be involved. The government could turn to the voluntary sector but they have already cut their funding forcing them into making redundancies. So where else can they find willing and able community workers outside the public sector? Answer: religious groups however that brings difficult questions in itself.

By Matt Owen

Stevan Riley’s excellent Fire in Babylon covers how the West Indies of the late 1970s abandoned the flamboyant style of losing dubbed ”calypso cricket,” and morphed into a juggernaut of a side who went undefeated in a test series for more than fifteen years; James Erskine’s From the Ashes, meanwhile, presents the celebration of England’s 1981 Ashes win as a rare moment of national unity during a time in which Thatcher was introducing the country to her brutally divisive brand of neoliberalism.