Bøger af Stewart Lansley

The amazing true story of how London became home to the Russian super-rich - told for the first time ever. A dazzling tale of incredible wealth, ferocious disputes, beautiful women, private jets, mega-yachts, the world's best footballers - and chauffeur-driven Range Rovers with tinted windows.A group of buccaneering Russian oligarchs made colossal fortunes after the collapse of communism - and many of them came to London to enjoy their new-found wealth. Londongrad tells for the first time the true story of their journeys from Moscow and St Petersburg to mansions in Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Surrey - and takes you into a shimmering world of audacious multi-billion pound deals, outrageous spending and rancorous feuds.But while London's flashiest restaurants echoed to Russian laughter and Bond Street shop-owners totted up their profits, darker events also played themselves out. The killing of ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko in London to the death - in a helicopter crash he all but predicted - of Stephen Curtis, the lawyer to many of Britain's richest Russians, chilled London's Russians and many of those who know them.This is the story of how Russia's wealth was harvested and brought to London - some of it spent by Roman Abramovich on his beloved Chelsea Football Club, some of it spent by Boris Berezovsky in his battles with Russia's all-powerful Vladimir Putin. Londongrad is a must-read for anyone interested in how vast wealth is created, the luxury it can buy, and the power and intrigue it produces.

The Richer, The Poorer charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. This landmark book shows how, for 200 years, Britain's most powerful elites have enriched themselves at the expense of surging inequality, mass poverty and weakened social resilience. Stewart Lansley reveals how Britain's model of 'extractive capitalism' - with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake - has created a two-century-long 'high-inequality, high-poverty' cycle, one broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Why, he asks, are rich and poor citizens judged by very different standards? Why has social progress been so narrowly shared? With growing calls for a fairer post-COVID-19 society, what needs to be done to break Britain's destructive poverty/inequality cycle?

Poverty in Britain is at post-war highs and - even with economic growth -is set to increase yet further. Food bank queues are growing, levels of severe deprivation have been rising, and increasing numbers of children are left with their most basic needs unmet. Based on exclusive access to the largest ever survey of poverty in the UK, and its predecessor surveys in the 1980s and 1990s, Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack track changes in deprivation and paint a devastating picture of the reality of poverty today and its causes. Shattering the myth that poverty is the fault of the poor and a generous benefit system, they show that the blame lies with the massive social and economic upheaval that has shifted power from the workforce to corporations and swelled the ranks of the working poor, a group increasingly at the mercy of low-pay, zero-hour contracts and downward social mobility. The high levels of poverty in the UK are not ordained but can be traced directly to the political choices taken by successive governments. Lansley and Mack outline an alternative economic and social strategy that is both perfectly feasible and urgently necessary if we are to reverse the course of the last three decades.

Is a Universal Basic Income the answer to an increasingly precarious job landscape? Could it bring greater financial freedom for women, tackle the issue of unpaid but essential work, cut poverty and promote greater choice? Or is it a dead-end utopian ideal that distracts from more practical and cost-effective solutions? Contributors from musician Brian Eno, think tank Demos Helsinki, innovators such as California's Y Combinator Research and prominent academics such as Peter Beresford OBE offer a variety of perspectives from across the globe on the politics and feasibility of basic income. Sharing research and insights from a variety of nations - including India, Finland, Uganda, Brazil and Canada - the collection provides a comprehensive guide to the impact this innovative idea could have on work, welfare and inequality in the 21st century.