POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Finding Radical Danny

Is the author of Power To The People really that radical?

PlainTalkBadManners
9 min readJul 31, 2024

--

Danny, smiling, fist raised in ‘solidarity’ holding a copy of his book.
Author’s image of Danny Sriskandarajah. July 17th, London

A Guardian headline declares Danny Sriskandarajah to be a radical, a radical who left Oxfam to fight for democracy.

The radical who left Oxfam to fight for democracy: ‘Eight men have the same wealth as half the world. Where does this end?’ | Politics | The Guardian

I’m not convinced. Oxfam, Democracy and Radical don’t belong in the same sentence.

Off I go then, to search for this radical Danny.

The same Guardian article tells us,

In his time at Oxfam, Sriskandarajah made the case trenchantly that the existence of billionaires posed an active hazard to the global functioning of civic life.

and Danny, as new head of the New Economics Foundation think tank, declares,

The NEF is working on an “extreme wealth line”: “There’s the extreme poverty line, the line below which it’s socially unacceptable for someone to have to live. Why can’t we have a similar one for the upper limit? A level of net assets that society thinks is problematic? It’s likely to buy you too much influence … It’s a result of policy or market failure.”

--

--

PlainTalkBadManners

Ex-Doctor, Ex-Catholic, Ex-Muslim. Climate Worrier & Wannabe Climate Warrior. Novelist. Human. Label resistant. https://thefriendlyradicalnextdoor.substack.com/