Mark Henderson will be talking about his new book, The Geek Manifesto

ORDER THE BOOK HERE: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Geek-Manifesto-Why-science-matters/dp/0593068238/

Whether we want to improve education or cut crime, to enhance public health or to generate clean energy, science is critical. Yet politics and public life too often occupy a science-free zone.

Just one of our 650 MPs is a scientist. Ministers ignore, and even sack, scientific advisers who offer inconvenient evidence. The NHS spends taxpayers’ money on sugar pills it knows won’t work, while public funding for research that would boost the economy is cut. Groundless media scares, taken up by politicians who should know better, poison public debate on vaccines and climate change, GM crops and nuclear power.

In this agenda-setting book, Mark Henderson builds a powerful case that science should be much more central than it is to government and the wider national conversation. It isn’t only that scientific understanding is passed over as decisions are made; the experimental methods of science aren’t applied to evaluating policy either.

Politicians, Henderson argues, pay lip service to science for a very simple reason: they know they can get away with it. And that will change only when people who care about science get politically active. It’s time to mobilise the geeks.

Something is stirring among those curious kids who always preferred sci-fi to celebrity magazines. As the success of Brian Cox and Ben Goldacre shows, geeks have stopped apologising for an obsession with asking how and why, and are starting to stand up for it instead.

The Geek Manifesto shows how people with a love of science can get political, to create a force our leaders can no longer afford to ignore.

The geeks are coming. Our countries need us.

A free-form question and answer session, which will be kicked-off by David Allen Green.

The government maintains that the Health and Social Care Bill doesn’t mean the privatisation of the NHS. 

Is this true? 

What are the main changes implied by the Bill, and what do they imply for patients and taxpayers? 

What are the reasons for the changes, and do they add up to a persuasive case? 

Colin Leys is an emeritus professor of political studies at Queen’s University, Canada, and an honorary professor at Goldsmiths University of London. His most recent books include Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest (2001) and (with Stewart Player) The Plot Against the NHS (2011). 

 Addiction is a very modern obsession. Like allergies, everyone's got one, yet many people present the evidence for their 'addictive personality' by announcing their greater-than-average capacity for biscuits. 

But what is addiction? 

Compulsion, behaviour, illness, all three, or none of the above? 

Do AA and other 12 step recovery programmes really work? 

And will a skeptic *ever* admit to needing a higher power?


Tania Glyde is the author of Cleaning Up, a memoir about how she took on British drinking culture and survived.

£2 on door, all welcome.

Some hardcore geekiness and policy wonkery by Dr Graeme Archer

(Ph D in statistical inference; professional statistician; winner of George Orwell Prize for political blogging 2011; New Statesman blogger; Telegraph columnist.)

 Why this appeal matters, in so many ways...

Talk will be by Hayley Stevens, the leading skeptic authority on ghosts and ghosthunting.

All welcome, £2 on door.

The emergence of gender variant people, practices and identities following the publication of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Transvestites (1909) and the inter-war invention of sex reassignment technologies posed considerable challenges to conservative, socialist, feminist and gay/lesbian politics: if ‘male’ and ‘female’ were no longer true, then what was? 

Consequently, transgender people became an object of fascination, and plenty was written about them – by the mainstream media, feminists and the medical establishment whose management of transsexualism has proved especially controversial – with transgender people themselves frequently excluded from the conversation, with their identities erased or discounted, or having their experiences framed by people or outlets with no lived experience of being transgender.

Juliet Jacques author of the Guardian’s Transgender Journey series which documents the gender reassignment process from a first-person perspective, critically examines some of the ideas and myths that grew around transgender people, and the gulf between mainstream political and media discussions of transgender issues and the autonomous transgender theory and identities that developed in response.

Heather Brooke returns to Westminster Skeptics to talk about her new book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-will-Digitised-Dispatches-Information/dp/0434020907

There is more information in the world than ever before - but who is in control?

At the centre is the Establishment: governments, corporations andpowerful individuals who have more knowledge about us, and more power, than at any other time in history. Circling them is a new generation of hackers, pro-democracy campaigners and internet activists who no longer accept that the Establishment should run the show.

In her gripping, revelatory new book, award-winning journalist and campaigner Heather Brooke takes us inside the Information War, from the hackerspaces of Boston and Berlin to the UK’s journalism hub and Iceland’s free speech revolution; from the headquarters of Google and Facebook to Collateral Murder, Cablegate and the murky world of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Along the way Brooke explores the most urgent questions of the digital age: where is the balance between freedom and security? In an online world, does privacy still exist? And will the internet empower individuals, or usher in a new age of censorship, surveillance and oppression?

Praise for The Silent State

‘Passionate, eloquent and persuasive’ Times Book of the Week

‘Wonderful… Heather Brooke has changed British public culture
and earned an essential place in our national history’ Peter Oborne

‘***** If you care about our so-called democracy, you must read
this profoundly shocking book’ Mail on Sunday

The acclaimed Guardian journalist comes to Westminster Skeptics to discuss the recent civil disturbances

All welcome; £2 a head