HOW DO WE PRESERVE BRITAIN AS A TOLERANT PLACE?
In Episode 9 of Do Not Adjust Your Focus, the podcast from strategic and creative advisory firm Blurred, Stuart talks to business woman and campaigner Gina Miller, who twice initiated legal challenges against the government standing up for Parliamentary democracy… And won.
Her first victory came in September 2017, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of giving MPs a say over triggering Article 50 - the legal mechanism taking the UK out of the EU.
Her second victory came in September 2019, when the Supreme Court ruled that Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful.
Consequently known as one of the most prominent names and faces of Remain and somewhat of a figurehead of the pro-EU camp, Gina and Stuart discussed some of today’s major battles: Europe, ESG, ethics and education, highlighting why we must preserve Britain as a tolerant place, now more than ever.
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What was it like being thrusted into the public eye at such an incredibly strained, emotionally fraught time?
You use words like naïve and claim you “got it wrong”. Would you do anything differently?
The world and the media learned a lot about Gina Miller via that campaign. What did you learn about yourself?
Talking about values, what did you learn about the values of this country?
That politics of division, the polarised and polarising language that we see across society still even now - it is worrying it seems to still be so prevalent. Do you feel optimistic about the future?
We are talking here about building a kinder, more humane, more caring society. What would the ‘Gina Miller prescription’ for a better, more tolerant Britain involve?
A lot has been written about the Black Lives Matter movement feeling like a real inflection point right now in terms of empathy, equality, tolerance. Do you agree, or have we been here before?
You are a Co-founder of an investment management firm, and have been highly critical of the murkiness and misclassification that is endemic of the ethical investing sector – what’s going wrong there?
I feel that psychologically we are still quite a backwards looking country in so many ways, and we pay more attention to our past than our future.
Should we be teaching things like ethics and leadership in our schools?
COVID has highlighted various issues more starkly than ever - human rights, employment rights, workplace health and safety etc. Do you agree there will be much more scrutiny on those from now on?
You’ve been calling for legal reform around the act of making a will. Do you want to explain the problem briefly and what you want to see change, and then how your new campaign “Messages of Love” works?
