The Antidote: How People-Powered Movements Can Fix Politics

The gap between personal and formal politics has been widening globally and locally. As personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian inspired by new social movements, neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Yet this paradox may also offer a path to transformation.

Using international evidence and examples, The Antidote explores what we can learn from the equalisation of personal roles and relationships that’s been taking place, to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and make possible more participatory and liberatory policy and politics. It sets out the barriers we face and offers a route map to bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics.

Peter Beresford OBE is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia, Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, the national disabled people’s organisation and has long term lived experience of welfare benefits and mental health services. He is also Emeritus Professor at Brunel University London the University of Essex and Honorary Professor at Edge Hill University.

He is a long-standing advocate of participation and empowerment as an activist, educator, researcher and writer. He has published over 30 books, and many chapters and journal articles, writing regularly for The Guardian and other mainstream and online media.