Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog. This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE. We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore. You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling. This is Y...
JACK SHUTE Having watched a TED talk by Guy Standing, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, I reflected on the emerging social class called the ‘Precariat’ and how they could, and to a certain extent have already, drastically altered the political landscape. Standing describes how we are in the painful construction of a globalised market economy and states that currently it is a delicate moment, with growing inequalities and insecurities starting to threaten long-nurtured enlightenment values. The supply side economic policies pursued since the Thatcher-Reagan days has resulted in a system of “rentier capitalism,” in which a rising share of income is going to those who own physical, financial and intellectual property. This effectively means that the income distribution system of the 20th century has broken down, and will not come back. As a result, one could certainly argue that it has generated a new global class structure. At the top you have a plutocracy of multi-billionair...