Turning Point 2000

After the two general elections of 1974, and the successful miners' strike of that year, the crisis atmosphere in British politics continued into 1975. The media were full of rumours about a possible coup to set up a new coalition government.

Following our involvement in the Campaign for Social Democracy and the experience of campaigning as a candidate in the first 1974 election, a growing interest in decentralist, environmental, feminist and other "alternative" viewpoints was stimulating me to think more radically. It was an exciting time. For more details, see About James Robertson.

Among the people we got to know were Peter Cadogan and Colin Hutchinson. Peter was the General Secretary of the South Place Ethical Society in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square in London, and minister of the humanist congregation there. He had just published his powerful pamphlet on "Direct Democracy". Colin was actively engaged in the environmental campaigns of the Conservation Society.

After some months of preliminary discussions with many other people, the four of us - Peter Cadogan, Colin Hutchinson, Alison Pritchard and I - established ourselves as an ad hoc committee to organise a meeting in Conway Hall. We decided to call it "Turning Point", after the recently published Club of Rome book Mankind at the Turning Point. (Fritjof Capra's book The Turning Point came out only in 1982.)

We duly held the first Turning Point meeting in Conway Hall on 29 November 1975. Over 200 people took part.

Peter Cadogan chaired the meeting. The speakers and their subjects were:

The meeting aimed to "provide an opportunity for concerned people to discuss the nature of the present crisis. Thinkers and activists in various fields, including ecology, religion and values, science, sex equality and institutional change, will be exploring what common ground they share and what scope there may be for helping and supporting one another".

That set the tone for the thirty-five more big meetings and smaller seminars held by Turning Point/2000 from 1975 to 1996. Their subjects included "The Politics of Tomorrow" (1977), "The Psychology of Social Change (1978), "The Future of Health" (1982), "The Future of Money" (1984), "The Conscious Consumer" (1987), "Beyond Marx, Keynes and Thatcher" (1993), "Overcoming Obstacles to a New Path of Progress" (1996), and many others.

One memorable big meeting was on "Contributions to an Alternative Future" on 12th May 1979. The speakers were Bill Dyson, Hazel Henderson, Willis Harman and Amory Lovins. A Guardian centre-page article two days later, titled "Enter the Future Softly", reported the meeting as "evidence that the alternative movement shadows all sectors of activity, public, private and personal. One day, when the soft revolution comes, presumably all these alternative individual sectors will link into one whole". Spot on!

Papers and correspondence about all these meetings and seminars are in our hard-copy Archive (click here for information about it).

The first Turning Point newsletter went out in June 1976, and from February 1977 we issued 16-page newsletters to a thousand or so recipients around the world regularly twice a year to September 1987. Then, after a two-year gap, we resumed the series under the heading Turning Point 2000.

NEWSLETTERS

1977			1978
Feb 1977	Sept 1977		Feb 1978	Aug 1978
1979			1980
Feb 1979	Aug 1979		Feb 1980	Aug 1980
1981			1982
Feb 1981	Aug 1981		Feb 1982	Aug 1982
1983			1984
March 1983	Aug 1983		April 1984	Aug 1984
1985			1986
March 1985	Aug 1985		March 1986	Aug 1986
1987			1988
March 1987	Sept 1987		Not published
1989			1990
Sept 1989			March 1990	Aug 1990
1991			1992
March 1991	Sept 1991		Feb 1992	Sept 1992
1993			1994
March 1993	Aug 1993		March 1994	Sept 1994
1995			1996
March 1995	Aug 1995		Jan 1996	Aug 1996
1997			1998
Jan 1997	Sept 1997		March 1998	Sept 1998
1999			2000
Jan 1999	Sept 1999		Jan 2000

PAPERS

Turning Point also published two papers.

The Redistribution of Work (1981)

Impressions of the New South Africa (1996)

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