Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves was made a patron of Humanists UK for his humanist contributions to ethical questions in public life.

Writer, commentator, and speaker

Richard Reeves' interests include the economics and politics of wellbeing, trends in British politics and the future of the workplace, and his career has spanned business, the media, academia, think-tanks, central government and the non-profit sector. As well as books, he has written essays and articles forNew Statesman, Management Today, The Guardian, Observer and Prospect, and in 2005 he presented the BBC2 series Making Slough Happy.  In February 2010 he contributed to a pamphlet published byThe Guardian entitled Citizen Ethics in a time of crisis.

He has been Director of Futures at The Work Foundation, Society Editor of The Observer, principal policy adviser to the Minister for Welfare Reform, Economics Correspondent and Washington Correspondent of The Guardian, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and a postgraduate researcher at the University of London. Richard Reeves also speaks to commercial audiences on topics including happy business, leadership, employee engagement, working time, gender equality and the future of work. He is the co-founder of, Intelligence Agency, an ideas consultancy, and Director of think-tank Demos. In the first year of the last Labour Government, he worked as principal policy adviser to the Minister for Welfare Reform, and he is currently a special adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister.

His well received books include John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand (2007), an intellectual biography of the British liberal philosopher and politician, Happy Mondays – putting the pleasure back into work(2001), CoCo Companies - Work, Happiness and Employee Ownership (2007), Papering over the Cracks, Rules, Regulation and Real Trust (2006, with Edward Smith), and The Politics of Happiness(2003). If you buy his books at Amazon.co.uk through this link a small commission will go to Humanists UK.

In November 2009, he gave Humanists UK's Bentham lecture, arguing persuasively that true liberalism – the liberalism of John Stuart Mill – is not the problem, but the solution to the moral and societal problems facing us today. You can read an account of the lecture here, and watch the video here.

See also
http://www.richard-reeves.com/about.asp