More bad news was brought in January looking back over the previous year. Unsurprisingly, 2020 was either the hottest year ever recorded, according to NASA, or – the UK Met Office determines – it was just squeezed into second place by 2016. What is not in doubt is...
On the morning of Sunday 24 January, 97,329 lives had been taken by the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, according to Government statistics. By some estimates, the country had already passed 100,000 deaths 11 days earlier. Marking this milestone is in some sense...
Each year the Financial Times newspaper investigates the UK’s upcoming economic prospects with a survey of economic analysts. New Weather’s Andrew Simms took part. The survey’s predictions often prove highly accurate but after such an extraordinary year, and with...
By David Boyle, Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms “We created 400 clone towns nobody loves. We shouldn’t get upset - job losses aside - about changing them.” So said Mark Robinson, co-founder of landlords Ellandi and chair of the government’s High Streets Task Force, on...
Andrew Simms and Sarah Woods reflect on the accidental relevance of their performance-lecture Neoliberalism: The Break-Up Tour for the launch of Digital Theatre+'s new filmed discussion. “A pandemic spreads'' are the first three words of our participatory show...
Outsourcing and privatisation died at 15:18 on Wednesday 4 November 2020. Or thereabouts. That was of course a misquotation of the great architectural critic Charles Jencks who passed judgement on the failures of inhuman, modernist buildings. It was also when the...
Lindsay Mackie, Andrew Simms and David Boyle argue that the UK test and trace debacle shows why capitalism - critics of which are now banned from school educational materials - isn't working The testing crisis in which we are now engulfed could easily - like the...
In my just published eco-thriller, Skyseed, the untimely eruption of an obscure volcano in Bolivia dooms an illicit programme to engineer the climate to failure – and worse. The events that follow are pure fiction and hopefully will stay that way. Nonetheless,...
The tickbox phenomenon, which I have been writing about for most of this year, seems finally to have reached its apotheosis with the appointment of the queen of tickbox, Dido Harding, to run the government’s test and trace service. Now I have never met her, I’m afraid...
POWER OUT is a new BBC thriller about power and protest on a dying planet, starring Vinnie Heaven and written by New Weather's Sarah Woods. It asks what happens when the power system we’re hooked up to fails? If this is power, then POWER OUT: POWER OUT on the BBC...