In the sorry tale of the UK’s response to the corona virus there are many lessons. The current unfolding illumination is how test and trace is destined to fail because of the actions of this and previous governments which have rendered a sensible response to testing...
Sometimes we are enabled to see clearly. A light shines and we have the ‘intake of breath’ moment. One such widely shared moment has been revelations about the brazen breaking by members of the government of their own public safety measures. Another such a moment,...
In a recent poll only nine percent of respondents said they wanted to return to the world as it was pre-Covid19. We need to be preparing that new world now. So let us imagine it, this new world. The kindness of neighbours we can leave on one side for the moment - it’s...
The Government and Professor Chris Whitty, its Chief Medical Officer, have, to be fair, always told us that this and the next two or three weeks are going to be horrible and difficult. That the death rate would be high - almost 1000 people a day now - and that...
Prof Bill McGuire writes that the pandemic is like a 'waterless flood' that is bracing us for what new studies suggest are much larger ones to come A little more than a decade ago, Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood - the second book in her dystopian...
How often are ideas that once seemed radical and to some, even preposterous, made tame by the turn of events? That is the case now with the suggestion that Britain should experiment with National Gardening Leave, an idea suggested in a 2012 pamphlet I wrote with my...
This pamphlet looks at how the UK is unprepared for a new era of crises and disasters. To illuminate the national predicament we look at lessons from recent history, and what we can learn, often from countries in the Global South, about the kind of local planning required and resources needed to be ready for when storms and other disasters strike near where we live.
