Author: Professor Juliet Lodge

Schools and covid – as any parent knows, kids spread coughs and colds. And covid. But that evidence escapes the prime minister.

Juliet Lodge writes about the political corruption during the pandemic; PPE contracts for friends, mismanagement of the virus, and going against the Northern Irish Protocol. The EU have lost faith in the UK and are preparing a code of practice for all member governments.

While the UK is happy to allow international travel, the ‘covid pass’ requirements for other countries are much stricter

Juliet Lodge writes about the UK’s failure to protect EU citizens’ personal data, or GDPR, ever since we left the EU. Britain used to follow EU law, whereby data was not allowed to be sold to companies or governments;

Doctors are taking the government to court over its decisions to award PPE contracts to inexperienced and ill-prepared companies. Last night EveryDoctor beamed giant illuminated messages onto the walls of official buildings in London.

The big question is – will our Yorkshire MPs be at the EveryDoctor press briefing on the growing privatisation of the NHS tomorrow at 11 am tomorrow? The EveryDoctor campaign group and its supporters have sent out some 2,400 emails inviting all 650 of our MPs to attend. So far only just over 90 have signed up, including Hull East’s Labour MP, Karl Turner.

With the UK officially removed from the EU’s Erasmus Plus scheme, Prof. Juliet Lodge asks whether these benefits are gone for good. With Erasmus Plus lost, can the UK truly remain the educational powerhouse that it once was, and will our soft power be forever diminished?

Juliet Lodge reviews the EU’s covid certificate programme, how will it work in reality, and what future steps could be. The covid certificate programme will be free for all EU citizens, and will help enable travel across the continent.

Covid passports are likely to be sold to us as our way out of lockdown – but are they ID cards in any other name? Professor Juliet Lodge looks at the wider issues around this controversy.

Digital identity cards are supposed to confirm who we say we are in specific contexts. Now the government wants to revise its guides and link up our personal information in ways that allow information to be shared by various organisations wanting to check our personal details.

EveryDoctor are deeply concerned that the trauma triggered by the pandemic will have lasting consequences for the mental health of frontline NHS workers and the public.

To depict this as the EU being ‘nasty’ and pretend this is just about vaccines is to miss the point completely. As every politician or civil servant who has worked in the EU over the past 40+ years know, informal cooperation is how ‘constructive cooperation’ gets done – on the island of Ireland and in the EU.

The more we’ve learned about how Covid-19 spreads, the more it makes sense to wear a proper FFP2 mask. And with new more contagious variants appearing, it’s crucial that we take better steps to protect ourselves.

With all the conflicting stories circulating about the various Covid-19 vaccinations, will you, or won’t you, go and get immunised when you get the call? Weighing up the pros and cons isn’t exactly easy.

A covid passport is not the only or even the most important answer to getting back to some form of normality. And as long as the UK’s covid rates remain the worst in the world, we are likely to be blacklisted. Restrictions against travellers from areas where high infection and death rates continue will not be lifted anytime soon.

Juliet Lodge looks at what the UK education sector will lose from abandoning the Erasmus scheme and replacing it with the Turing programme. “Alan Turing, after whom the government’s scheme has been named, would probably not have approved of this act of what Nicola Sturgeon calls educational vandalism.”

Juliet Lodge looks at how the European Union is moving its docucmentation processes online with e-visas, and the challenges this presents. “So the new e-visa procedures illustrate the importance to successful policy implementation of ascertaining, anticipating and addressing potential concerns at the outset. “

We have been warned about the logistical problems we will face when the transition period ends on 31 December and we formally leave the EU single market and customs union. We know there will be supply chain problems affecting imported goods, including food and medicine. But the logistical nightmare doesn’t stop there and covid vaccine […]

In a month’s time, the UK could be before the European Court of Justice for breaching the withdrawal agreement. Yesterday, the EU commission president sent a letter of notice to the UK, starting infringement proceedings against us. This states the EU’s view that, by unilaterally trying to change the terms of the agreement signed last […]

Something stinks and it’s not just the fish. Britain is rotting from its heart, as its democratic institutions and processes are eroded from within. It’s not just individual things, like cutting the number of days parliament sits, and thereby cutting the time available for MPs to make the government publicly accountable (we know that if […]

The computer says, “No, you Josh from a community comprehensive in Mexborough shan’t go to Oxford”. Nor shall you, Amber from Bransholme, Hull’s largest council estate. But the computer says “yes” to Harry from Rishworth and Olivia from Ampleforth. As for grades, the computer says “yes” to downgrading Josh’s and Amber’s and “yes” to inflating […]

Is it too kind to describe the government’s handling of the covid crisis as a dog’s dinner? It’s certainly a mess for all manner of reasons: incompetence, over-centralisation, fragmentation of procurement, ignoring public health experts and labs, chaotic and ad hoc reactions, inefficiency, dogma, spin and outsourcing testing to a myriad of private companies. On […]

You know something’s rotten in the state of Denmark when a Lord gets the same money for ‘signing in’ once, as a single person gets in a month on universal credit. In four days, not counting their Lordships’ allowances, their sign-in takes nearly £1m from the public purse, which is filled by anyone paying tax. […]

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the government is asleep on the job – not paying attention and not asking critical questions affecting the safety and security of the UK. This is as much about the Russian report as it is about the very serious issues surrounding the role of the British parliament […]

One of the more intriguing aspects of what parliamentary scrutiny committees do concerns the way in which they have, more recently, revealed how weak parliament is when it comes to controlling government. MPs are now setting about challenging this. At a time when the UK is facing the double whammy of Covid-19 and Brexit, it […]

Even before the general data protection regulation (GDPR) came into force, US authorities had lobbied hard, with some success, to dilute the protections the EU wanted when it agreed the so-called privacy shield. The privacy shield is designed broadly to guarantee an equivalent, not identical, level of protection for data as the GDPR. It has […]

Rushing headlong into anything serious should be worrying at the best of times. But when we’re facing the worst of times any of us have known, it is crazy. An illusion has somehow been created of there being plenty of time before the transition period ends. But this is far from the reality. The UK […]

Can the UK afford to ignore what the EU is doing on Covid-19? Or will it gradually try to join in with its ambitious plans for the future? Opening pubs at 6am was another U-turn for the government. But it didn’t deflect attention from it casually letting drop that the UK would participate in EU […]

It’s very tempting to ask Antony Gormley how much paint would be needed to cover his 65-foot tall Angel of the North with its wingspan as wide as a Boeing 767. And how much it’d cost to slap red, white and blue on it. No doubt a lot less than the £900,000 for tarting-up the […]

It didn’t used to be like this: buying tickets online to travel from Leeds to Amsterdam via Brussels by train with just a passport and euros. Back in the day, we needed travel agents to source tickets well in advance, book Channel or North Sea ferries, point us to the ticket counters in the different […]