Back in late March, as the country had just gone into lockdown, and I was cycling to the House of Lords as we passed what is now the Coronavirus Act, central London was an eerie place. It was practically deserted. #StayHomeSaveLives had just been invented and was really being followed. The noise of construction – […]
Daniel Hannan is not a man you would necessarily trust to give you the truth about anything. He is on record in 2016 saying that, “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”; since when, he himself never stops telling us that’s precisely what we should do. The former MEP and […]
The UK government is fooling itself if it thinks we will ever be free from the massive gravitational field of the world’s only genuine regulatory superpower. Even Americans don’t realise how much their lives are ruled by the European Union. Brussels has risen to accidental pre-eminence as the global regulator. In 2012, a Finnish-American academic […]
Schools across Europe are getting ready to open in the next few weeks. But what are we doing here in the UK? The UK government maintains it has ‘followed the science’ throughout the pandemic and will continue to do so as life returns to normal and the economy is rebooted. With lockdown measures seemingly easing, […]
Three days after my mother’s death in March 2016, the phone rang. It was her GP. He sounded worried. “Daphne, did you know your mother was married? Because your mother’s man-friend’s here with a marriage certificate. It says they were married five months ago.” The shock hit me like a punch in the stomach. During […]
Following publication of the number of care home deaths due to coronavirus, much media attention has focused on the government’s response to concerns raised in 2017 in the Exercise Cygnus report(published by the Guardian on 7 May 2020). The report highlighted potential difficulties for the care home sector in a flu pandemic. Stella Perrott considers […]
The prime minister’s shocking near death experience filled the front pages last weekend but he may soon find himself facing a second one if the Greek confrontation with the EU in 2015 is anything to go by. Five years ago, the long-running financial crisis was coming to a head and saw Athens squaring up to […]
Explosive allegations have been made by a programming ‘expert’ that the underlying code of the program used by Imperial College in London to model population behaviour in response to different Covid-19 measures, was itself deeply flawed and regularly produced different outputs when given the same inputs. The work at Imperial, done under professor Neil Ferguson […]
Vigorous discussion has now begun about how to organise the back to school process, with questions raised about full-time or part-time attendance, and which age groups are to return before others. One important concern that has not yet hit the headlines is the issuing of personal protective equipment (PPE) to those who work with very […]
At a time of national crisis, emergency measures have to be hurriedly put in place; new priorities emerge and regulatory systems have to be adjusted. This is all an essential part of good leadership. But what if these crisis-inspired ‘shortcuts’ remain when normal life resumes? There are worrying signs that this may happen in areas […]
Britain is to recruit 50,000 more customs agents, to handle post-Brexit trade according to a report in the Financial Times yesterday, at a cost to industry of at least £1.5 billion a year. The announcement of plans to build an academy in Kent to train the agents was made by Michael Gove. But as Jean […]
A guide to spotting fake news – COVID-19 edition In an inter-connected world with a captive, susceptible and vulnerable audience – and in this climate of uncertainty – disinformation and fake news thrives. Our natural tendency to share helpful information is exploited by a proliferation of disinformation pollution, seeping into our information bloodstream. Disinformation is […]
The phrase ‘personal protective equipment’, or PPE, was unfamiliar to many before the current crisis. Builders wearing hard hats and high visibility vests were familiar, as were police officers wearing stab vests and firefighters wearing breathing apparatus. These sights are unlikely to raise comment. But now we see members of the public in gloves and […]
There is a growing and increasingly tense row developing between the UK and EU over arrangements for implementing the Northern Ireland protocol in the withdrawal agreement, threatening plans for entry points into the province becoming a de facto EU border. Britain appears to be dragging its feet and going out of its way to be […]
The Government’s reluctance to discuss an exit strategy from Covid-19 suggests it’s trying to hide something, yet again. The public is getting fidgety and wants to know what strategies might surface. But we also want to protect our loved ones and prevent the collapse of the NHS. It’s not unreasonable to expect that when these […]
Prof. Nigel Young explores how public ethics are influencing government coronavirus policies. The Government’s justification for recent sudden policy changes has been the public’s demand for action. This appears to be their preferred option when the policy would potentially have been unpopular if enacted by decree. So, rather than ‘following the science’, the Premier League’s […]
The British Parliament, long held as a bastion of government – which inspired enlightened thinkers such as Montesquieu and is the framework for other parliaments worldwide – needs an overhaul. The first past the post (FPTP) electoral system is the rot. It promotes and reinforces our two-party system; two complacent, comfortable, mainstream parties that fail […]
The American Chamber of Commerce to the EU (AmCham-EU) published a cross-sectoral position paper on Tuesday turning the screw on the UK Government’s hard-line negotiating stance. Although it urges both sides to “work to mitigate disruption as much as possible”, the paper deals a devastating blow to Britain’s present strategy. They make no secret that […]
One almost begins to feel sorry for Boris Johnson, a journalist by training but a court jester by inclination. He has spent years climbing his cursus honorum as he calls it, his ladder to success, only to find when he reached the summit things are not as he imagined. Coronavirus has turned his crown of […]
The stage is already being set by this discredited prime minster and his government. They are positioning themselves as victorious leaders of the country’s emergence from our disastrous encounter with the Covid-19 virus. Moreover, they are already using the pandemic to argue for the UK’s isolation from the rest of the world, by holding to […]
Brexit continues to be the unseen thread that runs through everything happening in this country, even coronavirus. The pandemic has somehow become a proxy for Brexit and for some people it is the continuation of the European campaign by other means. Brexiteers are clearly worried about the impact Covid-19 might have on the government and […]
Even before Covid-19 has finished wreaking havoc across the world, commentators and politicians have started to point fingers and apportion blame for the crisis. So far in the dock we have the Government (primarily Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock), China, the World Health Organisation, the NHS, No 10 political advisors (particularly Dominic Cummins) and the […]
In 2018 Dr Hannah Fry, lecturer on the mathematics of cities at University College London, presented Contagion: the BBC4 Pandemic in which she widely foretold Covid-19. The programme was repeated on 14 March this year. She predicted that a pandemic would start in South East Asia, be an entirely new virus, mutate from an animal […]
There is something odd going on in West Hertfordshire NHS. Last Friday someone named John O’Connell tweeted asking @WestHertsNHS if they could confirm a nurse on Twitter @NHS_Susan was actually a creation of the DHSC Communications Team, and not in fact, one of their staff. Here is the tweet with a picture of ‘Susan’ and […]
Pots away! As a nation, why did people suddenly panic-buy pasta and pizza? I remember reading that some people think these are the key ingredients for the famously healthy “Mediterranean diet” – so perhaps that explains the empty supermarket shelves? But if the aim was to boost our immune systems, why haven’t we heard more […]
Today, the formidable Captain Tom Moore – the new celebrity of the coronavirus crisis – will open the Nightingale hospital in Harrogate, having raised an astonishing £26m for NHS Charities Together doing laps of his garden with a mobility walker. The event will be watched by millions of TV viewers. Then on 30 April – […]
The FT on Friday 17 April carried what they called the inside story of the shambles at the heart of government efforts to purchase thousands of ventilators for coronavirus victims. A tweet by reporter Peter Foster says it all: The Government have now issued a detailed rebuttal, believed to be the first time ever for […]
It’s understandable that British farmers want to export their products to Europe, America and the rest of the world. Already, some 40 per cent of our lamb is currently exported to Europe and the National Farmers’ Union has warned that 25 per cent or more of UK farmers could go out of business in the […]
The coronavirus lockdown has brought a strange tranquillity to much of Europe and now, out of the silence comes the sound of the Brexit ante bring upped. Talks on our future relationship, stalled for a few weeks, are getting underway again with the clock ticking ominously. A videoconference was held this week between the lead […]
School’s out for summer – or is it out for longer? In the space of just one weekend we de-schooled our country. What does this mean for the future of education? In ‘De-schooling Society’ (1971) Ivan Illich, the philosopher critic of the institutions of modern culture, put forward a series of suggestions for learning for […]