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...
It wasn't clear at the time, but a couple of weeks ago I gave what is likely to be my last public talk for a while, reproduced below, at an event called Human Nature, organised by the Experimental Thought Co. Already it seems an age away, but even then our...
Nothing like the current upheavals around the world in the wake of the novel coronavirus, COVID19, have been experienced in peacetime. But societies have mobilised like this during conflict and mass conflagrations. Are there lessons to be learned, and could it lead to...
Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms explore how crises reveal fundamental flaws in underlying political and economic models and call for a new approach It looks like it’s going to be a national emergency, or, in Whitehall terms, a very grave civil contingency. Novel...
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.
