It’s there in black and white on the Scottish Government website: ‘People should avoid travelling unless it is essential…This guidance is for people planning to visit second homes…”. That the Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood broke that rule not once but twice is very bad. But the government mishandling thereafter raises more questions than the […]
Coronavirus
“If the festivals return to business as usual in 2021, complete with the same bad bosses, lousy wages and illegal working practices, with corners cut and conditions worsened in a mad drive for profit to make up for the losses faced this year, all efforts made to help them now will ring hollow.”
Sean Bell: When Edinburgh’s festivals return, priorities must change
“If politicians start talking about the post-virus priority being to get you all back to the shopping malls, then let’s use that 2021 election to tell them we want a better and more resilient society at the end of this.”
Robin McAlpine: When this is done, let’s build a resilient society
There are worrying signs about the UK’s Covid-19 trajectory. The UK’s death toll is now higher than Italy’s was at this stage, and is following the US in accelerating when other countries were by now seeing the rate of increase slowing. ITV Political Editor Robert Peston responded to that fact by stating plainly: “This is […]
The (lack of) testing scandal
Food. Everyone needs it. It’s one of those universal essentials that goes on regardless of a pandemic. But most of us are so used to getting it on our plate that we don’t worry about it how it got there, and whether the mechanisms which led it to get there are resilient. There is growing […]
Chickens coming home to roost
The coronavirus pandemic is the latest and perhaps most significant shock to an already unstable global order, writes David Jamieson
Coronavirus: What’s left of the world Brexit Britain and indy Scotland want to join?
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a wise man if ever there was one, described hope as “being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness”. Where do I see hope in our global Pandemic? In the struggles of people who are realising their own power to shape their lives and the society around them. In the […]
The Silverburn Suffragettes, and other sources of hope
“Luckily, just as causes for pandemics and environmental degradation are related, so too are the solutions: state intervention and following science.”
Lena Swedlow: Climate, Coronavirus and the shared solution
There’s a common refrain at the moment in the UK which goes along the lines of ‘no one can predict what is going to happen’, or ‘there is a lot of unknowns’. That is only partly true. The thing about a global crisis of this nature is that it may be very fast, but it […]