“Tomorrow’s Holyrood election – for which more than 4.2 million people have registered to vote, the highest number yet recorded – has arguably frustrated Scotland’s politicians at least as much as the public on whom their futures depend.”
pandemic
“If we are to design a NCS worthy of the name, it is essential that the full truth about that disaster is made public, including the role of central government, private sector providers and the relationship between the two. The revelations of the last two weeks represent some tentative steps in the right direction.”
Nick Kempe: Would the Scottish Government’s proposals for a National Care Service have averted the death toll in our care homes?
“As our national and international conversations turns increasingly towards post-Covid recovery, we will dwell less on what has traumatised us and more on what might heal us. Of course, this is where it gets tricky.”
Sean Bell: What does a post-Covid recovery for our mental health look like?
“If Scotland is to be a place to live a good life in a good society, we should take the lessons of mutual support groups and the new fluidity of governance offered by the pandemic upheaval. We’ve seen the power when people come together – when communities are shaped by us and for us, all done at a local level.”
Willie Sullivan: Only real local democracy can rebuild our communities
“How did US citizens, all supposedly libertarian somewhere deep down, learn to love Federal bucks, and what does it mean for us?”
Analysis: We are all for ‘Big Government’ now, but what does that mean?
“Care homes are asked to ‘undertake individual risk assessments to assess the rights and needs of individual residents’. The whole point of human rights surely is that no-one should be able to ‘assess’ anyone as not having them?”
Nick Kempe: The politics of care and care home visiting
“We now know what the UK is going to look like in the final years before we reach those irreversible climate tipping points and the planet stops caring how fast our economy is growing. With Scottish elections and possibly another independence referendum now looming, it’s time for the various parties to show their support for an alternative future”
Analysis: UK Budget 2021
“The Tories will no doubt use the victory of state planned and universal healthcare to venerate Britishness. We can instead insist on the value of collective security and care in a destabilising world.”
Analysis: EU vaccine chaos shows planning is the future
“Tenants were already being driven into poverty by unaffordable rents before the pandemic, but the situation is now beyond repair, and we need to undo the damage that has already been done before we start to talk about stabilising things.”
Gordon Maloney: “The Scottish Government had multiple opportunities to freeze rents over the course of the pandemic, but they rejected all of them”
A new report from the University of Edinburgh has reviewed what lessons can be learnt from society’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and applied to the fight against climate change.