The UK passed a grim milestone yesterday, as Boris Johnson announced that officially recorded coronavirus deaths have passed 100,000. Only five countries have crossed this number: ourselves aside, there is the US, Brazil, India and Mexico.
Public Health
Most will respect the gravity of the circumstances and follow the rules. But lockdowns, as everyone has always acknowledged, are an inherently chaotic last resort. For all the rhetoric of national unity, they come with significant costs.
Source Direct: Lockdown Return Highlights Deeper Failings
There are advance indications that Scotland’s drug death figures, released today, will be the worst ever. They follow a shameful last year, where Scotland overtook America as (per capita) the drug deaths capital of the Western world.
Source Direct: The War on Drugs Failed in Scotland and Beyond
A group of unions, charities, campaign groups and think-tanks have written to First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon urging her to commit to Crown Use Licensing for any Covid-19 vaccines and medicines, to ensure they are available and affordable for everyone. We re-publish the letter below. To find out more about the campaign, click here. […]
Open letter to the First Minister: Make any Covid-19 Vaccine Affordable for All
The UK is going Korean. Having led with a herd immunity approach to this crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now said to be convinced that South Korea’s “test, trace, isolate” is the model for Britain. That means forcing the rate of transmission down low through the lockdown, and at the same time building a […]
Putting the genie back in the bottle
The Scottish Government’s new ‘Framework for Decision-Making‘ document is worth 20 minutes of your time. It sets out a sound set of principles in which to move forward on the public health side, based on learning from best international practise and with the right values at its heart. There is no talk of “flattening the […]
A “class group-think” problem?
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 […]
A tortuous Sunday
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
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 […]
Beware of lockdown passivity
The lockdown is on. The government has finally done what should have happened weeks ago. Now we are running to catch-up, and the government has to run much faster. Both governments, I should say. The Scottish Government has acted in unity with the UK Government, and as such has also been utterly inadequate so far. Without doubt […]