How to dodge the next wave of ghost towns
Bernie Ward is a friend mine, but she is also something of a heroine. For six thrilling years, she led the local economic tools team at the New Economics Foundation. During that time she developed, not just money flows analysis but also Bizfizz (enterprise coaching)...
Test and What? How official lack of confidence in the public sector worsened the crisis
In the sorry tale of the UK’s response to the corona virus there are many lessons. The current unfolding illumination is how test and trace is destined to fail because of the actions of this and previous governments which have rendered a sensible response to testing...
How privatisation designed-in the PPE chaos
Sometimes we are enabled to see clearly. A light shines and we have the ‘intake of breath’ moment. One such widely shared moment has been revelations about the brazen breaking by members of the government of their own public safety measures. Another such a moment,...
Where do we begin the transition?
In a recent poll only nine percent of respondents said they wanted to return to the world as it was pre-Covid19. We need to be preparing that new world now. So let us imagine it, this new world. The kindness of neighbours we can leave on one side for the moment - it’s...
A Government in charge but in denial of its role
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...
The floods still to come
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...
National Gardening Leave: an opportunity to reinvent working lives and urban spaces
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...
What are we like? Economic myth and the kindness counter-revolution
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...
Why and how rationing works – lessons from rapid civic mobilisation
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...
Time for a genuinely civil, civil contingencies response
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...