Not since Churchill promised victory over Germany in his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech of May 1940 has the UK set itself a more expensive or ambitious policy goal. The initial, official cost estimates for getting to net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 range from £1.5 to £2.1 trillion. That equates to […]
The Treasury will start to wind down the furlough scheme this week – and not a moment too soon. For a start, the support is relatively generous – and costly – and still due to last another three months. Under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), employees on furlough receive 80% of their normal wages […]
If football does come home, it will be met with at the border with restrictions so bafflingly arbitrary it may wish to turn back. Amid the ongoing confusion and uncertainty around international travel, the Government has quietly introduced an exemption that will allow business leaders coming in from ‘amber list’ countries to leave quarantine for […]
Increasing the gap between Covid-19 vaccine doses (up to a maximum of 12 weeks) was one of the more controversial decisions made by the UK government during the pandemic. Medical experts came out for and against the plan when it was announced in January 2021. Faced with the new delta variant, experts are once again […]
Was there more to Matt Hancock’s resignation than meets the eye? Could the Health Secretary’s departure really have been timed to distract us from a far bigger story? That was the suggestion offered over the weekend by the comedian David Schneider, whose social media posts are a litany of glib half-truths masquerading as satire, designed […]
One underweighted cost of the Government’s response to the pandemic is that it seems likely to have made many of us markedly worse citizens, at least in terms of voluntary compliance with the state. Matt Hancock’s admission that he broke social distancing rules with his aide is just the latest proof that the Government has […]
The rise in Covid cases that started in early May took many of us by surprise and spooked the Government, leading to the delay of Step 4 in its pandemic roadmap. The Government always expected numbers to tick up as the ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ were relaxed, but the rate of growth was unnerving. After loitering at […]
Some people seem to think that after the last year of coronavirus restrictions, an additional four week wait to return to life as normal is a relatively small matter; having lived a limited life for the good of others for this long, it seems almost churlish to complain about such a short delay. They are […]
One of the subtexts of the debate over the origin of the pandemic concerns the role of the scientific journals. The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers […]
So 21 June will not, after all, see the great restoration of freedom that we had hoped for. But while restricted businesses and their potential customers will be rightly disappointed, Step 4 (as the now-postponed June 21 roadmap stage is known) was never going to be a complete return to normality, and we should not […]
When people say that we won’t reach “herd immunity” to Covid-19, they are usually referring to an ideal of “full” population immunity: when so many people are immune that, most of the time, there is no community transmission. With full herd immunity, most people will never be exposed to the virus. Even those who are […]
The G7 meeting of world leaders hosted by the UK in Cornwall will have a very different feel than recent summits. The 2020 summit was cancelled because of Covid, but Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda caused much acrimony at previous outings. At Biarritz, France in 2019 and La Malbaie, Canada in 2018, there were high-profile […]
Imagine watching the past 15 months back in montage. There’d be plenty of moving footage of NHS workers, people looking plaintively out of windows and the heroic vaccine effort. But there’d also be certain scenes that made you think the nation had lost its mind. Roped off toys in Welsh supermarkets, police tape on park […]
As the Great British public finally enjoy some summer sun, you can still detect a nervous rumbling. It’s the sound of government advisers fretting that the UK might be on the cusp of yet another Covid wave. Susan Michie, the literal communist who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, warns portentously that we are […]
A year and a half into the pandemic, we still do not know exactly where the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, came from. The prevailing view so far has been that the virus “spilled over” from bats into humans. But there are increasing calls to investigate the possibility that it emerged from a lab in […]
The most striking observation made by Dominic Cummings last week received the least attention. The UK’s plans for crisis, conflict or catastrophe are either wrong, deeply flawed or simply do not exist. That a pandemic sat at the top of our national risk register pre-Covid is clear. Far less clear is why senior civil servants […]
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