In a piece for the Guardian today, columnist and rent-an-activist Owen Jones naively asks “Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?”  It isn’t even an original thought.  There are memes all over social media just now comparing the current death rate from COVID-19 (around …

The UK government has published plans for responding to the threatened COVID-19 pandemic which ministers say could affect between 50 and 80 percent of the population, and could result in 20 percent of the workforce being off sick at the same time. As with all of these things, we begin …

An excerpt from my new book which is available on Amazon or to order from bookshops and libraries: I didn’t set out to write about Brexit.  My interests have always been in the far more profound crisis stemming from what environmentalists – among others – refer to as trying to have …

The late Albert Bartlett, a professor in nuclear physics at the University of Colorado, famously explained that: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” What Bartlett was referring to was the way in which most people misunderstand growth – whether of an …

Before you can fleece or slaughter sheep, you must first corral them.  Whether by accident or design, the stock market is the financial corral into which investors have been herded.  The measures used to bail out the global banking system after the 2008 crash – quantitative easing and ultra-low interest …

Thirty years ago today, Britain experienced a severe storm not dissimilar to the ones that have swept across us in the last fortnight.  The North Wales coast was particularly badly hit, with a combination of a high spring tide, a north westerly wind and a strong storm surge driving the …

Waking this morning to the sound of a storm that seems to have been raging for a fortnight, my duvet is too warm to want to get up to see what time it is.  Instead, I tentatively extend an arm into the cold morning air and reach for the radio …

US President Franklyn D. Roosevelt coined the idea that the first 100 days of a government provided the best opportunity to introduce the greatest reforms.  In the years since, it has become a truism; one that Johnson’s Tories will be fully aware of.  It is instructive then that with the …

US President John F. Kennedy began the political fad of setting targets for the future when, on 25 May 1961, he persuaded the Congress to agree to the goal of landing men on the moon by the end of the decade.  On 12 September 1962 he made his more famous …

One reason why nationalist populists like Trump are able to get away with calling mainstream media “enemies of the people” is that those outlets all too often fabricate stories.  This has more to do with falling advertising revenues and increased competition for people’s attention than with grand conspiracy (although that, …