On security and surveillance trade-offs: ‘Even if the government is well intentioned, as many people doubtless think, are they competent to build a secure system? As the Scottish Government pauses for reflection, declining to adopt NHSX, we have an opportunity to ask these questions.’
Declan Welsh: Ventures in lockdown
‘Feeling helpless, isolated, scared, alone, trapped, nostalgic, missing people, missing the pub: these are all feelings we will always feel. Except for maybe the pub bit. My songwriting tends to be really misty eyed over that communal drinking with friends thing anyway. Now that’s gone into overdrive.’
Poverty and coronavirus in Edinburgh: solutions in shared humanity
Edinburgh Poverty Commission is an independent group working to define the steps required to end poverty in the capital. It has been listening to people and organisations in the city over the past few weeks to hear at first hand the profound impacts of the Covid-19 emergency on people living in poverty, now and in the future, and issues its interim report today.
Where has all that central bank COVID-19 money gone?
‘Once the public health crisis of COVID-19 is over, it might yet expose the flaws in this capital-led economy just as it has exposed the inadequacies of our public health systems that has suffered from under-investment over a decade of austerity.’
Not so sage experts
‘But the more we study COVID-19 the more the differences with influenza become evident. However, public pronouncements still take their cue from that virus, like the need to avoid a second wave that will swamp the NHS…time to stop using ‘flu as a useful model…’
Leadership, learning and knowledge: lessons from COVID-19
‘Not everything is about the constitution. We need to find a way out of the lazy constitutional rut Scottish politics has descended into. This is not to suggest that the constitutional question or relations between London and Edinburgh are unimportant, only that there are other ways of looking at politics and policy. Even in the midst of this crisis, this needs to be a learning exercise and not only when we look back and seek to learn lessons retrospectively.’
Optimism of the will in Future Library
Camus speaks for our era: ‘The time of the irresponsible artists is over… The freedom of art is not worth much when its only purpose is to assure the artists comfort‘. Katie Paterson’s work (Future Library) takes that observation and invocation to heart. Go see it however you can…
A very Scottish spy
‘His life-story has contemporary resonances, with the resurgence of the far right and what the French call fascisant mentality along with nativist protectionism in response to both pandemic and economic collapse. From his school days, Cairncross was a firm believer in (Scottish) Enlightenment values; he remained an exemplar of Davie’s Democratic Intellect.’
Strictly street dancing: a poem for a pandemic
Coronavirus brings powerful new poignancy to a remarkable poetry collection gathered by Edinburgh’s former Makar, Christine De Luca to celebrate “those who daily undertake some of the lesser-seen jobs in our city…night bus drivers, lollipop ladies, binmen…now on the ‘frontline’
Better recovery after new divides
‘As the inequalities in our economic system are laid bare by this crisis, rather than returning to business as usual, countries such as the UK would be well-served to instead build back better by creating a wellbeing economy.’