Cash Before Strategy: Defence in the Integrated Review

By @MikeClarke2020s The Chancellor and the Treasury pulled a fast one on the Prime Minister and No.10 when it cancelled the three-year Comprehensive Spending Review in favour of last week’s interim one-year settlement. It looked as if the Ministry of Defence would be the big loser. And the famous ‘Integrated Review’ of all Britain’s external …

Continue reading Cash Before Strategy: Defence in the Integrated Review

As The Virus Mutates, So Will Vaccine Nationalism

By @HelenRamscar Encouraging data released from the Pfizer[1], Moderna[2] and Oxford University[3] vaccine trials have hit headlines worldwide. Yet indications of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant named 20A.EU1[4], which originated in Spanish farms and spread successfully across Europe, followed by confirmation that a SARS-CoV-2 mutation found in mink in Denmark has transmitted into humans in no fewer …

Continue reading As The Virus Mutates, So Will Vaccine Nationalism

Three Donald Trumps and the Judgement of History

@MikeClarke2020s In the astonishing aftermath of Joe Biden’s convincing win in the US Presidential Election there now seem to be three separate Donald Trumps locked in the White House. None of them are him; but he is simultaneously all of them. Shakespeare would have understood this figure; at once propelled to the throne by the …

Continue reading Three Donald Trumps and the Judgement of History

Written Evidence to the JCNSS Inquiry into Biosecurity and National Security

Helen Ramscar points to the urgent need to protect the UK life sciences sector from the impact of halted clinical trials across therapy areas and reduced research funding due to Covid. For the buoyancy of the sector is critical to the UK’s ability to continue pioneering pharmacological countermeasures (medicines, treatments, vaccines) to biosecurity risks like …

Continue reading Written Evidence to the JCNSS Inquiry into Biosecurity and National Security

Tipping Point review: Journal of Contemporary European Studies

The following book review by Derek Hawes features in the March 2020 edition of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies 28 (2): 1-2. The original can be accessed here. JCES Book Review Derek Hawes. February 2020 Slipping Loose: The UK’s Long Drift Away from the European Union. By Martin Westlake. (Agenda Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK) 2020. …

Continue reading Tipping Point review: Journal of Contemporary European Studies