The Thin End

Phew! June was a scorcher. The month of June 2017 was marked by high temperatures across Western Europe with heat waves triggering national heat-health plans and wildfires requiring evacuation in Portugal and Spain. Record breaking heat gripped most of western Europe with mean temperatures 3 degrees above ‘normal’. England experienced the hottest June day since 1975. Belgium imposed water rationing because of record temperatures. In Switzerland a heat wave warning was issued, and in France and the Netherlands heat action plans were triggered. France experienced the hottest June night ever recorded as the average nighttime temperature reached ​26.4 degrees Celsius on June 21st. Switzerland saw the second hottest day on record since records began in 1864. In England temperatures recorded at Heathrow reached 34.4 degrees Celsuis. These high temperatures are no longer rare in the current climate, occurring roughly every 10 to 30 years. So, was this heat wave a result of man-made ...

Melvin Burgess' children story,  Cry of the wolf, tells the tale of a man whose quest is to kill the last wolf alive in England.  One female survives, wounded by The Hunter, but she survives long enough to teach her sole surviving cub a few skills before she then is killed by the man.  The cub is raised by a human family, but being a social animal, he waits in vain for the scent of another wolf.  When I consider how badly we treat other intelligent beings here on earth, I am rather pleased that Extraterrestrial Intelligence continues to  elude us.  It would be better if we were at peace with ourselves, and that we care for our living planet before we blunder about in the nether reaches of the universe. Tragically, when we have found other intelligent life here on our planet, we have tended to do it harm rather than give it respect.  Nonetheless, we have a notion and a sense of fairness and justice, else we would not agonise over the problems this p...

Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Do you remember when it all appeared so simple? Just a few weeks ago Mrs May was still delivering the mantra 'Brexit means Brexit'. That was before the general election. Now it doesn't appear so simple, and Brexit gets softer, and softer and....why? Reality awakens. The truth is understood. Brexit isn't good. It isn't good for the economy, for jobs, for health and social care, for research, for fighting climate change, and so the negotiations now turn on how to ameliorate the harm it will do. When these harmful effects were outlined in the EU referendum, they were dismissed as 'scare tactics' by the Leave campaign. But they are real. The government will try to negotiate some sort of access to the single market. It will do so because much of our economy depends on it. That access will come with a cost, and we will wonder what is better about it. "What's it all about Alfie? The question will be repeatedly asked. ...

With Brexit negotiations now underway this week the potential adverse impact on health and social care needs to be considered. The  British Medical Association, the voice of doctors in the UK, is calling on the government to protect future patient care by putting healthcare "front and centre" of its plans. There can be little doubt that unless staffing issues are resolved the potential harm of Brexit to  health and social care is considerable.  The government should act speedily to resolve the uncertainty.  M any health and social care professionals currently working in the UK have come from other EU countries, including 55,000 of the NHS’s 1.3 million workforce and 80,000 of the 1.3 million workers in the adult social care sector.   The NHS is currently struggling to recruit and retain staff.  Unless the future of NHS  and social care staff can be settled, then this problem is set to get worse with a deepening NHS and social care crisis. ...

In my early teens, back in the 1960s I wrote a brief poem titled ‘under sunlight rays’. It was my first real statement of concern about the damage we were doing to our environment.  It was also my first attempt at poetry.  There stood a tree in my childhood days And there grew grass under sunlight rays But where are these now so rare Under the concrete lain so bare My children Will not know In the world in which they'll grow They will read it in a book And I Will say look There grew a tree in my childhood days And there grew grass under sunlight rays It was my first insight into the loss of our forests of trees, but little did I know then just how important they were.  There Is considerable anxiety about President-elect Donald Trump, and not least because he does not accept Global warming is man made. He believes it is a Chinese hoax. The concept of global warming, he says, was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufactu...

The warning from the British Bankers Association that some banks are considering relocating to Europe in the new year because of Brexit, reminds us once again of the perilous state we are in. The problem is not that politicians lie to us. The problem is that they have not the courage to tell us what we don't like to hear. The government knows Brexit will hurt millions of people in the UK, but they won't acknowledge it. They know it is set to seriously harm our economy and competitiveness in the world, but won't tell us. They can't tell us the reality because it would destabilise the markets. So we are stuck in fantasy land.  We go on with the belief, I would say delusion, that somehow all will be ok, but it won't. Even if we take the most optimisitc scenario of Brexit from economists such as Patrick Minford we are in for a very hard knock.  Just as in war, everyone becomes an expert. In the comfort of their armchair in front of the television it is easy...