Universities UK (UUK) has suggested that there may be very significant losses to higher education as a consequence of Covid-19. However, losses are likely to be substantially lower than the potential losses estimated by UUK. But the magnitude of losses is very uncertain. The UUK's proposal to restrict undergraduate enrolment per university to stop institutions poaching students is not in the interests of the most highly regarded universities, or that of students. Some rationalisation of the sector should be the price of further government support. Now is also the time to reconsider how university research is funded.

The global threat of the coronavirus pandemic has forced policy makers to react quickly with totally new policy-making approaches under conditions of uncertainty. This article focuses on such crisis-driven policy learning, examining how the experiences of China and South Korea as early responder states influenced the subsequent coronavirus crisis management in Germany. The first reaction of the German core executive was the quick concentration of decision-making power at the top of the political hierarchy. Asserting the prerogatives of the executive included the radical simplification of the relationship between politics, law and science. State actors took emergency measures by recourse to a single piece of legislation-the 'infection protection law' ()-overriding other elements of the legal order. They also limited the government's use of scientific expertise to a small number of advisors, thereby cutting short debates about the appropriateness or otherwise of the government's crisis measures. Finally, German actors failed to understand that some of the earlier Chinese and Korean responses required a precondition-namely public willingness to sacrifice privacy for public health-that is absent in the German case.

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen most governments worldwide having to think on their feet rather than implementing detailed and well-rehearsed plans. This is notwithstanding the fact that a pandemic was bound to happen, sooner or later (and will happen again). The effectiveness of national responses has varied enormously. Globally, New Zealand has been perceived as setting the gold standard in 'curve crushing', and for a short period achieved Covid-free status. For this achievement, much credit is due to the New Zealand government, especially to Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. However, post-lockdown the New Zealand government has encountered a number of Covid policy implementation problems (many of which could have been anticipated). Nevertheless, Covid-19 might still turn out to have been a seismic shock to existing policy processes and policy frames (such as austerity). If so, there are grounds for hope that in the future, governments and voters might be less short-term in their outlook. Perhaps anticipatory, rather than reactive policy making, might become more fashionable?

More urgently than ever we need an answer to the question posed by the late Mick Moran in nearly two decades ago: 'if government now invests huge resources in trying to be smart why does it often act so dumb?'. We reflect on this question in the context of governmental responses to Covid-19 in four steps. First, we argue that blunders occur because of systemic weaknesses that stimulate poor policy choices. Second, we review and assess the performance of governments on Covid-19 across a range of advanced democracies. Third, in the light of these comparisons we argue that the UK system of governance has proved itself vulnerable to failure at the time when its citizens most needed it. Finally, we outline an agenda of reform that seeks to rectify structural weaknesses of that governance capacity.

The challenge for experts in government is often described as one of speaking unwelcome truths to a resistant power. Yet, just as problematic can be instances where the advice is welcome and so left unchallenged. Two such cases in which the UK government followed flawed expert advice are considered: intelligence assessments and military advice leading up to the 2003 Iraq War and the role of SAGE (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) during the first stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Governments need to interrogate advice and make sure that they understand its underlying assumptions and implications. It remains vital to protect the independence of the experts, but to get the best out of their advice early and active political engagement is required rather than an arms-length relationship.

The contracting out of public goods and services has become a central feature of the UK's state machinery, with more than £350 billion spent annually on services ranging from rubbish collection to building submarines. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK government took the unprecedented step of incorporating private providers at a national scale to deliver emergency services which were previously the purview of the state. To achieve this, the government used emergency legislation temporarily to remove competitive tenders and reduced reporting processes. In doing so, it substantially re-orientated its relationship with private providers, moving from a position of a principal granting its authority to deliver services to something more akin to a partner organisation leveraging private resources. This shift in power dynamics, coupled with an ongoing government ambition to expand the UK's public service markets, risks a permanent change in government-provider relations, to the detriment of the UK's contracting out framework.

This article explores the question of devolution in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on English local government. Criticism of the government's handling of the crisis is widespread and tends to focus on the highly centralised nature of the British state. Here, we attribute the challenges faced by regional and local government in responding to the pandemic primarily to the asymmetric nature of power relations that characterise financial planning and control mechanisms, devised and overseen by the Treasury. We argue that the ongoing crisis underlines the need for a democratic form of devolution-including further fiscal powers for regional and local government-to support the economic recovery. In a context of increasing fiscal uncertainty, the Treasury should seek to unlock the existing powers of local leaders by reforming centralised budgetary constraints and taking accountability and monitoring mechanisms closer to citizens.

In this article, we consider the one-year review (OYR) by Parliament of temporary powers in the Coronavirus Act 2020 (CVA). The OYR stands as a key concession on the part of the UK government to enable scrutiny of Covid-19 law making, after the CVA was rushed through Parliament at the beginning of the pandemic. The principal argument of this article is that despite appearances, this review was another example of Parliament being marginalised during the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, there were four obstacles to meaningful scrutiny in the OYR: inadequate parliamentary time scheduled for the review; the 'all-or-nothing' framing of the review; late and inaccurate government reporting prior to the OYR; and the failure to address key issues regarding the operation of the CVA, including major human rights concerns. In light of such obstruction to scrutiny, it is clear that the review represents a broken promise on the part of the current government to Parliament. The review is also part of a broader pattern of marginalising Parliament during the pandemic. In presenting this analysis, we argue that two changes could be made in the upcoming and penultimate review of the CVA in September 2021, in order to enable Parliament to engage in meaningful scrutiny in this review.

This article analyses the changing character of the contemporary Conservative Party. It argues that the period since the Brexit referendum has seen the creation of a new politics in which voter alignments have shifted, and that the experience of the Covid pandemic has created a new agenda of issues facing government. Taken together, these developments constitute formidable challenges to the Conservative Party as it seeks to maintain its electoral support and its ability to manage the politics of power.

Opposition to vaccines is not a new phenomenon, but positions once associated with traditional religious or conservative stances have given way to some highly disparate views that transcend traditional left/right/religious divisions. This article reviews recent literature showing how social media has contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories around Covid-19 and mass vaccination programmes. The narratives discussed are principally those of the right and the religious right.

Libertarian ideas of self-ownership and the priority of bodily autonomy have featured prominently in the political debate over vaccination programmes and the justifiability or otherwise of restricting the liberty of the unvaccinated. In this article we look at a selection of recent right-libertarian literature to show that there is a considerable divergence between the application of consistent libertarian principles to this issue by academic libertarians and the strident opposition to vaccination programmes and vaccine mandates expressed by people who profess to be libertarians in the public-political debate.

Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic place an added premium on the social contract underpinning principal-agent relations in representative democracies, which relies, at a fundamental level, on conditional trust judgements those without power those with decision-making authority to act in their better interests. Existing studies of political trust during the pandemic suggest that it has been both a symptom of government activity as well as a cause of its success or failure. Presenting original longitudinal data collected from UK citizens at the start of the pandemic and again twenty months later, the article teases apart these dynamics and their implications. It shows, for example, that the public became less trusting and more distrusting of politicians during this unique moment, and that these trends are strongly linked to performance evaluations of the UK government as well as public compliance with mandatory and non-mandatory policies such as vaccination and mask wearing.

Rather than aiming to produce more 'rational' or more 'other-regarding' citizen judgements (the outcome of which is uncertain), deliberative democratic exercises should be re-designed to maximise democratic participation. To do this, they must involve citizens experts, a novel arrangement that will benefit both cohorts. For the former, a more inclusive form of deliberation will offer an opportunity to contribute to political discussion and be listened to by people with political or policy-based authority. For the latter, it will provide a venue through which expertise can be brought to bear on democratic decision making without risk of scapegoating or politicisation. More broadly, deliberation that prioritises dialogue (over, say, opinion change) affirms the principle that political decisions reflect value judgements rather than technically 'right' or technically 'wrong' answers-judgements that are legitimate if arrived at through discussion involving the people due to be affected by the resultant policy. This article sets out the advantages of this form of deliberation-which bears some similarity to certain types of citizen science-in the context of the UK government's responses to Covid-19; both the confused decision making evident to date, and the forthcoming re-opening phases that will prioritise or advantage some constituencies over others.

Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic have put relationships between the UK government and its devolved counterparts under growing strain. Tensions generated by both of these developments have exposed the inadequacies of the existing, under-developed system for bringing governments together in the UK. The limitations of the current system include the nature of intergovernmental meetings, and their consultative rather than decision-making character. Drawing upon an analysis of how intergovernmental relationships are structured in five other countries, the authors offer a number of suggestions for the reconfiguration of the UK model. They explore different ways of enabling joint decision making by its governments, and argue against the assumption that England can be represented adequately by the UK administration. Without a serious attempt to address this dysfunctional part of the UK's territorial constitution, there is every prospect that relations between these different governments will continue to deteriorate.

This article looks at the financial performance and position of English professional football before Covid-19 and the impact that the pandemic has had on the industry. It analyses revenue streams in different divisions, the dependency that clubs have on them and how they have changed as a result of the pandemic. The article also reviews key costs for football clubs, the extent to which they can be reduced, different business models that operate, and possible funding sources for the sport from third parties and within the industry.

It is commonly said that the lockdowns and social distancing necessary to control coronavirus pandemics will only work if the general population trusts its government, believes the information it provides, and has confidence in its policies. This article traces the British government's record in providing information about its policies and performance, and compares this with the public's use of the mainstream news media. It then considers how these two sources of information affected trust in government and public compliance with social distancing and lockdown rules. Lastly, it compares Covid-19 with Brexit and draws conclusions about how beliefs and behaviour are formed when individuals are personally faced with a serious threat.

This article explores why the Swiss Federal Council and the Swiss Federal Parliament were reluctant to follow the majority views of the scientific epidemiological community at the beginning of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. We propose an institutionalist take on this question and argue that one major explanation could be the input overload that is characteristic of the Swiss federal political system. We define input overload as the simultaneous inputs of corporatist, pluralist, federalist and direct democratic subsystems. Adding another major input-this time from the scientific subsystem-may have threatened to further erode the government's and parliament's discretionary power to cope with the pandemic. We assume that the federal government reduced its input overload by fending off scientific advice.