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Background: There is an extensive body of research demonstrating that trade and globalisation can have wide-ranging implications for health. Robust governance is key to ensuring that health, social justice and sustainability are key considerations within trade policy, and that health risks from trade are effectively mitigated and benefits are maximised. The UK's departure from the EU provides a rare opportunity to examine a context where trade governance arrangements are being created anew, and to explore the consequences of governance choices and structures for health and social justice. Despite its importance to public health, there has been no systematic analysis of the implications of UK trade policy governance. We therefore conducted an analysis of the governance of the UK's trade policy from a public health and social justice perspective.Results: Several arrangements required for good governance appear to have been implemented - information provision, public consultation, accountability to Parliament, and strengthening of civil service capacity. However, our detailed analyses of these pillars of governance identified significant weaknesses in each of these areas.Conclusion: The establishment of a new trade policy agenda calls for robust systems of governance. However, our analysis demonstrates that, despite decades of mounting evidence on the health and equity impacts of trade and the importance of strong systems of governance, the UK government has largely ignored this evidence and failed to galvanise the opportunity to include public health and equity considerations and strengthen democratic involvement in trade policy. This underscores the point that the evidence alone will not guarantee that health and justice are prioritised. Rather, we need strong systems of governance everywhere that can help seize the health benefits of international trade and minimise its detrimental impacts. A failure to strengthen governance risks poor policy design and implementation, with unintended and inequitable distribution of harms, and 'on-paper' commitments to health, social justice, and democracy unfulfilled in practice. Although the detailed findings relate to the situation in the UK, the issues raised are, we believe, of wider relevance for those with an interest of governing for health in the area of international trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a wide-ranging debate about the merits and demerits of searching for, and sending messages to, extraterrestrial intelligences (SETI and METI). There is however reasonable (but not universal) consensus that replying to a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence should not be done unilaterally, without consultation with wider society and the rest of the world. But how should this consultation actually work? In this paper we discuss various ways that decision making in such a scenario could be done democratically, and gain legitimacy. In particular we consider a scientist-led response, a politician-led response, deciding a response using a referendum, and finally using citizens' assemblies. We present the results of a survey of a representative survey of 2000 people in the UK on how they thought a response should best be determined, and finally discuss parallels to how the public is responding to scientific expertise in the COVID-19 Pandemic. • Democratic accountability regarding communication with extra-terrestrials. • How to make the decision whether or not to communicate with aliens. • Democracy, SETI and METI. • SETI and METI: Who has the right to decide what messages we send to aliens. • Voting in a referendum, or electing representatives, to determine response to First Contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzed some of the reasons why Britain participated only half-way in the European Union and ended up voting for Bremen on 23 June 2016. It also examines the options open to the European Union and Great Britain. Europe must show that it can work by showing results. In Britain it is necessary to break the established molds of thought and reshape the structure of political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I check the ethical pulse of further education (FE) at the moment of its coming of age. Using a philosophical lens, I select and review post-2010 literature, to argue that FE colleges persist in a diminished form within a learning economy. In response to the managerial onslaught, the sector has adopted an ethics of survival, a necessary response to austerity and deregulation. Twenty-one years after incorporation, ethical fading has purged ethical desire from educational discourse, while the endless banality of college life has corroded the language with which it might be possible to speak about educational purpose, value, utopia, democracy, equity, and vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myanmar or 'Burma' is a country which has a long history of colonialism by foreign powers. Before Myanmar achieved its independence in 1948, it was ruled by two prominent foreign powers that are Britain and Japan. Both countries had created the political scene of Myanmar. After achieving independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar became an independent country that practiced the democracy ideology under the ruled of General Aung Sann. However, its democracy system faced problems when a coup d'état happened in 1962. Since that year, the efforts to regain the democracy system in Myanmar faced a lot of obstacles. Thus, this paper will explain the process of democracy development since 1948 until the present days of Myanmar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public participation in technological decision-making is increasingly seen as de rigueur, but the limits and purpose of such participation remain open to debate. In this paper we explore the tension between different rationales for widening participation and examine their implications for its practice. Taking debates about medical genomics in the UK as an illustrative example, we argue that more heterogeneous participation and debate have the potential to improve the scrutiny and accountability of science within representative democracies. In doing so we also argue that it is necessary to replace the language of `lay expertise' with a more systematic and rigorous treatment of the expertise or its absence that characterizes different participants. Drawing on the theoretical work of Collins & Evans (2002), we distinguish between those processes where expert knowledge is required and debate is conducted within the public domain, rather than by the public itself, and those where the views of non-expert lay citizens are needed and valued. The effect of adopting this approach is to permit a more inclusive treatment of the `technical' while also providing a positive role for non-expert citizens in the democratic control and oversight of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a re-appraisal within political science of the characteristics of various kinds of public policy failure. At the same time, the political significance of education has grown in most liberal democracies. The present paper examines public policy in British education since the mid-1970s and asks: What goes wrong in policy-making and when does manageable failure slide into full-scale crisis? Various episodes of policy are explored and set against the theoretical framework developed by Mark Bovens and Paul t'Hart in an attempt to distinguish those policies in recent British education that have been controversial, those that have been manageable failures and those that turned into disabling fiascos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]