Supreme emergencies and public accountability: the case of procurement in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to examine the changed nature of public accountability during a supreme emergency and explore how legal and auditing mechanisms have come to the fore, concluding that misappropriation of public monies is not an inevitable outcome.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores an illustrative example, the UK government's procurement of personal protective equipment during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.FindingsIn circumstances of a supreme emergency where parliamentary scrutiny and competitive contract tendering are suspended, other forms of public accountability come to the fore, with civil society actors becoming more evident.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper relies on illustrative examples based on the Westminster model of government. The study advanced the notion of deferred accountability and identifies areas for further study, potentially in different jurisdictions.Social implicationsThe paper highlights the need for a variety of active and engaged civil society actors.Originality/valueThe paper contributes an empirical case to how an account of government behaviour is established. The paper also contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature and role of legal and government audit accountability mechanisms.

Justifying Terrorism: Three More Attempts

In Chapter 6, three more categories are scrutinized, each of which again reflects a less sophisticated but appealing form of argument that is often enough deployed in the public sphere to justify terrorist acts either by terrorists themselves or by those who identify with the proclaimed justice of cause for which the terrorist acts are committed. The arguments considered in this chapter are: the argument from collective responsibility; the argument from redistributive justice; and the argument from supreme emergency. As with the attempted justifications in Chapter 5, all three of these attempted justifications raise a more general and very challenging issue about the difficulties of moral philosophizing in the face of absolute moral prohibitions.