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Logically, such protection would appear to extend from famines to many other disasters, as these too would presumably be a threat to politicians’ chances of re-election (and would be exposed by a free press). One of the best-known contributions to the field of disasters is the important argument by Sen and Drèze ( 1989) that famines do not happen in democracies with a free press, since the prospect of bad publicity and electoral defeat will deter politicians from allowing such events on their watch. The paper underlines the risk of a move towards a disaster-producing system that is self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting. A fundamental problem in the UK and US is that these countries were not democratic enough.

Disasters, though, call for a reinvigoration of democracy, not a knee-jerk invocation of autocratic ‘emergency’ rule. A key pandemic-related danger is the conclusion that democracy itself is discredited. These include: reconceptualising disaster as a good thing (via ‘herd immunity') the influence of neoliberalism and the limitations in the circulation of information. This paper highlights the extent to which disasters are now ‘coming home’ to Western democracies and it looks at some of the principal reasons why democracy has not been especially protective, at least in the case of the UK and the US. The Covid-19 crises in the United Kingdom and the United States show how democracies may struggle to confront disasters that are increasingly impinging on the Global North.

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