A new day and a frosty morning here in the UK, things are not getting better in America and overnight it has been reported that 4 people have died, one shot, during the storming of The Capitol yesterday, tragic but predictable.

Donald Trump has apparently now said that there will be an "orderly transition" and I conclude from this that he is perhaps shocked at what has happened and knows that he has blood on his hands.

It is interesting to think about how America seems to respond in a crisis. Comparing this situation with 9/11, and I am sure in spite of a great deal of planning and theoretical work, once again things have not gone well.

During the 9/11 attack, according to several reports and TV documentaries the US President was completely out of touch and unable to direct operations from Air Force One. The technology side of things failed completely and different parts of the administration were unable to communicate with each other. In fact, things were so bad, that those on Air Force One became dependent on an intermittent TV signal and TV news for information. This was the sole source of information on Air Force One, and to the US President. At the time, in a moment of National crisis, things were completely out of control and crisis control systems failed completely.

Last night, what happened was that hundreds, possibly thousands, of protestors marched on The Capitol, the seat of US democracy. This was a planned and known event and the shocking thing is that protestors were able to walk straight into the very seat of US democracy and disrupt it.

There are huge questions to be answered, the most obvious of those being why was the building not better prepared and protected, given that this was a predictable event? Surely in this situation what was required was a "ring of steel" to be placed around The Capitol to ensure that if things got out of hand they could be dealt with and that the required manpower was available to deal with the situation.

It seems to me that once again the United States was left woefully unprepared in a time of crisis and the systems which should have been in place to manage a crisis were simply not up to the job. It is all very well being "the most powerful nation on Earth" but if you cannot deal with a sudden crisis then there is something badly wrong. The ability to deal with a crisis quickly and effectively is what frequently matters, not having vast numbers of nuclear missiles sitting in silos.

The role of social media in all this cannot be ignored. It has been known for months, maybe years, that the current US President uses social media to promote his particular agenda. In some instances social media has been used to promote "unrest" and division which is the last thing that the world needs at the moment from someone with such power at his fingertips, what is needed is calm and stability.

Surely the social media companies could and should have acted sooner and with more rigour to control and reduce the spread of misinformation. It is not enough to simply put warnings on things which are known to be wrong, they should be removed completely. Putting warnings on tobacco products does not stop people consuming them, they still kill people.