Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

Matt Hancock will regret appointing Dido Harding

It seemed at first that Matt Hancock was scrapping Public Health England in a bid to save his own political career. But the hapless Health Secretary appears to have bungled even this elementary piece of political theatre. He has appointed Baroness Harding as the head of the new National Institute for Health Protection. Dido Harding?!? The Conservative life peer’s main claims to fame are presiding over the muddled response to a cyber-attack that affected tens of thousands of customers when she was chief executive of TalkTalk and heading up the government’s test-and-trace programme. To date, the programme has proved almost comically disastrous. The much-heralded app developed by NHSX has now

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Have Arab nations forgotten about Palestine by accepting Israel?

The Palestinians are entering one of the most precarious periods in their nation’s history. The normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is only the beginning as other Arab and Muslim states are expected to follow. Yesterday, Haidar Badawi Sadiq, spokesman for the Sudanese foreign ministry, confirmed talks between Khartoum and Jerusalem and predicted a treaty before the end of the year. Today, Sadiq was fired and the ministry denied all knowledge of secret negotiations. Maybe Sadiq spoke out of turn; maybe he jumped the gun; maybe he floated the test balloon that he was told to. No matter. Whether Sudan is next or later is not

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

How Nicola Sturgeon outsmarts Westminster

14 min listen

A new poll today shows that support for Scottish independence is at a record high of 55 per cent. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson about why – in particular, how does Nicola Sturgeon continue to exceed Westminster’s expectations?

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Did female leaders trump men in dealing with the pandemic?

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen if an academic produced a paper claiming that countries led by men were more entrepreneurial or are better at negotiating international deals. The sky would fall in on them before the ink was dry. Their paper wouldn’t find a mainstream journal to publish it, anyway, but the mere existence of the study would be enough to have them denounced by students and thrown out of their university. But if you were to publish a study claiming that countries led by women have coped better with the Covid-19 pandemic, with fewer cases and fewer deaths than countries led my men? We know what

Matt McDonald

Who is the virtual DNC for?

21 min listen

The virtual Democratic National Convention kicked off this week with an agenda packed full of the party’s most well-known and experienced figures. But with a controversial appearance from Bill Clinton and a barnstorming speech from Michelle Obama, who is the convention really for? Matt McDonald, managing editor of the Spectator USA, speaks to Emily Larsen, political reporter at the Washington Examiner.

Christopher Snowdon

Farewell, Public Health England

Farewell, Public Health England. Hello, National Institute for Health Protection. As expected, the hammer has fallen on the agency that promised to ‘protect the public’s health from infectious diseases’ but floundered hopelessly when tested by coronavirus. PHE failed to expand diagnostic testing, failed to engage with the private sector, stopped contact tracing when the virus was just getting going, discouraged the use of face masks, refused to share infection data with local authorities and couldn’t even count the number of people who died of Covid-19 properly. Good riddance. According to Matt Hancock, its replacement will have a ‘single and relentless mission – protecting people from external threats to this country’s

Tali Fraser

Meet the students left in limbo by the A-level U-turn

Gavin Williamson’s A-level U-turn may have quietened the protestors but it has only added to the confusion. The education secretary’s change of heart to allow students their teacher predicted grades, rather than those generated by an algorithm, means there could be an extra 60,000 students now entitled to a place at their first-choice university – and universities could be contractually obliged to accept them. But will there be enough places? When pupils originally received their results on 13 August, universities (not assuming a government U-turn was on the cards) started sorting through the offers they had made to students, accepting and rejecting some, and offering new places to others. But only four

Simon Hart

For too long the Union has been taken for granted

Last month, Boris Johnson marked one year as Prime Minister. He did so not by making a speech from Downing Street but instead by travelling north to Orkney in Scotland. Those few days also saw a historic cabinet meeting, focused solely on strengthening the Union, a sign of the government’s commitment to the centuries-old family of nations that makes up the United Kingdom. There are those who may wonder why the Prime Minister feels the need to spell out this commitment. Surely the UK has been bound together in a common cause during the Covid crisis? The numerous Treasury intervention schemes, Ministry of Defence field hospital, sharing of data – the

Lee Jones

The A-levels fiasco will cripple our crisis-ridden universities

The fiasco over A-Level results has only deepened the suffering of a university sector mired in market-driven chaos. Analysis suggests that, thanks to the U-turn on predicted grades, as many as 100,000 students could now meet the entry requirements for their first-choice university. The usual figure is 40,000.  Universities simply cannot accommodate this many additional students. Indeed, they cannot actually accommodate – physically or in terms of teaching staff – their existing students under social distancing regulations, which is why all teaching is being shifted online for 2020/21. And yet, universities feel not only morally obliged, but perhaps also legally mandated, to try to do so. A situation that would

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Ofqual boss’s algorithm malfunction

Gavin Williamson has taken a lot of stick for the A-level exams debacle, but Mr Steerpike thinks we should perhaps look to Roger Taylor, the chair of Ofqual, who also happens to be head of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. Not many people think that using an algorithm to decide exam results was the best option, but it becomes even more questionable when you realise that Taylor led a study last year, warning of algorithms propensity to ‘make decisions which reinforce pre-existing social inequalities’. The study states: ‘concerns are growing that without proper oversight, algorithms risk entrenching and potentially worsening bias.’ Unfortunately, concerns hadn’t grown enough to prevent

John Connolly John Connolly

Why has the government scrapped Public Health England?

12 min listen

Matt Hancock today confirmed that Public Health England will be scrapped and replaced by a new National Institute for Health Protection, which will be led by Baroness Dido Harding – who currently runs the Test and Trace scheme. John Connolly speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about why.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The rise of Scotland’s Covid nationalism

Whenever some London celebrity with a hamster’s grasp of Scottish politics simpers about moving north to escape the flaxen-fringed Franco in No. 10, the cybernat rank-and-file briefly down pitchforks to assure them ‘we’ll get the kettle on’. Like all megachurches, Scottish nationalism loves nothing more than a convert and English progressives all the more so for their loathing of the political and cultural character of England today. In so far as Scottish nationalism has anything as coherent as a philosophy, it is that Scotland is more politically progressive and therefore more virtuous than England. This fusion of national identity and moral superiority claims to be civic nationalism and, while it

Theo Davies-Lewis

What Boris can learn from David Lloyd George

The question of nationalism within the United Kingdom is not a new one. The popularity of self-governance and separatism has ebbed and flowed, but it has been a constant force that has strafed against the Union. If Boris Johnson is truly intent on preserving the United Kingdom then he would do well to look to others who have navigated the nationalist question. One such figure is surely David Lloyd George, the architect of the modern UK settlement who secured the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by resolving the Irish question during the post-war coalition. For all this, however, he spent much of his career as the gadfly on Welsh

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What’s behind the government’s dramatic U-turn?

13 min listen

Gavin Williamson announced this afternoon that pupils receiving A-level and GCSE results this year would be awarded teacher-predicted marks. Why has the government finally changed its mind, and will Gavin Williamson stay in the Cabinet? Cindy Yu speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.

Steerpike Steerpike

Gavin Williamson’s Twitter gaffe

Not content with criticism from virtually all sides of the political arena, Gavin Williamson appears to have turned even his own Twitter account against him in an act of online sadomasochism. The most recent like on his account is of a tweet by the children’s author Michael Rosen, in which he argues that under the current government: ‘People get promoted to positions of power (and nice pay) to abuse teachers and run a system that judges young people on two or three hours splurge that bears no resemblance to life’s tasks.’ Unless Williamson is the most self-critical minister in British political history, it would appear the like was an accident…

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why the exams debacle was so predictable – and predicted

Bit late now, isn’t it, to complain about the exams debacle? Where were they, Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer, the teaching unions, Nicola Sturgeon and the BBC on 18 March when Gavin Williamson fatally decided to scrap this year’s A-levels and GCSEs? If they were throwing their rattles out of the pram, it wasn’t loud enough to be heard.  The grounds for that idiot move was ‘to give, pupils, parents and teachers certainty, and enable schools and colleges to focus on supporting vulnerable children and the children of critical workers’. That, you note, was before the start of lockdown. Yet if ever there was a problem that could be seen a mile

Steerpike Steerpike

Five times Gavin Williamson suggested he wouldn’t U-turn

Gavin Williamson has performed a big U-turn today and announced that pupils in England receiving A level and GCSE results this year will be awarded their teacher-assessed grades, to avoid any student being downgraded by an algorithm. In a statement this afternoon, the Education Secretary said: ‘We worked with Ofqual to construct the fairest possible model, but it is clear that the process of allocating grades has resulted in more significant inconsistencies than can be resolved through an appeals process’. Williamson added that he is ‘sorry for the distress this has caused young people and their parents but hope this announcement will now provide the certainty and reassurance they deserve.’ That’s

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The exams U-turn is an act of damage limitation

After a bruising few days for Boris Johnson and his ministers over the grading system for A-levels and GCSEs, the government has today performed a U-turn. Following growing outrage both from disappointed students and frustrated MPs, the chair of exams body Ofqual has announced a change in the grading system. In a pre-recorded clip, Roger Taylor said:  Expecting schools to submit appeals where grades were incorrect placed a burden on teachers when they need to be preparing for the new term and has created uncertainty and anxiety for students. For all of that, we are extremely sorry. We have therefore decided that students be awarded their centre assessment for this summer – that is,

Ruth Dudley Edwards

In defence of Claire Fox

I have been so unremitting and harsh a critic of the IRA and Sinn Fein since the early 1990s, that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness tried hard to have me silenced. Sinn Fein still try to shut me up with the help of libel lawyers, and an army of Shinnerbots hurl insults at me on social media, often begging me to die. I have also worked for years with organisations representing victims of terrorism, including Innocent Victims United, whose spokesman, Kenny Donaldson, recently called the Brexit Party’s endorsement of Claire Fox ‘appalling and indeed borderline contemptuous’ because of her past membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which supported the

John Connolly John Connolly

Is the government about to U-turn on exams?

10 min listen

As the backlash to the government’s exams fiasco continued over the weekend, Gavin Williamson has been steadfast in not U-turning. But with GCSE results out later this week and Ofqual’s algorithm revealing significant inequalities, is this position sustainable? John Connolly talks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson.