Politics

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

Wednesday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris’s sloppy PMQs performances are becoming a problem

A former prime minister once told me that PMQs in the Commons is an event that can only be enjoyed in retrospect, after the final whistle has blown. Even if exchanges with the opposition leader had gone well, there remained the possibility of being tripped up by a minor party leader, an opposition backbencher or a member of the ‘awkward squad’ on your own side. Tony Blair disliked it so much that one of his first acts as PM was to cut the sessions from two a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) to just one: a half-hour joust on a Wednesday. His prime motivation for doing so was that he knew

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Starmer’s swipes leave Boris unbowed

Keir Starmer is a very rum package. His body and his manner seem to belong to different organisms. His physique is martial, sturdy, invincible. The square jaw, the trunk-like neck, the unsettlingly symmetrical face, the blue but eerily lifeless eyes. But his personality has no trace of manliness at all. He seems grannyish, nervy, over-delicate, like an unobtrusive footman who finds himself lord of the manor following a paternity test. There’s something about him that doesn’t ring true. His voice is like the creak of a door in a chapel of rest. But he’s an effective debater. He enjoys using statistics to inflict horrors on his opponent. Today, he unleashed

John Connolly John Connolly

Keir Starmer trips up Boris Johnson at PMQs

The majority of today’s PMQs face-off between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer concerned the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in care homes, after the Office for National Statistics reported yesterday that over 8,000 care home residents have died of Covid-19 – a figure that is expected to rise in the coming weeks. Boris Johnson’s weakest moments in the session were when Starmer criticised the policy of moving elderly patients from hospitals to care homes at the beginning of the crisis, before they received a negative coronavirus test. The leader of the Labour party quoted a cardiologist who claimed that suspected coronavirus cases were discharged from hospitals into care homes

Ross Clark Ross Clark

This study from Iceland suggests reopening schools is safe

Some countries are refusing to open their schools for fear of a prompting a second wave of coronavirus infections. But their policies would appear to be flatly contradicted by evidence from Iceland. There, a company called deCODE Genetics, in association with the country’s directorate of health and the national university hospital, has analysed the results of coronavirus tests on 36,500 people. The tests identified 1801 cases of people suffering from the disease – and ten deaths. Each case was carefully tracked. In not a single case could the researchers find evidence of a child passing on the disease to their parents. The company’s CEO, Kari Stefansson, revealed the findings in

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Peter Bone takes a pop at Boris

Boris Johnson continues to enjoy healthy ratings in the polls but not all of the Prime Minister’s Tory colleagues are pleased with his performance. Conservative backbencher Peter Bone has just taken a pop at Boris in the virtual Commons, slating the PM for revealing his lockdown plan on television on Sunday night rather than in front of MPs:  ‘The television presentation by the Prime Minister was plain wrong. Too many of the Prime Minister’s special advisers and aides think they are running a presidential government. That the Prime Minister goes on television and announces all sorts of executive orders without any reference to parliament. Many of them have clearly been

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris’s Whitehall overhaul has just become even more ambitious

When this crisis is over, reform of Whitehall is going to become a major issue again – as the government’s command paper yesterday acknowledged. Any government reform is going to have to be driven by the Cabinet Office which has today announced an intriguing set of new non-executive directors. The four new appointments are Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner; Henry De Zoete, who worked with Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings at the Department for Education before winning Dragon’s Den and setting up an energy switching service; Gisela Stuart, the former Labour MP and co-chair of Vote Leave; and Simone Finn, a Tory peer who was the coalition’s adviser on

Hardeep Singh

Labour is stirring up Sikh identity politics

It’s good news that next year’s census will not include a separate Sikh ‘ethnic’ tick box. A no brainer, you may say, because Sikhism is a religion (already recorded in the census), which like any other includes people from various ethnic groups. But don’t be fooled: this issue has been highly contentious – and Labour has only made matters worse with its meddling. Campaigners from a group called the Sikh Federation UK (SFUK) point out that Sikhs are recognised as an ethnic group under law (a point I addressed here). However in the current pandemic, the SFUK has made noise suggesting ‘Sikh discrimination continues’ because statistics for death by religion aren’t available, whereas deaths

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Extending the furlough scheme comes at colossal cost

One of the most generous Covid-19 emergency measures in Europe has been extended until the end of October – with some caveats. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has just told the House of Commons that the furlough scheme – which covers up to 80 per cent of an employees’ wages, with a cap of £2,500 per month – will continue to operate unchanged between now and the end of July. From August, furloughing will become more flexible, allowing for part-time work. The scheme remains extended to all sectors, avoiding the optics of industry favouritism, which could easily extend to regional favouritism, given the dependence on certain sectors in different parts of the

Matthew Lynn

Sunak’s furlough scheme is a victim of its own success

Who are we kidding? If you are still furloughed through July, August, and September, the chances are that your job isn’t on hold as you wait for lockdown to gradually be lifted or for your company to get back to normal levels of demand. In truth, you have probably been fired. It’s just that no one got around to telling you yet. Rishi Sunak’s coronavirus job retention scheme, to give its full title, has in many ways been one of the most successful government projects we have seen for years. More than six million workers and half a million companies have taken it up. It has been brilliantly implemented by

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are we seeing 2000 excess deaths a week from non-coronavirus causes?

Cambridge professor of the public understanding of risk David Spiegelhalter recently made the point that, given the uncertainties over exactly what constitutes a death from coronavirus, the number we should we watching is the ONS’s figure for deaths from all causes. That, he argued, will give us the surest indication as to the progress of the epidemic. For anyone minded to take his advice, the ONS’s figure for deaths from all causes fell again in the week ending 1 May for the second week running. In England and Wales, 17,953 deaths were registered, down from 21,997 in the week ending 24 April and 22,351 in the week ending 17 April. These figures

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Parents deserve answers on schools and coronavirus

Boris Johnson had barely finished announcing the phased reopening of primary schools on Sunday night when my phone started buzzing with messages from concerned parents in our Year 1 WhatsApp group. The consensus was clear: to send your child back in June would be irresponsible parenting. Several said they refused to let their child be used as a ‘guinea pig’ for the virus and many emailed the headteacher to say so. There were, however, a few lone dissenters – parents for whom the decision could not have come soon enough. It was clear a rapid class divide was emerging between middle class parents with work from home jobs for whom

Theo Davies-Lewis

Why Wales and Westminster don’t agree on the lockdown

Nicola Sturgeon is a familiar figure to many even south of the border. But while Scotland’s nationalists are frequently seen and heard on the airwaves in England, the same isn’t true of Wales’s politicians. If you ask a Brit to name the first minister of Wales, you wouldn’t be surprised if they struggled to answer. But coronavirus has given Wales a new prominence – not least in the country choosing to go it alone in its response to tweaking lockdown rules. It seems all it took was a pandemic to prove that the Welsh, not just the Scots, have a competent parliament and leader to make decisions. Over the last couple

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Scotland’s chilling new blasphemy law

The new Hate Crime Bill proposed by the Scottish Government is a sweeping threat to freedom of speech and conscience. The draft law radically expands the power of the state to punish expression and expression-adjacent behaviour, such as possession of ‘inflammatory material’. It provides for the prosecution of ill-defined ‘organisations’ (and individuals within them) and could even see actors and directors prosecuted if a play they perform is considered to contain a hate crime. Its schedule of protected characteristics is extended beyond race (which covers ethnicity, national origin and citizenship) to include age, disability, ‘religion or… perceived religious affiliation’, sexual orientation, transgender identity and ‘variations in sex characteristics’. If the

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

The Lib Dem leadership race is descending into farce

In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, the finer details of the contest to choose who will be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats might have understandably passed you by. It was supposed to be taking place, well, right about now, with all Lib Dem members getting to vote for who ultimately is to replace Jo Swinson. Ed Davey and party president Mark Pack are currently interim co-leaders of the party, a strange situation that was meant to be only temporary and that you’d think they would want to change as quickly as possible. Instead, in the wake of the pandemic, the Lib Dems have pushed the leadership election back: to May

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson says businesses need to become ‘Covid-secure’

After Boris Johnson was accused by opposition leaders of providing mixed messages over his roadmap for easing lockdown, the Prime Minister attempted for the third time in 24 hours to explain what the new government guidelines mean in practice. Johnson used the daily press conference – alongside chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance – to take questions from members of the public. After confusion this morning over how many people from a different household an individual can meet outside, Johnson confirmed that it could only be one member of another household at any one time. When it comes to the long-term picture, Johnson said that

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Keir Starmer’s canny coronavirus critique

13 min listen

Following 24 hours of confusion over the government’s advice on the next phase of lockdown, Keir Starmer is making his debut as Labour leader with a statement to be broadcast on the BBC. On the podcast, Katy Balls and James Forsyth analyse his approach of constructive criticism.

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s confusing lockdown rule change

The miracle achieved by Boris Johnson’s 50-page ‘Plan to rebuild” strategy for ‘Covid-19 recovery’ is that somehow the PM succeeded in alienating the leaders of Wales and Scotland and create an apparent rift between the nations, when the liberation from lockdown he is offering the people of England is so slight as to be barely perceptible. There is a tonal shift in respect of work, namely that the PM would like to see businesses that are not on the proscribed list, such as factories and building sites, operating again. But that’s a wish, not an order. And the overarching message is unchanged, namely that it is far better to work from home

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Britain isn’t opting for an Apple or Google ‘test and trace’ app

The government’s decision to try and develop its own ‘test and trace’ app seems bizarre at first glance. Who is going to be better at developing an app, the UK government or Apple and Google? Even inside government, there are those who regard the decision to try and go it alone as technological hubris. But the reason that the government is so keen to determine its own app is that the decentralised Apple and Google one doesn’t allow you to easily identify where infections are spiking. The government really wants this information as it is key to its plan for easing social distancing restrictions and keeping on top of the