Politics Archives

Wednesday

1 Dec 2021

Boris’s social care plans are hollow

Boris Johnson promised to ‘fix social care once and for all’ as he became Prime Minister on the steps of No. 10. On the basis of today’s social care white paper, he doesn’t think it’s particularly badly broken. Care minister Gillian Keegan launched the document in the Commons this afternoon, telling MPs that while this set out a 10-year ‘vision’, ‘today’s white paper is an important step on our journey to giving more people the dignified care that we want for our loved ones’. Those words — ‘important step’ — suggest that ministers don’t think this is the sum total of their proposals to fix social care, which is just

Isabel Hardman

Is Boris in trouble over No.10’s Christmas party?

12 min listen

Keir Starmer went on the attack today at PMQs. The controversy over last years Christmas party resurfaced, with accusations that No.10 breached lockdown rules. He then went on to criticise the government’s new hospitals program. Boris was dealt another blow, this time from his own side. Tory MPs are in uproar about the threats of growing restrictions. Yesterday, two votes in the commons over the new Covid rules led to another rebellion. ’40 is considered the problematic number for a rebellion. That second vote was very close to that’ – Isabel Hardman. A lot of MPs are worried the UK will just bounce in and out of these restrictions endlessly.

Philip Thomas

Unless Omicron changes everything, Covid is on the way out

There are good reasons to be concerned about the Omicron variant. For starters, this strain has 50 mutations, twice as many as Delta. Early reports from South Africa, where the virus has been circulating for a while, suggest it’s outcompeting Delta and spreading rapidly. There is a concern, too, that it could blunt the vaccines, because more than half of the new mutations affect the spike protein that the jabs are designed against. But all of this is theoretical: we need real-world data. So we won’t know whether it really is more transmissible, or how the vaccines perform against it, until long after Christmas. The concern, for now, remains Delta, as

Steerpike

Anti-cancel culture conference cancelled

Oh no! What’s behind the cancellation of GETTR’s ‘Counter Conference’? The right wing festival – due to take place later this month – had promised to tackle cancel culture with a roster of speakers featuring Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox and several US Trump supporters. The organisers had ambitiously booked the O2 Indigo Centre, which has a capacity of almost 3,000. Only they have now cancelled the event with GETTR, the Trumpists answer to Twitter, putting it down to new travel restrictions which mean arrivals to the UK need to self isolate until they have received their day two Covid test result. The company claims the new quarantine rules made ‘scheduling travel to the conference impossible for many

Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Boris blows his top

At PMQs Sir Keir attacked Boris for breaking social distancing rules. But not recently. A year ago, alleged the Labour leader, the guidelines had been ignored at a Downing Street Christmas party. Boris was evasive. ‘No rules were broken.’ That’s all he would say. Sir Keir claimed this as an admission of guilt. Not much of an ambush. Last year is pre-history. And the theme of Christmas gave Boris a chance to deepen the rift between Sir Keir and his ambitious deputy, Angela Rayner, whose invitation to Sir Keir’s Christmas bash has vanished in the post. Boris revealed Rayner had been deeply stung by the snub. She said it was,

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Keir Starmer blunts his own attack

Sir Keir Starmer had two lines of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions, both of them strong in their own way. The problem was that it wasn’t entirely clear what held them together and by splitting his six questions between them, he weakened the force of both. Starmer has been building a case for a while that Boris Johnson is playing the electorate for fools Starmer started by asking Boris Johnson about the Mirror front page, which claims the Prime Minister and his aides broke lockdown restrictions last year by holding a party in Downing Street. Johnson brushed off the allegations by arguing that people were more interested in what happens

Ross Clark

When will the Tories do something about house prices?

Anyone who doubts that the fiscal response to the pandemic has stoked inflation needs to look at the latest figures from the Nationwide on the housing market. Yet again they confirm that the deepest recession in modern history has been accompanied by a boom in house prices. Moreover, the inflation does not seem to have been reined-in by the ending of the stamp duty holiday. The price of the average home, according to the building society, rose by a further 0.9 per cent in November to reach £252,687. This is ten per cent up on last November and 15 per cent up on March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. How can

James Kirkup

Who cares about a power cut in the north east?

How long could you cope without electricity, dear reader? And how many days could you endure without running water? Imagine your home was without power or water for four or even five days. What would you expect to happen? How do you think your country and your government would respond to your plight? There’d be a bit of a fuss, right? I mean, this is an advanced industrialised economy where we have, quite reasonably, come to take the supply of basic utilities as a given. If thousands of people were left without power, heat and water — and in winter too – for the better part of a week, it would

Tuesday

30 Nov 2021

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s booster bet

Boris Johnson is relying heavily on the booster programme to protect Britain from any additional threat posed by the Omicron variant. The Prime Minister made that very clear at this afternoon’s Covid press conference in Downing Street, opening by saying that ‘there is one thing we already know for sure: right now, our single best defence against Omicron is to get vaccinated and get boosted’. Temporary vaccination centres were going to pop up ‘like Christmas trees’, he said. He also seemed committed, if not to boosterism in the form of unbridled optimism about how the next few months would go, then at least to a reluctance to tell people to change

John Jenkins

Will we learn the truth about the Liverpool bomber’s conversion?

It’s been more than a fortnight since the bombing of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and there remain plenty of unanswered questions. It is a sign of the challenge authorities face that even establishing something as basic as the nationality of the man killed in the blast, Emad Al Swealmeen, has proved difficult. There is also much uncertainty over the circumstances surrounding Al Swealmeen’s conversion to Christianity. Al Swealmeen is believed to have entered the UK from Dubai, and his claim for asylum was rejected soon afterwards. Permission to appeal was refused, but, in 2017, Al Swealmeen converted to Christianity. This year, he applied for asylum under the name Enzo Almeni, claiming his Christian faith would put

Ross Clark

How concerned should we be about Omicron?

Ministers accused of overreacting to the Omicron variant will feel vindicated by the comments of Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel. In an interview with the FT, Bancel said he expects his company’s vaccine to suffer a ‘material drop’ in efficacy against Omicron – on the grounds that the new variant has 32 mutations to its spike protein. The protein, which the virus uses to attach itself to human cells, is targeted by the Moderna vaccine. The vaccine seemed to cope with previous variants – but they had fewer mutations. Bancel said the company’s scientists had told him: ‘This is not going to be good.’ Yes, it will be possible to

Isabel Hardman

What’s the aim of Labour’s second reshuffle?

10 min listen

Yesterday Keir Starmer’s Labour Party announced a new reshuffle of its shadow cabinet. It just coincidentally happened on the same day Angela Rayner gave a big speech on Tory sleaze, leading some to speculate on friction within the party. ‘What you can’t avoid is that they ultimately decided to do the reshuffle on a day where Angela Rayner, the deputy leader was trying to make a big statement that would lead the news.’ – Katy Balls Isabel Hardman talks with Katy Balls and James Forsyth about Labour’s key moves, as well as the latest updates on the new Omicron variant and the plans to thwart it. Subscribe to The Spectator’s

Katy Balls

Could there be a Tory upset in North Shropshire?

As the government turns its attention to the new Covid variant, the ramifications of the Owen Paterson sleaze row are not quite done yet. After a difficult few weeks for the Prime Minister and his team in 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson’s approval ratings have fallen both with the general public and Tory members. The latest ConservativeHome poll puts Johnson in negative ratings for the second time since the last election among the Tory grassroots — on -17.2. In a way, it’s hardly surprising Johnson’s standing has fallen given the combination of problems facing the government — from tax rises to small boats and the Paterson row. The question is,

Steerpike

Truss channels her inner Thatcher

Since Liz Truss was appointed Foreign Secretary in Boris Johnson’s reshuffle, she has upped the ante when it comes to the visual element of the job. As well as appointing a new special adviser focussed on social media (who can no doubt compete with Rishi Sunak’s own social media whizz kid Cass Horowitz), Truss rarely misses a photo opp whether it’s for Instagram or tomorrow’s front pages. Today is no exception. After warning this morning ahead of a meeting of Nato counterparts in Latvia that a Russian incursion into Ukraine would be a strategic mistake, Truss appears to have adopted the view that a picture can say a thousand words. The Foreign Secretary

Annabel Denham

The economic impact of the latest Covid restrictions

We don’t yet know whether the Omicron variant will drastically accelerate the spread of coronavirus, or whether it will circumvent parts of the immune system. Nor can we be sure that the ‘light’ coronavirus restrictions announced at the weekend will be enough to combat the new strain. We can be certain, however, that these measures will come with an economic cost that politicians are, at least publicly, understating. Face masks are once again compulsory in shops and on public transport in England, and UK arrivals will need to take PCR tests within two days of landing, isolating until they get their result. But the major economic threat stems from the

Brendan O’Neill

Covid restrictions have gone on for too long

We can’t carry on like this. We can’t keep resurrecting restrictions every time a new Covid variant emerges. We can’t keep suspending certain liberties whenever this blasted virus mutates. Somehow we have got stuck in a spiral of doom and kneejerk authoritarianism, and we urgently need to find a way out of it. People, of course, will say it’s only mask-wearing in shops and on buses. It’s only a PCR test if you’re coming back from overseas. It’s only mandatory quarantine if you come into contact with someone infected with the Omicron variant. These are hardly onerous regulations. And Boris says they’ll be temporary. They will be reviewed in three

Monday

29 Nov 2021

Steerpike

Exclusive: Zemmour will run for President

It may be the worst kept secret in France but Eric Zemmour will tomorrow announce his candidacy for his country’s presidential election, according to a source on his campaign team. It is, in one sense, confirmation of the obvious: it’s been clear for some months now to everyone who follows French politics that Monsieur Z is running for the Élysée Palace in 2022. His supposed book promotion tour was nakedly a series of political campaign rallies. Two days ago he released a campaign; now it is about to become official. But the timing is nonetheless interesting since Zemmour has had a difficult few days. The polls suggest his soaring popularity has lost

Isabel Hardman

Starmer’s attention-grabbing shadow cabinet reshuffle

Keir Starmer has a new front bench. He has conducted his second reshuffle in the space of a year, but this time he’s actually managed to get the changes he was after. A key theme of this reshuffle has been giving Labour a better chance of being heard. Many of the departures today have involved figures who were underperforming in key roles: Nick Thomas-Symonds, for instance, was very well-liked in the party but struggling to get much purchase even against Priti Patel’s growing political mess on human trafficking in the Channel. He has now been replaced by Yvette Cooper, who has done this brief before and who has grown even

Daniel Lightman

Does cricket have an anti-Semitism problem?

The row over racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club has also shone a spotlight on anti-Semitism in the cricketing world. Andrew Gale, the Yorkshire head coach and former captain, has been suspended for having sent a tweet which said: ‘button it, yid’. Azeem Rafiq, the former Yorkshire spin-bowler who blew the whistle on racism, was found to have sent a Facebook message in which he labelled a fellow cricketer as a ‘Jew’ for being reluctant to spend money at a team dinner, and went on to assert: ‘Only Jews do (that) sort of shit ha’. The comedian Mike Yarwood once quipped: ‘I was doing the smallest books in the world.

Isabel Hardman

Why is the Treasury blocking a helpful health reform?

The Health and Care Bill is having a predictably stormy passage through parliament, popping up in the Lords next week for its second reading. If you’d paid only cursory attention to its closing stages in the Commons then you might be forgiven for thinking the legislation is largely about reform to social care and privatisation of the NHS. In reality, the social care policy was inserted at the last minute, and it’s only an amendment covering the cap on care costs, while privatisation has become something left-wing politicians like to warn is about to happen regardless of what’s in the bill before them (more on that here). It is not