Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
25 min listen
At Thursday’s coronavirus press conference, Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, said a second wave ‘is real and it’s serious’, as he warned that 11,000 people were already in hospital with the virus. Is the NHS able to cope with another spike in infections, and has the government adequately prepared for winter? Kate Andrews speaks to Fraser Nelson and Dave West, deputy editor of the Health Service Journal.
21 min listen
On this week’s episode, Sam Carlisle, a mother of a disabled child, says her family has been abandoned during the pandemic; Alberto Giubilini considers the ethics of lockdown; and Taki explains why New Yorkers are leaving the city in droves.
Joe Biden is the President elect. His lead in Pennsylvania is unassailable, such that even if he somehow slipped behind in Arizona, Nevada or Georgia, he will still receive the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. President Trump, however, at the time of writing, continues to dig in. With lawsuits filed in several key states and the President making increasingly deranged statements around ‘illegal votes’ and the illegitimacy of late-counted mail-in ballots, it seems possible that he’ll refuse to leave the White House quietly. Some in Trump World have even made the outlandish suggestion that the Pennsylvania state legislature, controlled by Republicans, should override the election result
After saying there was ‘no question of lockdown’, Emmanuel Macron has announced what many feared: the implementation of a new national and mandatory lockdown. We are lawyers and jurists of all specialities and from all parts of France and write to express our indignation at the injustice of this measure. After being astonished by the first lockdown, we believe that such violations of our freedoms and ways of life are neither viable nor legitimate. Lockdown will have major collateral consequences that will be more harmful than the virus itself. While we agree with the President’s statement that nothing is ‘more important than human life’. But a national lockdown is an
How worried should we be about a mutant strain of Coronavirus found in Denmark’s mink farms? The virus was found on its farms in June, and it emerged a few days ago that a dozen people had been infected with a strain of Covid called ‘Cluster 5’. This has raised the prospect of a new, more virulent vaccine-proof strain: a prospect dismissed in some places but being taken very seriously in 10 Downing St. So seriously that Britain has just become the only country in the world to close its borders to anyone from Denmark. Francois Balloux, a professor of genetics at University College London has downplayed it as a story “making the
So, how will Joe Biden’s victory affect US-UK relations? As I write in the Times, the downsides for this government are obvious. Biden fiercely opposed Brexit and those around him, like many on the American left, look to London and see a mini-Trump. They will regard other leaders from Merkel to Macron as more natural partners for them. The first phone calls are likely to go to them, not to Johnson. If the transition period ends without a trade deal and the Northern Ireland clauses of the Internal Market Bill come into force, that will further strain relations. The bulk of Biden’s key appointments will need to be confirmed by
Nicola Sturgeon sank to a new low this morning. The SNP leader bizarrely seemed to compare opposing a second independence referendum in Scotland to Trump refusing to concede the US election. This is, of course, the same SNP leader who still refuses to accept the SNP’s 2014 referendum loss – a referendum her party claimed would be a ‘once in a generation’ vote. Perhaps Sturgeon should take a long hard look in the mirror before claiming that ‘politicians who rage against democracy don’t prevail’. Let’s remember too, that as well as rejecting the decisive No vote in the independence referendum in 2014, Sturgeon has also raged against the British vote
14 min listen
As Liverpool begins it’s mass testing trial, ONS figures published today show that the coronavirus infection rate was fell in the week ending October 31. So was the tiered system working all along, meaning the new lockdown is unnecessary? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about the new data, Scottish independence, and the US election.
Tensions over the election outcome are escalating in the United States, as President Donald Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. Nearly a day and a half after Trump prematurely declared victory, he took to the stage at a press conference held in the White House and did so again, arguing ‘if you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.’ He also used the opportunity to double down on his assertions of foul play: ‘they’re trying to rig an election. They’re trying to steal an election,’ he said. Team Trump has not provided evidence for these serious allegations. The claims remain unfounded,
28 min listen
What are the latest developments in the US presidential election? (01:15) – Lara is joined by the Spectator’s economics correspondent Kate Andrews and the Spectator US’s editor Freddy Gray, who is currently in Pennsylvania. What is it like to care for a disabled child during a time of lockdown? (09:19) – The journalist Sam Carlisle discusses the lack of support for her daughter Elvi with the Education Select Committee Chairman Robert Halfon. And finally, should churches keep their doors open throughout the pandemic? (20:42) – Journalist Laura Freeman thinks so, and considers the issue with Reverend Steve Morris from St Cuthbert’s Church in North Wembley. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced
14 min listen
The Chancellor announced new furlough measures today, something that he has long been opposed to. Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and James Forsyth about whether or not Rishi Sunak has lost the argument.
Sir Simon Stevens, the chief exec of NHS England, joined Boris Johnson during this evening’s Downing Street press conference where the pair sought to justify England’s second national lockdown. Stevens, however, went one step further: he had a dig at Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance. He told the press conference: I’ve watched a number of these press briefings and sometimes the charts can be a bit hard to keep up with. So I’ve just got one chart today that indisputably sets out what we in the health service are seeing. Stevens’s chart — which shows the number of patients in hospital in England with Covid-19 — was then described by the NHS boss as
Boris Johnson is holding a press conference at 5 p.m. on the new England-wide lockdown. This follows last night’s vote where thirty-odd Tory MPs voted against the new measures. But listening to that debate, it was clear that even among many of the Tories who voted for the lockdown there is deep scepticism about the measure. The biggest danger for the government, as I say in the magazine this week, is that this lockdown turns out to be tactical, not strategic. The driving force behind it was the fear that the NHS would be overwhelmed. Johnson has indicated that if infection levels are falling on 2 December, he will deem
These days Rishi Sunak’s appearances before the House of Commons tend to mark changes to pre-existing economic support schemes. His proposed winter economy plan didn’t survive a month before alterations had to be made. But even by recent standards, today’s statement marks a big shift for the Chancellor. Not only is the furlough scheme back — despite previous insistences that it must end — it is available until the end of March (with the specifics of the policy to be reviewed in January). Meanwhile, the jobs retention scheme, which had been imagined as a follow-up scheme for the end of furlough, has been scrapped. While Sunak and his supporters take issue with the idea that
SNP politicians often get an easy ride when they appear on politics programmes south of the border, where most of the discussion tends to revolve around the performance of the Westminster government. Unfortunately, that was not the case for the SNP MP Alyn Smith, who appeared on the BBC’s Politics Live this afternoon. Near the end of the show, the politician received quite the grilling from Andrew Neil, who was appearing on the show as a guest for the final time. Neil began by tearing apart the SNP’s woeful record on poverty and deprivation, after which Smith suggested the SNP needed more powers to solve Scotland’s problems. In response, Neil pointed out
England has only been back in national lockdown for a matter of hours and already economic support packages are rolling in — not for the duration of this lockdown (furlough was already confirmed until 2 December) but for the months to follow after the country exits lockdown. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has abandoned a return to the jobs support scheme when lockdown ends — which sees the majority of financial costs fall on the employer — and instead decided to extend the furlough scheme across the UK in its most generous form. Furlough will run until March 2021 at least, with the government paying 80 per cent of workers’ wages for
Even before the final result of the US Presidential election was known, the British left was ready with its hot takes. Momentum, which continues to proudly hold aloft the flickering flame of Corbynism, was amongst the first out of the traps, claiming that Joe Biden’s failure to achieve a landslide victory confirmed, ‘what we already know: that corporate centrism cannot deliver a decisive defeat to insurgent right-wing populism or deliver real change’. Expect more of this kind of thing from across the Labour party: somehow or other events in the US will be magically used to authenticate already-entrenched positions. Since the parallel rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the
The Bank of England includes as one of its ‘conditioning assumptions’ in its forecasts today that the Bank Rate – the interest rate that is the benchmark for all rates – becomes negative for the first time in history next year, at minus 0.1 per cent. It describes a world in which banks are charged for not lending to us and we are charged for saving. And it is one manifestation of the desperate economic scarring caused by the virus. Another striking characteristic of today’s Bank of England projections is that UK GDP, or national income, is set to shrink by 11 per cent for the whole of 2020 –
The benefit of having a lockdown announced some days in advance is the ability to savour what is about to be lost. People have been able to visit friends and family, not knowing when it will be legal to meet again. Parishioners have attended church to say their farewells, as have small groups of friends and family. Small shops stayed open until midnight on Wednesday to serve customers, restaurants were booked up. Yes, we face the return of Covid-19. But was also face a government that seems in a flap, unable to decide what to do. Boris Johnson has said that this latest lockdown will last only four weeks, and there
Keir Starmer has his first attack line of the next general election campaign. He will say that England’s second lockdown was longer than it needed to be because the Prime Minister didn’t act when he had the chance. If Boris Johnson had listened to the scientists, Labour will say, we’d have had a two week ‘circuit-breaker’ and controlled the virus. As things stand, a man who set his face against lockdown was then forced to adopt one — making it longer, more painful and costing far more jobs. A couple of weeks ago, there was a clear dividing line: Labour wanted national measures; the Tories wanted regional ones. So Starmer