Politics

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

Patrick O'Flynn

Nigel Farage’s China curveball should worry the Tory party

I have lost count of the number of times the Conservative Party has thought it has shot Nigel Farage’s fox. They stretch all the way back to David Cameron’s January 2013 pledge to hold an In/Out EU referendum, and include the party’s as yet unfulfilled summer promise to stop the illegal Channel crossings and its delivery of a trade deal with the EU that honours the fundamentals of Brexit. Given that the Covid vaccines have also taken some of the sting out of the lockdown debate, which the former Ukip leader was poised to exploit, many Tories will have felt able to relax a bit about the challenge on their

Katy Balls

Lockdown returns: what the new rules mean

11 min listen

This evening the Prime Minister announced a return to the lockdown system for England, coming after Nicola Sturgeon announced similar measures earlier in the day. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about what the measures mean for students, vulnerable groups and more.

Lockdown 3: the rules in full

Boris Johnson has announced a third national lockdown to last until at least the middle of February. But there are more stated exemptions than in the first lockdown. The new laws are expected to follow shortly, while the formal advice is below:  ● You must not leave home without a ‘reasonable excuse’. This will be put in law with fines for non-compliance ranging from £200 (for a first offence) to £6,400. ● Work — You can go to work ‘where it is unreasonable for you to do your job from home’. The examples given are ‘critical national infrastructure, construction or manufacturing’ but the advice says it’s ‘not limited to’ those jobs.

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson announces a third national lockdown

Boris Johnson has announced that England is going into a third national lockdown – but a much stricter one than we saw in the autumn. The government has also been forced to accept that A-levels and GCSEs will not be going ahead this year because all schools will close from tomorrow, save for vulnerable children and the children of key workers. In a televised address to the nation, the Prime Minister asked people to stay at home from Monday, with a legal requirement to do so being introduced in regulations this week. The lockdown will run until the middle of February. He explained that scientists had concluded the new variant

Steerpike

Keir Starmer’s shifting schools policy

It shouldn’t have been a difficult task to hold the government to account today on schools and lockdown, as the Prime Minister currently weighs up shuttering the school gates till Covid cases decline. Labour leader Keir Starmer though seems to have managed to develop an even more confused policy today. This morning, Labour suggested that schools should remain open even if the country went into lockdown. This was followed by a hasty U-Turn this afternoon, with the party then calling for schools to be closed. After such a big change, Mr S had presumed that Labour would at least have a basic grasp of their new policy. Unfortunately though, in

Katy Balls

Prime Minister to address nation over new restrictions

Boris Johnson will address the nation this evening in an 8 p.m. address over rising coronavirus rates. Ahead of the statement, a No. 10 spokesperson said the Prime Minister is ‘clear that further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise and to protect the NHS and save lives’. It’s also been announced that parliament will be recalled on Wednesday to debate new measures. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced a lockdown in Scotland earlier today while Keir Starmer and Jeremy Hunt called for further measures in England. The expectation among MPs now is that the PM will likely announce some form of national lockdown – whether by name or placing the whole of England under

Isabel Hardman

How will Tory backbenchers react to another lockdown?

Boris Johnson is coming under increased pressure from Tory MPs on both sides of the Covid debate today. On the one hand, there is former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt calling for schools and borders to close and a ban on all household mixing straight away in order to prevent the NHS from collapsing. On the other, there is Mark Harper, chair of the influential Covid Recovery Group, who has just issued a call for the government to start relaxing restrictions from February. The two demands aren’t necessarily mutually-exclusive: the two men just have rather different timescales. Hunt insisted this morning that the restrictions he is calling for ‘will be time-limited

Katy Balls

Senior Tories urge government to toughen restrictions

As government ministers hint at tougher restrictions to come, one of the themes of lockdown measures so far has been resistance from the Conservative parliamentary party. However, while there remains some unease on the Tory benches over both the Christmas measures and the lack of parliamentary scrutiny of them, there has also been an increase in the number of Tory MPs willing to call for the opposite: tougher measures sooner. Jeremy Hunt has made a public intervention today. The former health secretary has called on the government to move to a national lockdown without delay. He say this ought to include the closure of schools and borders — as well as a ban on

Katy Balls

How far will Boris tighten Covid restrictions?

16 min listen

Boris Johnson today said there was ‘no question’ that the government would announce tighter coronavirus restrictions, as case numbers continue to surge. It came after health secretary Matt Hancock said this morning that the existing tier system is ‘no longer strong enough’. What will further restrictions look like? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

James Forsyth

Matt Hancock: the Tier system is no longer strong enough

There is a sense of grim inevitability this morning that even tighter Covid restrictions are coming very soon. On his media round this morning, Matt Hancock has been emphasising that the new variant means that the ‘old tier system… is no longer strong enough’ and that the only thing that can stop the spread of the virus is people not seeing others. There is beginning to be a shift back to the ‘stay at home’ message we heard so much during the first lockdown. The increased transmissibility of the Kentish variant, let alone the South African one, means it is unclear if even a March-style lockdown would be enough to

Robert Peston

Covid statistics suggest schools are likely to be closed soon

Here are the numbers that show why schools are very unlikely to re-open any time soon in London and the south east, and why within a week or so the whole country may be in a lockdown that includes school closures. Tier 4, the so-called “stay-at-home tier”, is broadly equivalent to the two-week circuit-breaking lockdown that was imposed in November. It did not include school closures, but it suppressed the rate of transmission of Covid-19 to 0.85 or 0.9. In other words it led to the infection gradually shrinking in the community. Unfortunately, since then we’ve witnessed the explosive growth of the new strain of Covid-19. Here is the point:

Sunday shows round-up: primary school children should ‘absolutely’ return, says Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson – Restrictions ‘probably about to get tougher’ The Andrew Marr Show returned this morning, and with it came an in-depth interview with the Prime Minister. It will surprise no one to hear that the bulk of the interview focused on the coronavirus, and Boris Johnson signalled throughout that the new year could see fresh restrictions being brought into place. He did not go into any detail about what measures could be introduced under a potential ‘Tier 5’, but it was clear enough that his 5pm Downing Street press conferences were not yet a thing of the past: BJ: It may be that we need to do things in

Katy Balls

Prime Minister hints at ‘tougher’ restrictions to come

Boris Johnson kicked off the new year with an appearance on The Andrew Marr show in which he warned of tough weeks ahead for the country. With Covid cases on the rise and concerns among the scientific community that the current restrictions will not be enough to contain spread of the virus, the Prime Minister said that restrictions are ‘alas probably about to get tougher’. Johnson told Marr that the government was ‘entirely reconciled to doing what it takes to get the virus down and that may involve tougher measures in the weeks ahead’ – even if that meant doing things in the next few weeks that ‘will be tougher in many parts

Steerpike

Labour MP’s vaccine fake news backfires

Oh dear. It’s not been a good weekend on vaccine news for the New York Times or the Labour party. The one time paper of record ran a misleading report claiming the UK planned to give Britons a dangerous cocktail of Covid vaccines. Despite that claim being debunked, it wasn’t enough to stop a Labour MP from sharing similar comments. Now there is another incident to add to the list. The self-titled shadow ‘cabinet’ minister for mental health Dr Rosena Allin-Khan set the cat among the pigeons late on Saturday night with a series of extraordinary tweets. The Labour MP – who is a trained doctor – took to social media to announce that she had

A haunting revelation from the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry

The path to the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry, which opened in September, has been a long one. It had to wait for the extradition from Libya and trial of the bomber’s brother, Hashem Abedi, and then for the first wave of coronavirus. Once underway, it has been a rollercoaster of emotion for the victims’ families, many of whom have sat through every day of the hearings. It began with two weeks of truly heart-breaking stories of the 22 lives cut short. The kind of person who attends an Ariana Grande concert is likely to be young and in love with life; that made their stories feel that much more tragic.

Steerpike

The New York Times’s UK vaccine clickbait

The New York Times really does have it in for poor old Britain, doesn’t it? Not content with portraying Brits as boiled mutton eating swamp dwellers, America’s self-styled paper of record is now suggesting we’re being pumped full of a dangerous cocktail of Covid vaccines. ‘Britain Opts for Mix-and-Match Vaccinations, Confounding Experts’ screams the headline.  The reality? A different second dose will only be considered in very limited circumstances where there is an ‘immediate high risk’ to health. And that’s only if the previous type of vaccine isn’t known or isn’t available. Surely a reasonable precautionary measure if all else fails?  As Jonathan Stoye of the Francis Crick Institute notes, such a plan ‘does not seem unreasonable and

Nick Tyrone

My fellow Rejoiners are living a fantasy

On New Year’s Eve at 11 p.m., the United Kingdom departed both the single market and the customs union, making the end to the country’s former membership of the EU complete. It was a moment to celebrate for Brexiteers; the commemoration of sadness for some Remainers. Or should I say ‘Rejoiners’ — there is no remaining now, Great Britain having departed the European Union. Many Rejoiners have set out their stalls already. ‘When they tell you to “move on” DO move on — to the long, strong, campaign to rejoin,’ tweeted Simon Schama, the historian and noted fan of the UK’s membership of the EU, ‘However hard the road, however

Patrick O'Flynn

Has Brexit already destroyed Labour’s chances?

Part of the soap opera appeal of politics comes from the idea that it is a competitive sport based on fine margins – with a result that will be determined by the relative performances of the teams and their captains. Under the British first-past-the-post system two major parties slug it out in an epic tussle across hundreds of seats and then one of them wins. Sometimes things are so closely fought that neither party has an outright majority, in which case one or more of the minor parties gets to choose which should be propped up. From this point of view, every policy shift or zinger soundbite thrown by Boris