Politics

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

Thursday

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

What’s holding up Scotland’s vaccine rollout?

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say that Nicola Sturgeon has had a ‘good pandemic’, I’d be living in my very own Scottish castle by now. Imposing restrictions one step ahead of Boris Johnson seems to have become Sturgeon’s go-to formula. But if the First Minister has been praised for her initial response to Covid-19, Sturgeon is running out of excuses to explain why Scotland’s vaccine programme lags behind that of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Having just managed to catch up on the over 80s briefly at the weekend, Scotland has now fallen significantly behind in its vaccination of the over 70s. And with England soon

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Could lockdown lift sooner?

Wednesday’s very upbeat Downing Street coronavirus briefing underlined the optimism that Boris Johnson feels about the way the Covid crisis could work out for him. The Prime Minister was celebrating the UK passing the ten million mark for the number of people who have received their first dose of the vaccine, and thanked the NHS for the programme, which he described as ‘the most colossal in the history of our National Health Service’. He also very pointedly thanked the Vaccine Taskforce, which the Prime Minister sees as another vindication of his approach to the pandemic. For Johnson, the first part of the coronavirus crisis was bruising and the government made

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris’s easy ride at PMQs

13 min listen

At PMQs today, Keir Starmer denied Boris Johnson’s claims that he wanted the UK to remain in the EU’s vaccine procurement scheme. Could a successful domestic rollout, away from the bloc’s programme, be seen by the public as an upside of Brexit and cause the opposition problems? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The pointlessness of PMQs

It’s a different game at PMQs. With fewer than 40 members present, the debates feel more like a committee meeting than a full-throated parliamentary session. It’s bad for democracy if the highlight of the parliamentary week looks so static and uninspiring. When the weather cheers up they should move to a secure location outdoors, (like the gardens of Buckingham Palace), where more members could attend and the sessions would be livelier. Meanwhile, MPs are chafing under the restrictions. They’ve started to mess about like schoolkids in detention. They play games. They needle each other. They stretch the rules, and they dare the Speaker to shut them up or tick them

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What the latest vaccine news means for lifting lockdown

As more good news about vaccine efficacy rolls in, questions are already starting to be asked about what it means for the Prime Minister’s lockdown timetable. Boris Johnson has committed to publishing his ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown — but news from the last few days may be influencing what that roadmap looks like, especially the PM’s top priorities of getting children back to school and lifting major social distancing restrictions. Today’s antibody survey from the Office for National Statistics shows 15.3 per cent prevalence in England, up from 10.7 per cent last month. This time around, the increase is not just due to infections: vaccines are playing their part too.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How alcohol deaths hit a record high during lockdown

Almost a year after the statistics were first published, the country remains horrified by the daily total of Covid 19-related deaths. Meanwhile, we are rather less apt to notice other statistics related to harm and death, which may be an unintended by-product of the fight against Covid-19.  The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) latest figures for the number of deaths related to alcohol-specific causes, published yesterday, received little attention. But they make for dreadful reading. There were 5460 such deaths in the first three quarters of 2020, a shocking rise of 16.4 per cent compared with the same nine-month period in 2019. This grim tally marks the highest number of deaths in the 20 years

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Will Sturgeon admit to the cost of independence?

I’m not a great fan of economic modelling. Remember, for example, the Treasury’s infamous claim that unemployment would rise by between 500,000 and 800,000 within two years of a vote for Brexit (i.e. before we had actually left). In the event, unemployment fell in 2018 to reach the lowest level since the mid-1970s. Yet having used economic models to rubbish the case for Brexit, it becomes very difficult then to ignore forecasts which claim there would be an even bigger negative economic impact from Scottish independence. So what, in other words, will Nicola Sturgeon and other SNP politicians do about a paper just published by the LSE that claims that

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris and Keir’s Commons argy bargy

At PMQs today, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer clashed over the latter’s support in the past for the European Medicines Agency – which as Mr S pointed out, appeared to involve Keir Starmer potentially misleading the House of Commons. It now sounds though like the pair’s argument continued outside the Chamber. The Sun reports that Sir Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson ended up having a dust up in the ‘aye’ lobby at the end of the session. It appears that Starmer confronted the PM about the medicines row, which led to a ‘heated exchange’. According to one account, a Labour MP had to pull Starmer away from the row –

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson had an easy ride at PMQs

Boris Johnson had a pretty easy ride at Prime Minister’s Questions today, despite Keir Starmer raising two policy problems that the government is really struggling to stay on top of. The Labour leader asked his first three questions on the quarantine policy, pushing Johnson for much tougher rules, and then turned to the cladding scandal. As we have repeatedly covered on Coffee House, the latter is a huge consumer crisis that is leaving thousands of people trapped in homes they cannot sell or with bills for remedial works to remove dangerous cladding reaching into the tens of thousands of pounds. Starmer channelled Jeremy Corbyn and quoted some of those affected.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How the EU can help calm Brexit tensions in Northern Ireland

The next Northern Ireland assembly election must take place by 5 May next year. The MLAs voted in then will decide whether or not to continue the Northern Ireland protocol, which requires the UK authorities to apply EU rules on various goods entering Northern Ireland. If a majority voted against (that is all that would be needed as the petition of concern, which requires a higher threshold, would not apply), then the protocol would fall. At the moment, it looks very unlikely that the election will result in an anti-protocol majority. But it would clearly be bad for stability in Northern Ireland if the campaign turned into an attempt by Unionists to rally

Steerpike Steerpike

Keir Starmer’s misleading European Medicines Agency remarks

Oh dear. Sir Keir Starmer was in a particularly prickly mood this afternoon, as he faced Boris Johnson at PMQs, and the pair clashed over border closures. But the Labour leader appeared most riled when the Prime Minister pointed out that Starmer had fought for Britain to stay in the European Medicines Agency – a move that could have potentially slowed our vaccine roll-out. An indignant Starmer suggested that the PM’s claim was ‘complete nonsense’ and added that: ‘The Prime Minister knows I’ve never said that, from this Despatch box or anywhere else, but the truth escapes him.’ A strong rebuke. Mr S is curious though, was it then a different

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Why are some Labour supporters embarrassed by the Union Jack?

How does Labour plan to win back the Red Wall? A leaked internal Labour strategy document gives one answer: it says the party must make ‘use of the flag’. This sounds like a sensible way to woo those voters put off by Jeremy Corbyn. But the deranged backlash from some Labour activists suggests that not everyone agrees. It also shows why the party is doomed to fail in its bit to change its image for the better. Labour activists took to social media yesterday to decry Keir Starmer on the strategy, asking why the Labour leader is risking alienating so many of his party’s core support. That just mentioning the Union flag in a positive

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

There are serious gaps in the Domestic Abuse Bill

Is the government making the most of its landmark Domestic Abuse Bill? The legislation is currently at committee stage in the House of Lords, with peers discussing hundreds of amendments. Some have little chance of success, but others point to serious gaps in the Bill which could undermine its overall clout. One of the most popular amendments has been tabled by Conservative peer Lord Polak and has support from across the House. It calls for public authorities to have a statutory duty to commission support in the community for victims of abuse. Currently, the bill only creates a statutory duty to provide for victims who are in a refuge or

Jamie Gillies

The SNP was wrong to back down to the transgender mob

The SNP’s hate crime bill has done plenty of damage to the party’s credibility. But it seems the party leadership is determined to make matters even worse. The Scottish government has announced that it will withdraw an amendment to the bill that would have permitted free speech on transgender issues. This move, a capitulation to activists, puts fears about the legislation back at an all-time high. The trans debate is already one in which it is difficult to speak out for fear of being abused, so providing for free speech on this topic is critical. Failing to do so could leave people, and women in particular, open to accusations of

Matthew Lynn

Ursula von der Leyen has broken the first rule of leadership

Valdis Dombrovskis could probably do without his moment in the limelight. His spell as prime minister of Latvia, a country with a population of 1.9 million, was largely successful, at least until the collapse of a supermarket roof in 2014 brought his coalition to an early end.  Shunted off to Brussels, he worked quietly as commission vice-president for the euro and social dialogue– nope, I don’t know what the heck that means either – before being promoted to the slightly more important trade portfolio last year. Now it turns out he is responsible for what is rapidly turning into the biggest policy catastrophe in Europe since the Second World War,

Steerpike Steerpike

Philip Hammond’s Brexit muddle

You won’t be surprised to learn that Philip Hammond was no big fan of Brexit. But Mr S was still somewhat taken aback by just how little the former chancellor made of Theresa May’s ‘Brexit means Brexit’ strategy: ‘My assessment of Theresa May’s Prime Ministership, in terms of Brexit, is that she dug a 20-foot-deep hole in October 2016 in making that speech’ Hammond was, of course, referring to the speech May made to Tory party conference in her first year as prime minister. But Hammond’s interview, released this week by UK in a changing Europe, has opened up something of a riddle. The Eeyore-ish ex-Chancellor said he had not seen May’s

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Starmer needs to be more like Blair to beat Boris

If Keir Starmer has a strategy, it’s this: to paint his party as more competent than the Tories while keeping his head down on almost everything else. The aim of this is to ensure Labour can crawl across the line come the next election, winning a majority with a bit of help from the SNP. There’s a big problem with this approach though: it’s the same one that failed to work for Ed Miliband. To beat it, Boris Johnson need do little more than recycle the Tories’ 2015 campaign, which depicted Miliband in Salmond’s pocket, substituting Sturgeon in his place. The other problem with the ‘do as little as possible’ strategy is that it will almost certainly result

Mark Mason

Before Rashford: sports stars who got political

It can’t be easy, holding down a place in the Manchester United and England teams while also serving as de facto Deputy Prime Minister. But Marcus Rashford seems to be managing it. After the footballer’s high profile campaigns on free school meals and homelessness, we look at some of the other sports stars who swapped the pitch for politics. George Weah Rashford’s predecessors in the world of soccer haven’t always focused on Lamborghinis and nightclubs. The Brazilian Socrates founded the Corinthians Democracy movement to oppose his country’s military government, while in 2014 his compatriot Romario went one stage further and got himself elected to the Brazilian senate.  In 1997 Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Westminster unable to solve the cladding crisis?

The government was never going to come out well from Monday afternoon’s cladding debate in the House of Commons, given it has taken so long to address the crisis facing tens of thousands of leaseholders trapped in dangerous and unsellable flats or holding bills for tens of thousands of pounds. Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick stayed away entirely, leaving housing minister Chris Pincher to respond at the start and junior housing minister Eddie Hughes to do the wind-up. This gave the impression that ministers do not see this as a priority, despite it developing into a huge scandal that will blight the lives of