Politics

The Scottish government has U-turned on its decision to downgrade thousands of students’ exam results. Instead, pupils in Scotland who had their grades lowered by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) will be able to rely on teacher assessments of their results, the Scottish Education Secretary John Swinney has announced. The U-turn comes after Nicola Sturgeon was forced into a humiliating apology yesterday for her administration’s handling of the exam results fiasco, which saw pupils in Scotland’s most deprived areas have their pass rate downgraded by more than students in wealthier areas. According to the Scottish children’s commissioner, grades had been lowered by taking into account the historic performance of a

Look past the headline statistics and you’ll see economic reality starting to infiltrate the labour market. Today’s employment figures from the Office for National Statistics mark very little movement from the previous quarter, with employment at 76.4 per cent (down 0.2 per cent on the previous quarter) and unemployment at 3.9 per cent (unchanged from the previous quarter, still hovering at a record-low level). Yet today also marks the biggest decrease in UK employment for a decade, since May 2009 in the wake of the financial crash. For many workers, being temporarily away from paid work is likely to become permanent How can this be? The official figures from the

The verdict is in: Boris Johnson’s handling of coronavirus has been disastrous. Britain’s death toll remains one of the highest in the world, sick patients were discharged back into care homes at the height of the epidemic; and millions of pounds blown on useless PPE which can’t be used by NHS staff. But while it’s true that some things have gone wrong – as Boris himself has conceded – it’s also true that many of those loudly condemning Boris for the way he has dealt with the pandemic have form in criticising Boris. So are they right? And is it fair to blame Britain’s coronavirus blunders on the PM? The UK

Noel Quinn, the chief executive of HSBC, declines to say whether his bank will disown pro-democracy staff who fall foul of China’s draconian new security law for Hong Kong. The bank, he says, follows the law of every country in which it operates: it will treat the issue case by case.  What he may not have digested is that the new security law claims universal jurisdiction. Any Hong Kong person making secessionist, terrorist, seditious etc statements (as defined by China) anywhere in the world commits a crime, just as if he makes similar statements from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong. If I were a pro-democracy Hong Kong citizen working at HSBC’s

In the run up to the 2015 general election, there was a lot of talk in Westminster about the demise of two-party hegemony. We were coming to the end of five years of coalition government and the thinking was that neither the Tories nor Labour could get a majority, possibly ever again. This theory has since been crushed as First Past the Post works its magic. But there is one exception to this: the SNP. From having only six MPs in parliament when Nick Clegg was deputy prime minister, they ended up with 56 after 2015, and though they dipped in 2017, they went back up to 48 seats in

A rigid and complicated planning system has long been one of the issues holding back the UK economy. The planning reforms announced by Robert Jenrick this week are designed to bring more predictability and speed to the system. Jenrick’s document is very much a case of politics being the art of the possible. The green belt is left alone in its entirety, despite the fact that a more rational planning system would require examining whether all of the green belt is needed, and if it is all in the right place. For example, building houses around train stations in the green belt would seem a sensible move – but these

Last Friday, Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard, was celebrating his nomination for a peerage. But while the future looks bright for soon-to-be Lord Lebedev (son of the former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev), there is bad news for some of those who work for him. Today it was announced that the Standard will sack nearly half of its journalists after its business model was shredded by the Covid-19 crisis. Up to 69 poor hacks at Derry Street are said to be up for the chop, with 46 who work in other roles in the company also losing their jobs. It’s a grim start for Emily Sheffield, founder

Power struggles at the heart of government continued today, with a key member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office announcing his retirement. Palmerston the cat, Chief Mouser of the department since 2016, announced he was stepping down via the Foreign Office Twitter account. In a statement, Palmerston explained that working from home over lockdown had made him reconsider his position. He had found life ‘relaxed, quieter and easier’, and decided his age meant it was finally time to take a ‘step back’. Could internal struggles be behind Palmerston’s decision to remove himself from the political fray? Famously, Larry the cat, Chief Mouser at the Cabinet Office, had his differences with