Politics

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

Wednesday

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Can Douglas Ross take on the SNP?

10 min listen

Douglas Ross has won the Scottish Conservatives leadership election – but can take on the SNP without risking a second independence referendum? Meanwhile, pressure is growing on the Tories to suspended a former minister accused of rape. Finally, a new report by a cross-party group of MPs suggests the failure to impose quarantine on travellers at the height of the pandemic could have worsened the coronavirus crisis. Gus Carter talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will the Beirut blast change Britain’s foreign policy?

What should the British government do to help Lebanon recover from the Beirut explosion? Ministers say they are working to provide the Lebanese government with technical support and financial assistance, but they are coming under pressure from senior Conservative colleagues to use the disaster as a turning point in the way Britain approaches the Middle East generally. Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Defence Select Committee, and Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have both called for Britain to take a more active role in the region, or risk seeing hostile states such as Iran and terrorist groups filling a ‘vacuum’. These two MPs have been instrumental in pushing

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Has Sweden been vindicated?

Sweden has released growth figures for the second quarter – a contraction of 8.6 per cent – and two narratives are circulating. The first is that the Swedish experiment has failed spectacularly, resulting in both a higher death toll than its Scandinavian counterparts as well as a collapsed economy. The second is that Sweden has been vindicated, taking a much less severe economic hit than the EU’s average and in a better position to recover as well. Which is the fairer assessment? Sweden has indeed taken an economic beating despite never instigating a full lockdown. Its population’s change in behaviour (adopting social distancing and heading indoors despite this not being

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Party whips are ill-suited to deal with serious allegations like rape

The Tories are still coming under fire for failing to suspend the unnamed MP who was arrested at the weekend on suspicion of rape, sexual assault and coercive control. A group of charities and trade unions are the latest to criticise the decision, saying in a statement released yesterday that ‘we are still not confident that [Parliament] is a safe and equal place for women to work’. The group wants Parliament to suspend the MP, and for the whip to be removed while the police investigate the allegations. But while the Tories insist they take all such allegations extremely seriously, they also say the matter is currently in the hands

Richard Dobbs

Introducing the Harding-Hancock Efficiency test

We are going to hear a lot about Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) in coming weeks, as we approach autumn and fears of a second wave of Covid-19 grow. Now we have moved away from national lockdown but do not yet have a vaccine, the test-and-trace system is our main bulwark against a resurgence of the disease. But how good a defence is it? A study published in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health this week suggests there is a huge amount at stake. Academics attempted to model what would happen in various scenarios over the coming winter, assuming schools return either full-time or on a part-time rota basis — and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is Sturgeon right to brag about Scotland’s coronavirus response?

What political opportunities Covid-19 has presented for Nicola Sturgeon. Day after day in recent weeks she has appeared at her press conference, presenting a picture of a Scotland where the disease has been all but eliminated – placed in contrast with England where, she says, the government is merely trying to contain the disease, and not very well at that. It is an image which, naturally, aides the cause of Scottish independence. To remind us of the game she is playing, she has several times pointedly raised, or failed to rule out, the threat of imposing quarantine on visitors from England. But is the image of a Covid death-free Scotland

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will a second wave thwart Boris’s bid to reopen schools?

As ministers work on plans to return all pupils in England to the classroom next month, the government is once again being criticised from all sides. Union leaders are questioning whether the current plan carried significant safety risks, while England’s children’s commissioner has made an intervention today warning that schools should be the last places to shut in future lockdowns – after pubs. This comes back to a Whitehall phrase I reported last week, the ‘schools or pubs dilemma’. Ministers have started to consider their arguments in the event that some things have to close in order for others to open as a result of the rate of infection being too high in No. 10’s view.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Has Trump’s Covid-19 response really been so dire?

The sight of Donald Trump fumbling with charts during his interview on HBO this Monday has provided much ammunition for his enemies. The words ‘train wreck’ and ‘toe-curling’ have been used multiple times to describe how the President insisted that the US has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19, while interviewer Jonathan Swan quoted figures suggesting the US has one of the worst rates. True, Trump looked ill-prepared, but was he fibbing, as many of his critics have implied? America cannot claim to have a lower death rate than comparable western countries – but neither does it come out especially badly The truth lies somewhere between what Trump

Dr Priyad Ariyaratnam

Should a coronavirus vaccine be compulsory?

The mandatory introduction of face masks in shops and a ban on families and friends from different households meeting in parts of northern England at a time when death rates and critical care admissions with Covid-19 are low, appears, on the surface at least, hard to explain. The original reason for lockdown – to protect the NHS – seems to have been replaced by weaker reasons to impose recurrent restrictions. This is worrying, not least because of the possibility that the Government could broaden out this approach of introducing policies based on low-grade evidence. Could it do the same in mandating vaccinations before their effectiveness and safety profiles have been definitively determined? Section

Samantha Smith

Predicted A-level grades could destroy my university dream

I was homeless at 16, and sofa-surfed throughout my A-Levels. Despite my circumstances, I worked hard and now hold offers from some of the best universities in the country — Cardiff being my firm choice — to study law. Yet I’m terrified that because this year’s results won’t be based on exams but on predicted grades, I will miss out without ever having had a chance to prove myself. Hearing about the fiasco in Scotland — where thousands of pupils got worse grades than they were expecting — has only made me more concerned. While those in younger years may be celebrating the longest summer holiday in modern British history,

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Justin Welby joins Labour’s civil war

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has shown an increasing willingness to venture into political debates lately. In June, during the Black Lives Matter protests, he suggested that portrayals of Jesus as white should be reconsidered in English churches. And ahead of the December election last year he accused Boris Johnson of pouring petrol on a divided Britain. Clearly not content with the controversy about his new role as a political consultant, Welby decided to go a step further this evening, when he willingly joined the most hellish fight in politics: Labour’s eternal civil war. Welby’s foray into left-wing politics came after the Labour MP Rosie Duffield received an alarming

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Are we heading for mass unemployment?

10 min listen

Pizza Express today announced that 1,100 jobs are at risk as they close 67 outlets. With the Chancellor’s furlough scheme winding up in November, should we expect more mass redundancies when the government support is cut? Gus Carter speaks to Kate Andrews and Katy Balls about the UK’s economic outlook, and also asks whether the UK’s track and trace system is ready for children returning to school next month.

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why Covid hasn’t been Boris’s Black Wednesday

Where are we again? Oh yes: a newish Conservative prime minister has confounded his critics by winning a general election that most expected would lead to a hung parliament. The result has caused Labour to drop its leader and replace him with someone more reassuring and substantial. And before the Government can work on its main domestic agenda, a giant convulsion has reared its ugly head to turn the world of politics upside down. That’s right, we are in the autumn of 1992, in the aftermath of ‘Black Wednesday’. The pound has crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism, despite the Government imposing sky-high interest rates in a bid

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Is the jobs cliff-edge fast approaching?

As ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ kickstarts this month – giving customers 50 per cent off their meals (up to £10) at restaurants and pubs that have signed up to the scheme – the centrepiece of the Treasury’s Covid-19 policy package starts to wind down. From this month, employers will be asked to pay a small part of their employees’ wages: 5 per cent now, 10 per cent next month, and 20 per cent in October, before furlough officially comes to an end. A policy that was initially expected to have take-up from 10 per cent of businesses has become the crutch of more than one million businesses across the

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Trump’s bizarre Covid interview

It would be fair to say that Donald Trump did not have the most comfortable of times in an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan on Tuesday, when discussing the spread of coronavirus in the United States. After first remarking that the daily US death toll ‘is what it is’, the President was asked by Swan why the number of Covid cases in the US has been proportionally higher than in many other countries. Trump was insistent that this was because ‘we are so much better at testing than any other country in the world, we show more cases.’ The interview took a strange turn though when Swan pointed out that

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why ‘progressives’ love to hate Rosie Duffield

There can be a hallucinatory quality to the progressive mind, a tendency to see enemies in allies and demons in opponents, to imagine a public consensus for niche propositions and to experience even mild-mannered political disagreements as near-physical attacks. One or more of these behaviours can be found across the spectrum — lefties hate other lefties, righties hate other righties, centrists hate everyone — but it is in progressivism that they most vividly concentrate. Rosie Duffield is experiencing this phenomenon rather roughly after expressing the wrong view about that deathless fixation of a disastrously overeducated generation: gender identity. The Labour MP took issue with one of the few tweets from

Steerpike Steerpike

Rishi-mania hits restaurants

It has been a long few months for the Prime Minister, who has seen both his personal and his party’s poll-ratings take a hit, as the government struggles with the coronavirus pandemic. However, there is one Tory whose popularity continues to buck the trend. Step forward Rishi Sunak. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be able to do no wrong in the eyes of many, as he has splashed the cash to help Britons get through lockdown. Having made a bold stroke early in the crisis with the furlough scheme, which has cost over £30 billion so far, Sunak’s latest move is the introduction of ‘Eat Out to Help

Monday

Olivia Robey

Child sexual abuse survivors are being let down

The Crown Prosecution Service’s latest grim statistics show that, despite the increasing number of police recorded rapes over the past five years, the prosecution rate has reduced. This state of affairs, has been branded as the ‘decriminalisation of rape’ by the Victim’s Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC. And the data’s fine print also reveals a heart-breaking truth: the victims suffering from the worst outcomes are children. Just 16 per cent of victims aged 10-13 saw their abuser charged for the abuse they inflicted, with 55 per cent then seeing no prosecution take place. By contrast, the charge rate in the 25-59 victim bracket was 46 per cent, while the no prosecution rate was 30

Richard Ekins

It’s time to rein in the Supreme Court

The return of lockdown measures across parts of northern England, as well as the announcement of dozens of new peerages, almost entirely overshadowed the Lord Chancellor’s launch on Friday of an independent review of administrative law. Lord Faulks QC, former minister of state for justice, is to lead five other barristers and academic lawyers in examining the law of judicial review and considering whether reforms should be made. This is an important development in the government’s efforts to address the misuse of judicial power and balance of our constitution. The review takes up part of the work the Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission was otherwise expected to undertake, confirming earlier reports

Debbie Hayton

Rosie Duffield and the war on women

It’s summer but the war on women continues. The latest person to fall victim to the transgender thought police is Labour MP Rosie Duffield after she liked a tweet by Piers Morgan where he harrumphed CNN’s reference to ‘individuals with a cervix’. Duffield later angered her critics more by asking: ‘I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix….?!’ Morgan is a man, of course, so he escaped censure. But Duffield was not so lucky. This modern witch hunt tends to target women, specifically those who have the audacity to reclaim the word ‘woman’ to describe their sex. The inherent sexism in this whole sorry saga stares us in