Politics Archives

Thursday

21 Jan 2021

Could Britain close its borders once lockdown ends?

The government’s most important economic policy is its vaccination programme, I say in the magazine this week. The speed at which people are immunised will determine when — and how quickly — the economy can reopen. ‘The advantage the vaccine has given us is so huge that we have to protect that’ But even when the so-called ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ are lifted domestically, there will likely continue to be restrictions on those entering from abroad. The view is that testing and tighter procedures at the border will be needed to protect the UK from the danger of any vaccine-resistant strain. Priti Patel’s admission this week that the government should have shut

Anton Howes

Britain’s copyright law is a mess

Copyright often seems like a joke. Most of us infringe it constantly, and publicly, without a second’s thought. With the advent of the internet, the public uploads countless videos, music, photographs, art, and a whole host of other things without the permission of the creators. Even large organisations get away with it. A few years ago, for example, the National Trust posted a picture of an unusual, heart-shaped honeycomb to social media, claiming it had been made by bees at one of their properties. It went viral, but it wasn’t actually theirs. Luckily for them, the beekeeper who took the photograph didn’t press the issue. Even creators, whom the system

Steerpike

Boris’s woke nightmare

Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary, Lisa Nandy, opened a Pandora’s box yesterday in an interview with the Guardian, in which she praised the new US President Joe Biden for being a ‘woke guy’ and, according to the paper, appeared to suggest that those defending the Parliament square statue of Churchill were comparable to white supremacists marching in America. Mr S imagines that isn’t quite the strategy the party had in mind to win back Red Wall towns lost in 2019. Nonetheless, it appeared to be Boris Johnson who was struggling most with the idea of a ‘woke’ US President yesterday. In an interview with Sky News, the PM was asked if

Martin Vander Weyer

My stamp duty solution for the Chancellor

On the Wednesday in early July when Rishi Sunak announced a temporary increase from £125,000 to £500,000 in the stamp duty threshold for house purchases, a record 8.5 million people visited the Rightmove property website and I’m pretty sure I was one of them. I continued visiting it weekly: it became a lockdown obsession, alongside French television thrillers, until last month I finally spotted a London flat I wanted to buy. Now, like thousands of others, I’m pushing to complete before 31 March, when the stamp duty holiday — a £15,000 saving for me but the equivalent of a £3.9 billion annual giveaway for the Treasury — is due to

James Forsyth

Could the Australian approach to Covid work in Britain?

The government’s most important economic policy is its vaccination programme. The speed at which people are immunised will determine when — and how quickly — the economy can reopen. If all goes to plan, Britain will be the first country in Europe to get rid of restrictions and start the job of social repair. Three factors give grounds for hope. First, there is remarkably little ‘anti-vax’ sentiment in the UK. More than 70 per cent of the population ‘would definitely get’ a Covid vaccine if it were made available to them this week. In Germany, it’s just 41 per cent; in France, 30 per cent. The willingness of the British

Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak’s Singapore problem

For those trying to argue that the evils of colonialism still hang over former lands of the British Empire, the legacy of racism suppressing their ambitions and achievements, the Republic of Singapore presents something of a challenge. Just how did this particular colony manage to become not only one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but one of the highest-fliers in the United Nations’ Human Development Index? Indeed, the Asian city state has once again this week been promoted as a model for its former colonial master to emulate. It can’t just be the Guinness that has attracted investment to another former corner of British soil over the past couple

Wednesday

20 Jan 2021

Cindy Yu

Will Theresa May’s intervention be the first of many?

17 min listen

Timed with the inauguration of Joe Biden, Theresa May has written an op-ed in the Daily Mail criticising her successor for his ‘abandon of our global moral leadership’. Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson about what this former prime minister will do from the backbenches.

Lloyd Evans

Silencing Ian Blackford is one upside to PMQs tech troubles

Parliament, 0. Computer Bugs 1. That was the score at PMQs today after a software glitch turned the debate into a cyber-shambles. The disaster unfolded as Ian Blackford asked his two questions. The SNP member, wearing a smart three-piece suit, joined the chamber from his sumptuously appointed country seat in the Hebrides. Blackford is known as a champion of the people and today he had a golden opportunity to stir up trouble for Boris. The very fishermen whom the PM had promised to enrich after Brexit are facing ruin because paper-wonks at sea-ports are holding up the transit of fresh fish. A perfect issue for the SNP. But Blackford ignored

Simon Evans

James Corden and the problem with post-Trump comedy

With admirable and determined positivity, James Corden and the Late, Late Show released a Les Mis-themed video last night, bidding a fond adieu to the Trump era. It was a coup — if you’ll forgive the word — de théatre. Corden and his team are well-versed in the well-oiled machinery of the viral video. And this one was no exception. The Les Misérables number ‘One Day More’ was transposed from its original setting on the eve of the 1832 Paris Uprising to the eve of the departure of Trump, plucked as he was by helicopter like a thorn from the lion’s paw of American democracy after four short, limping years.

Steerpike

Sturgeon advisor: independent Scotland would have handled Covid better

Scottish nationalists put a lot of stock in the mystical powers of independence, but this is a new one to Mr S: independence would apparently have improved Scotland’s response to Covid-19. At least according to Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University and member of the Scottish government’s Covid-19 advisory group. Interviewed on Holyrood magazine’s podcast, she was asked whether a separate Scotland would have made different decisions on the pandemic. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she reportedly replied. According to Holyrood, the academic added that ‘we could have hopefully been more like a Norway or a Denmark’ and said ‘if you look at the charts and the devolved nations,

Katy Balls

Priti Patel admits Boris got borders wrong

The government’s border policy has become an increasing cause of bemusement among MPs and the country at large. The UK did not close its borders during the first lockdown when countries such as New Zealand did. When they did eventually bring in tighter border restrictions, it was just at the point Conservative MPs thought they ought to be opening up. This time around, things are stricter, yet there were still delays. A new requirement to have a negative Covid test 72 hours before travelling to the UK has been brought in but even that had little sense of urgency with confusion over whether it would come into effect last Friday or

Katy Balls

How Boris plans to win over Biden

For all the recent talk from ministers that the UK government has plenty in common with the new Biden administration, there hasn’t been much of an opportunity yet for Boris Johnson to build ties. After Joe Biden’s inauguration today that will change. Until Biden and his team are sworn in, there can be no direct contact between them and a foreign government. This is why in recent months ministerial teams have instead focused their attention on meeting influential Democrats in the wider party and working out their plan of action for when channels open. So, who are the key players on the UK side when it comes to building on the special relationship? Boris

Steerpike

Lisa Nandy’s Biden no-show

Oh dear. It wasn’t so long ago that Labour brains were suggesting to the Sunday Times they would get one over the government by sending a member of Keir Starmer’s frontbench team to the inauguration of Joe Biden. The idea was that shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy would attend after months of building relations – thereby shining a light on the Conservative party’s comparatively slow progress. Yet as inauguration day finally gets underway, it turns out that Nandy is not in Washington D.C. Instead, she’s is in the UK doing a morning media round. In an interview with the Guardian, she said that while she had been due to attend she pulled out once England entered its third

Nick Tyrone

Ed Davey is leading the Lib Dems to extinction

Ed Davey became leader of the Liberal Democrats almost five months ago. Since then, his party has achieved nothing. The Lib Dems currently poll at around five per cent, meaning that a party that only six years ago was in government now enjoys less support than the Greens. If this is embarrassing, it isn’t surprising: the Lib Dems have had little to say for a very long time and certainly not since Davey took the reins. Davey fought hard to become Lib Dem leader. But it seems that his ambition stopped there. So why did he ever want to become leader in the first place? Don’t get me wrong: I have

Tuesday

19 Jan 2021

Isabel Hardman

Why is Labour calling on Gavin Williamson to resign?

Why has Labour chosen today to call for Gavin Williamson to resign as Education Secretary? This morning, shadow education secretary Kate Green released a statement saying ‘it is time for Gavin Williamson to go’, arguing that his ‘record throughout this pandemic has been shambolic’ and ‘he has bounced from one crisis to another without learning from his mistakes or listening to the parents, pupils and hard-working education staff who have been left to deal with the fallout’. It is unlikely that he will stay in the job when Boris Johnson carries out his next reshuffle It’s true that Williamson has had probably the worst pandemic out of any minister and

Tom Hodgkinson

Of course Boris Johnson should take an afternoon nap

Does Boris Johnson take an afternoon nap? Yes, according to a Downing Street insider who told the Times today that a post-lunch slumber was not unusual. Boris’s press secretary took a different view: ‘The Prime Minister does not have a nap. Those reports are untrue’, she said. Well, he should. For one, Boris would be delighted with the inevitable comparison with Churchill that springs to mind. Winston slept deeply every afternoon during the war. ‘Take off your clothes and get into bed,’ he advised in a letter to his nephew. ‘Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who

Katy Balls

Are Tory sinosceptics the real opposition?

14 min listen

Today the Commons debates the ‘genocide amendment’ to the Trade Bill, which would allow judges to restrict the government’s ability to sign trade deals with countries deemed guilty of genocide. It’s a clear swipe at China and its treatment of the Uyghur minority, and on the podcast, Katy Balls discusses with James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman what this means for the Conservative party’s new stance on China.

Robert Peston

The difficult vaccine debate we’ve shied away from

The Prime Minister only has himself to blame for the public outcry over 70-year-olds being vaccinated when there are still many over 80-year-olds waiting even to be invited to be vaccinated. What I mean by this is that there was a perfectly good argument for vaccinating 70-to-80 year olds before the more elderly, or at the same time. But Boris Johnson eliminated all debate about that when he ordered the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to organise the vaccination programme so that deaths from or with Covid-19 should be cut as rapidly as possible. As Professor Lim Wei Shen, chair of immunisation at the JCVI, told Jeremy Hunt’s health

Anthony Browne

A proportional property tax would be a disaster

Two of the most unpopular taxes in Britain are stamp duty and council tax, property taxes both, seen as economically damaging and unfair. So it is not surprising there is a noisy campaign, gaining widespread coverage, to abolish them both and replace them with a simple ‘proportional property tax’. The more your home is worth, the more you pay — what could be fairer and simpler? Although well intentioned, this new property tax is a genuinely bad idea. To be revenue neutral for the Treasury, campaigners estimate it needs to be set at 0.48 per cent of the value of the property per year — so that someone with a £1

Robert Jackman

Madam Vice President: who’s who in the Harris clan

Nearly three months since the US election, Kamala Harris will soon make history as the first woman to be sworn in as Vice-President. As the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, Harris has made much of her historic background. And not always without controversy – the recent ‘fweedom’ gaffe being a case in point. So who’s who in the new Vice President’s family? The inspiration – PV Gopalan (1911 – 1998), Harris’s grandfather Born into a Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu, Painganadu Venkataraman Gopalan joined the Indian civil service during the final decades of British rule. After independence, he specialised in the resettlement of refugees, eventually being stationed in Zambia to