Politics

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

Wednesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is the government blaming the scientists?

With ministers and officials involved with the country’s coronavirus strategy braced for an eventual public inquiry, this week we’re being given a glimpse of how it might play out. During a morning broadcast round on Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey set the cat among the pigeons when she was asked about mistakes the government may have made. It’s clear that this is a row No. 10 does not wish to be having right now Coffey replied by saying ministers can ‘only make judgments based on the advice’ they are given. She went on to say that on issues such as testing capacity, if the scientific advice at the

Jim Sillars

Beware Scotland’s hate crime bill

Burns, Hume, Adam Smith, and others who shone in that remarkable intellectual period in Scotland’s history, were not the cradle of the Enlightenment; but it is indisputable that they were major contributors to its emergence and influence. Now, north of the border, the Scottish government has set out to divorce us from the heritage those minds gave us: to be unafraid of, indeed willing, to discuss, probe, dispute ideas and thoughts in the liberating realm of fearless free speech. Scots are now locked in a woke chamber: virtue signalling, pandering to perceived victimhood, punishing any who assert biological fact, placing a halter of criminality on free thought when articulated by

Tuesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Sunak’s coronavirus rescue package looks increasingly unsustainable

The number of people claiming unemployment benefits in Britain rose by over 856,000 to 2.1 million in April, the first full month of the lockdown. Figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that the number claiming benefits due to unemployment has increased by nearly 70 per cent. This marks an unbelievable u-turn from the start of the year, when UK employment figures were hovering at record highs. These figures do not include ‘the furlough effect’: those who are still counted as employed, paid by the Government to stay home and wait for the green light to return to work. Today’s numbers, as bad as they are, don’t reflect the number of

Matthew Lynn

Macron and Merkel’s coronavirus rescue fund is a stitch-up

It is finally here. Die-hard European Union federalists have plotted for it for years. Economists and thinks tanks have argued for it. The Greeks and Italians have pleaded for it. And French presidents have made no end of grand speeches, full of references to solidarity and common visions, proposing it. The Germans have finally relented and agreed, at least in part, to share debt within the EU and the euro-zone, and bail-out the weaker members of the club. France’s president Macron and Germany’s chancellor Merkel last night agreed a 500 billion euro (£450bn) plan that will re-distribute fund from the stronger members to the weaker. There is a problem however.

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19

As scientists around the world race to find a cure, treatment or vaccine for Covid-19, the US president Donald Trump revealed that he had been doing his bit of medical experimentation this week. At a press conference last night the President revealed that he had been taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine every day for a week and a half, to ward off the virus. Trump said that ‘a lot of good things had come out about’ the drug, that frontline workers were using it, and that there was no harm in taking it, even if it didn’t stop the disease. Hydroxychloroquine has been touted as a potential treatment for Covid-19

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why Tory MPs are pushing for a speedy return to parliament

This Wednesday, MPs will head home from the virtual parliament and go into recess. When they come back to work, the government is pushing for a return to normal. Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg wants MPs to return to parliament rather than work from home. There are no current plans to renew measures that had allowed MPs to work from home such as the ability to question ministers via the video app Zoom or vote online. This decision has not been universally well-received. Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has expressed safety concerns while Labour MPs have warned against the move. Given that Hoyle says the Chamber cannot take more than 50 MPs at any one

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Three mistakes the UK made at the start of the corona crisis

There are three areas where government policy now implicitly accepts that they made mistakes in their earlier handling of the pandemic. The first is the desire to increase testing to 200,000 tests a day. This suggests that the earlier decision to pull back from a test and trace strategy because the infection was being spread in the community was due to a lack of a testing capacity; something that could have been remedied if the government and Public Health England had adopted the collaborative approach to testing that they now have. The second is care homes. It is now clear that the policy of discharging people from hospitals into care

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

If only Michael Gove was still education secretary

Children of richer families are studying six hours a day compared with four-and-a-half hours for children from poorer families. Which translates, says the IFS, which conducted a survey of 4,000 parents, to a gap of seven days advantage for the haves over the have nots by next month. Surprise! I don’t, myself, think they’ve quite got a grip of the thing yet, although they do point out that over half of parents of all backgrounds find it hard to support their children’s learning at home. Which I’d say is getting a bit closer to the truth. Because if quite a few of the richer children surveyed are educated privately, the

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Should the lockdown protests worry Boris?

Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, Piers, was among 19 people arrested at an anti-lockdown protest in Hyde Park at the weekend. The protest was small, as were those held in other cities across Britain, including ones in Belfast and Glasgow. Signs and chants held by demonstrators linked 5G and coronavirus. And familiar anti-Bill Gates slogans were chanted. It’s easy to dismiss the protesters as a bunch of eccentrics. But doing so might be a mistake. It’s plausible to argue that the government should be pleased that the first public protests against the lockdown, coming almost two months after it was brought in, were both small and attended by people with fringe politics. Yet the protests should worry Boris

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Tories should listen to Farage’s warnings about Channel migrants

The idea of a flotilla of little ships crossing the English Channel from France to deposit their beleaguered human cargo safely on our shores was born in this country’s darkest hour during the second world war. To say that the method behind the success of the Dunkirk evacuation 80 years ago has been repurposed for the modern age is something of an understatement. These days the little ships are usually inflatable dinghies packed with desperate young men from Asia and Africa who seek to evade this country’s immigration laws. They land at various points between Dover and Hastings and – if undetected – many head for rendezvous points pre-arranged with

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Why didn’t Boris act sooner against coronavirus?

It is too easy to become obsessive in whole or partial lockdown. And my obsession for weeks now is why ministers and Whitehall failed to learn the big lesson of the 2007/8 banking crisis – namely that high impact, low probability risks wreak maximum damage, and if they have the potential to destroy your way of life, money and resource should be no object in warding them off. To start on a more positive note, Boris Johnson seems belatedly to have found the appropriate gauge of risk versus reward. Because although the PM on Sunday conceded that a vaccine may never come to ‘fruition’, he has nonetheless committed £93 million

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Labour’s stance on reopening schools worsening the education gap?

17 min listen

The government is aiming to reopen schools on June 1, but with teachers’ unions putting up opposition to the move, this timeline is unlikely to be met. Latest research shows that, meanwhile, the education gap between the poorest children and the wealthier is widening all the time. So in its support for the teachers unions, is Labour doing enough to bear in mind the lifelong impact on the worst off kids during this pandemic?

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Gove confident that schools will be safe

Michael Gove – We’re confident children and teachers will be safe Michael Gove was in charge of the government’s media rounds this morning. Andrew Marr was keen to ask him about the provisions being made for children returning to school. The government wants primary school children in reception, Years 1 and 6 to return to the classroom from 1st June. The Cabinet Office Minister told Marr that he had been reassured that it would be safe to do so without significant fear of the coronavirus causing significant new outbreaks: MG: I talked to the [government’s] chief scientific advisor yesterday… and we’re confident that children and teachers will be safe… The

Bruce Anderson

Boris Johnson needs to admit his coronavirus mistakes

Be careful what you wish for. Over the past few years, a fair number of thoughtful Tories have included a strange item in their letters to Santa Claus. They wanted an effective Leader of the Opposition, who could keep ministers under pressure and force them to raise their game, which would lead to better government. Well, after nearly a decade-long pursuit of unelectability, Labour has granted the Tories their wish. The Tories are not enjoying it. One suspects that Keir Starmer was always a pretty forensic character, even before he sharpened his cross-examining technique at the Bar. Moreover, a virtual House of Commons plays to his skills, but not the

Saturday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Do the experts believe in the R number?

The R-number has been declared the most important metric in monitoring Covid in Britain. For young children to return to school in June, or for pubs to open in July, it is always linked to the rate of Covid transmissions – the R-number – staying below one. Above one is the danger zone: it means each infected person is infecting, on average, more than one other. So plans to liberalise are put on hold and we possibly enter a more severe lockdown once again. When explaining his strategy last weekend, the Prime Minister even showed a picture of an R-Number speedometer. But it gave no reading. We’re instead told a range: is that it

Simon Walters

My positive antibody test is an ‘immunity passport’ in all but name

I wouldn’t say I felt I had joined a master race when my coronavirus ‘immunity passport’ arrived this week. But I did have a slightly smug glow of satisfaction when discussing my positive Covid-19 antibody test result with colleagues. ‘Jammy devil’ and ‘I wish I had one’ were among the envious, bordering on resentful, responses. Although there is no absolute proof, it means it is almost certain I cannot get the disease again soon and consequently, unable to pass it on to anyone else. By contrast, friends who had antibody tests that proved negative bore the dejected air of youngsters who had just failed the 11 plus exam. Or failed

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Covid’s knock-on effect on child deaths

The daily death toll has been a constant backdrop to the Covid-19 crisis. Would we ever have entered lockdown, would so many people have been driven to panic, were it not for the publication, every afternoon, of the number of deaths in the past 24 hours? It has helped set in the minds of the public the idea that this is a lethal disease, on a scale completely removed from other common diseases. How much differently would we see Covid-19, though, if we were also fed with a slightly different statistic: the number of indirect deaths, caused not by the disease itself but by other factors associated with lockdowns: closure

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Audio Reads: Fredrik Erixon, James Forsyth, and Leaf Arbuthnot

25 min listen

On this week’s Audio Reads, Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon reads his cover piece explaining how European nations are all flying blind in the pandemic. James Forsyth advocates a complete rewiring of the British state. And Leaf Arbuthnot, whose novel Looking For Eliza is released this week, extolls the joys of Zoom raves.