Politics Archives

Wednesday

20 May 2020

Could negative gilt yields be Boris Johnson’s magic money tree?

A few months ago, Boris Johnson fought a general election saying that there was no ‘magic money tree’ and accusing Jeremy Corbyn of naively believing otherwise. This morning, something strange sprouted from the economic undergrowth, looking very much like a magic money tree. Britain sold its first long term bonds with negative yields: ie, sold at an average of -0.003 per cent. This dip below zero means investors are knowingly making a loss – paying more overall for the bonds than what their investment will return. The yield may be only a fraction below zero, but its cross into negative territory marks a difficult moment for the prevailing economic narrative:

Stephen Daisley

The SNP’s media war conceals their Covid failures

Sarah Smith is the Scotland editor of BBC News. On Monday night’s Ten O’Clock News, she was in the middle of a ‘live’ from Glasgow on Scotland’s divergent lockdown arrangements when she said this: Nicola Sturgeon has enjoyed the opportunity to set her own lockdown rules and not have to follow what’s happening in England or other parts of the UK. If you don’t see it, that’s probably because you’re in the pay of MI5 too. Smith’s choice of words made her meaning unclear. Did she mean Sturgeon was taking the chance to make her own decisions? Or that she was fortunate or glad to be doing so? Was she

Ross Clark

Stanford study suggests coronavirus might not be as deadly as flu

One of the great unknowns of the Covid-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent – which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded. The Imperial College modelling, which has been so influential on the government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 per cent. This was used to compute the infamous prediction that 250,000 Britons would

Ian Acheson

Tougher terrorism laws are popular. But will they actually work?

Social media is predictably swamped by the usual well-heeled, left-wheeled liberal rights activists decrying the major changes to terrorism laws introduced by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland this morning. The new Counter Terrorism and Sentencing Bill entering Parliament today delivers swingeing changes to the sentencing, risk assessment and supervision of this countries violent extremists. Fatal defects in the system had become all too apparent in two acts of jihadi terrorism that straddled last Christmas. The murderous rampage of Usman Khan, who killed two young people involved in an educational charity supporting him when on licence from prison, was followed by Sudesh Amman’s dramatic assault. His attack on shoppers in Streatham after authorities

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

19 May 2020

Katy Balls

Is the government blaming the scientists?

15 min listen

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

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

18 May 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 May 2020

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

16 May 2020

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