Politics

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

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why are some people being repeatedly tested for coronavirus?

Testing, the government keeps telling us, is the way out of the coronavirus lockdown. Soon, the Prime Minister assured us in his address to the nation last Sunday, we will be testing ‘literally hundreds of thousands of people every day’. Given that Matt Hancock seems finally to have achieved his ambition of testing 100,000 people day – as he promised to achieve by the end of April – who could doubt that the PM will realise his promise? True, there was some controversy over the way that the health secretary reached his 100,000 tests on the very last day of April, by counting tests which had been put in the

Tom Lees

Seven mistakes politicians make when following ‘the science’

For anyone who watches the daily Covid-19 briefings, it is quite clear that too many of our politicians and journalists have little to no understanding of science and mathematics. Out of the 26 ministers attending cabinet, only three have higher-level STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) backgrounds. In parliament, only around 100 MPs have science backgrounds.  Why does this matter? Training in science gives people a different perspective on the world. It makes them more sceptical, more rigorous in their approach and, most importantly, teaches them what science can and cannot answer. Unfortunately, too many of our politicians don’t benefit from this approach – and coronavirus has exposed this problem at the

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Inside Boris Johnson’s video call with Tory MPs

One of the consequences of the virtual parliament is fewer opportunities for MPs to lobby No. 10. However, this afternoon MPs were given a rare audience with the Prime Minister as Boris Johnson appeared via video link for a meeting of the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers. With a growing number of MPs anxious over what they view to be the slow pace of lockdown easing, the meeting was intended as an opportunity to raise concerns. Instead, it was dominated by technology difficulties – with around 140 Tory MPs battling background noise – ranging from young children to noisy pets – as they tried to hold a conversation with the

Steerpike Steerpike

The ‘silver linings’ of the Lib Dems’ election disaster

Today the Liberal Democrats have published an independent review into their disastrous showing at the 2019 election, which saw its former leader Jo Swinson lose her seat, and the party drop to only 11 MPs in the Commons – despite starting the campaign at 20 per cent in the polls. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the election review doesn’t exactly pull its punches when it comes to the party’s 2019 performance, describing the election as ‘a high speed car crash’ where the party’s policies failed to cut-through, ‘didn’t add up to anything cohesive’ and ‘alienated large chunks of the population’ with its Stop Brexit stance. The report is equally brutal about Jo Swinson’s

Christopher Snowdon

Boris’s war on obesity is a mistake

In less enlightened times, an outbreak of a deadly virus was taken as a sign of God’s displeasure and would be accompanied by the persecution of an unpopular minority. It was less than a coincidence that the scapegoats tended to be those of whom the Church took a dim view: heretics, ‘witches’ (i.e. unmarried women) and, above all, Jews. How neatly it all fitted into an existing narrative. The desire to fit the Covid-19 pandemic into a moral fable of what sinfulness means in a secular society has been palpable. One of the most puzzling features of the virus is the way in which it severely incapacitates certain people while

Steven Barrett

Don’t blame Boris for lockdown rule confusion

There has been much chatter about people being puzzled by the lockdown rules. Critics of Boris Johnson are partly right: the law is confusing. But this isn’t necessarily the Prime Minister’s fault. And nor should it come as a surprise. Why? Because the law can never give absolute clarity about what you should do. Only a totalitarian dictatorship could even try – and even then it would almost certainly fail. Lockdown is not martial law. It is made up of many factors, only one of which is the law. The law spelling out what we can and can’t do under lockdown is The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020. It is a major

Steerpike Steerpike

Plumber trolled for defending Boris’s lockdown plan

Remember the no-nonsense plumber who criticised those who claimed to be baffled by Boris Johnson’s lockdown announcement? Ryan Price defended the Prime Minister, telling Channel 4 ‘It’s not really hard to understand’ when asked to comment on the next steps in the lockdown plan. Price – who has been giving free call-outs to NHS workers – was hailed a hero by some, but it seems not everyone was best pleased with Price’s remarks. He told LBC this morning: ‘I didn’t sleep for a couple of days, couldn’t eat…anxiety because of the messages and things like that, and I’ve never had anxiety before. I wasn’t making a political view…people just need to stop

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The chasm between the UK and EU’s Brexit positions

David Frost briefed the Cabinet yesterday on the state of the Brexit negotiations and he has now issued a very downbeat statement. Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator says that the third round of negotiations ‘made very little progress’. The problem is that (as always in these talks) the UK and the EU have very different interpretations of what is reasonable. The UK thinks that because it ‘just’ wants a free trade agreement it shouldn’t be expected to follow EU rules in a host of areas and should be offered a deal similar to what Canada, South Korea or Japan have. The UK has even accepted that this deal might see

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris Johnson declares war on obesity to tackle the virus

One of the constants of Boris Johnson’s political career has been his opposition to ‘nanny state’ interventions in people’s lives. In 2006, he overshadowed David Cameron’s first conference as Tory leader by supporting mothers who were pushing pies through school railings in protest at attempts to make their children eat Jamie Oliver inspired healthy school dinners. As recently as last year’s Tory leadership contest, he was attacking the so-called sugar tax for being ineffective and hitting the poor hardest. But, as I say in the Times this morning, in a discussion with some of his senior ministers and advisers last week, Boris Johnson told them, ‘I’ve changed my mind on

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

How the Labour party ran out of ideas

After losing the leadership contest in April, the left of the Labour Party regrouped. Organising as part of old factions like the Socialist Campaign Group and new ones such as Don’t Leave, Organise, they have held Zoom events and created websites, pledging to make life difficult for Keir Starmer. One thing is missing, however, from their plans: any serviceable ideas. The left of the party can’t seem to name one solid thing in policy terms on which they disagree with Starmer. And, they appear unable to point to a single practical thing they would do differently had they won the leadership contest. Instead, they frame everything in culture war terms,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How should the Tories handle Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid devolution?

This week was meant to mark the moment the whole of the United Kingdom began to ease lockdown. Instead, it’s England that has become an outlier – moving to the slogan ‘Stay Alert’ while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland stick with ‘Stay Home’. With the devolved governments adopting different approaches to easing lockdown, Downing Street is facing a communication battle – and it’s the First Minister of Scotland who is leading the charge. Before Boris Johnson even got to his desk on Sunday night to make his address to the nation on the roadmap out of lockdown, Sturgeon had taken to social media and the airwaves to criticise the Government’s new slogan. She suggested

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

League of nations: guessing our way out of lockdown

38 min listen

European countries all seem to be doing something different, so what are the lessons from the continent (00:45)? Plus, how the West’s lockdown impacts the developing world in a very real way (13:05). And last, rediscovering the joy of driving on the country’s empty roads (24:55). With economist Fredrik Erixon, the Economist’s Anne McElvoy, Stanford Professor Jayanta Bhattacharya, Indian economist Ashwini Deshpande, writer Alexander Pelling-Bruce, and transport journalist Christian Wolmar.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Covid has exposed the weakness of Whitehall

Britain has long flattered itself that it leads the world in administration. But, as I write in the magazine this week, Covid-19 has highlighted just how far from being true that now is. It’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy, and we have clearly done worse than Germany. We are miles behind South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. This crisis has exposed the limitations of the UK’s government machine. One Whitehall veteran says that the ten days leading up to 23 March were ‘the nearest the wiring of the state has come to collapse. It wasn’t just blowing a fuse: the motherboard was beginning

Matthew Lynn

Britain should break the taboo on ‘challenge vaccines’

So far, so good: the Oxford university trials on a potential vaccine for Covid-19 is reported to be going well. It has been tested on more than a thousand people, and it looks to be safe. There is another, more important question, however, and one where an answer might take a frustratingly long time. Does it work?  It is too early to say. Right now, not enough of the people vaccinated have been exposed to the virus for any reliable results. Now the team are planning to move it into hospitals where the chances of exposure are significantly higher. The chances are that will give them more of an idea.

Anthony Browne

Don’t panic about how Britain will afford its coronavirus bill

Having a passionate national debate now about specific future tax and spending plans is like having a debate about how to fund the restoration of Notre Dame while it is burning down. It is too early for many reasons, but mainly because we just don’t know yet what the shortfall is. Put the fire out, assess the damage, get estimates for the cost of repairs, and then work out how you will fund it.  Our budget discussion is hampered by the fact we don’t know the depth of the recession, how quickly the economy will bounce back, what the national debt will be at the end of it, nor –

Steerpike Steerpike

NHS Covid app plans leaked

Nothing causes Whitehall headaches like a government IT project. Remember the Ministry of Defence digital upgrade back in the 2000s? MoD officials originally told MPs that the software roll-out would cost an eye-watering £2.3 billion. The upgrade, which suffered multiple delays, eventually ended up costing the taxpayer somewhere north of £7 billion. Or cast your mind back to the NHS’s national programme for IT, a £10 billion flop that was scrapped after the public accounts committee blasted the project, saying that ‘the biggest IT project in the world’ had become ‘the biggest disaster’. The history of Westminster web projects is littered with costly mistakes. So it’s not a particularly good sign when

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The British state needs rewiring

‘Covid-19 has been perhaps the biggest test of governments worldwide since the 1940s,’ declares the government’s command paper on the virus. The fact that the following paragraph proposes ‘a rapid re-engineering of government’s structures and institutions’ is telling. It is an implicit admission that the British government machine is, in several important areas, failing this test. The argument about whether the UK has the worst death toll in Europe risks descending into statistical absurdity. Until excess mortality figures are known, it won’t be possible to come to a verdict. But it’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy. We have clearly done

Katy Balls & James Forsyth

The MP demanding a new approach to China

Six years ago, Neil O’Brien was working for George Osborne when the then chancellor was enthusing about a ‘new golden era’ in Sino-British relations. But now O’Brien, who became the Conservative MP for Harborough in 2017, is one of the founders of the new China Research Group, a group of Tory MPs who are pushing for the government to take a tougher line with Beijing. His best-case scenario is one where the UK and its allies ‘manage to restrain some of the worst behaviours of the Chinese government’. O’Brien’s change of heart sums up the shift in Tory thinking on China. The party has moved away from pushing for the