Politics

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

Thursday

9 Jul 2020

Target for half of kids to go to university dropped

In a sign of how worried the government is about youth unemployment, it will – quiet literally – pay firms to hire 16 to 24 year olds. But, as I say in the magazine this week, these government-funded jobs can only be a short-term fix. Any medium-term solution is going to require fixing post-16 education. A third of British graduates are in non-graduate jobs. The government subsidises this failing system The expansion of higher education has not worked out as intended; the 50 per cent target for pupils going to university has been hit, but too many students are doing courses that don’t represent value for money. Research from the

Steerpike

Watch: Huawei execs grilled on Hong Kong

A handful of Huawei executives testified in front of the Commons’ Science and Technology Committee on Thursday morning, to discuss the UK’s network infrastructure and the recent moves to reduce the firm’s role in our 5G network, over security concerns. Presumably the Huawei representatives were hoping to convince the committee and the wider world that their company is no different to any other network supplier, and that the Chinese state has no undue influence over them. That rather came undone though in a sustained grilling by committee chair Greg Clark. After one executive suggested that Huawei was no different to a company like BT, Clark asked if that meant Huawei

James Kirkup

Gavin Williamson is right to call out educational snobbery

Politicians give speeches all the time, but with differing levels of significance. Can you think of a genuinely important political speech given by a minister this week? Maybe your answer is Rishi Sunak’s fiscal statement, and I’m not going to suggest that speech isn’t a big deal. It is. But I am going to make the case for a speech given today by Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary. The speech was to the Social Market Foundation, the think-tank I run, so I obviously have an interest here. Nonetheless, I think Williamson’s speech deserves to be seen as a big deal. While Sunak had important things to say on important issues

Katy Balls

New polling: who’s to blame for the UK’s Covid mistakes?

This week Boris Johnson came under heavy criticism for suggesting ‘too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures in the way that they could have’. While the Prime Minister has since said he stands by the comments, the intervention appears to be part of an inevitable blame game over who is at fault for mistakes made in the coronavirus pandemic. A public inquiry is eventually expected to take place – but in the meantime there is no shortage of public figures keen to tell anyone who will listen what went wrong. While the Opposition have pointed to government mistakes, ministers have suggested civil service inadequacies played a role. So,

Isabel Hardman

The rise of Brand Rishi

Long before he even ran for Mayor of London, Boris Johnson had developed an unusually strong political brand, to the extent that few bothered referring to him using his surname. Brand Boris inspires and infuriates in equal measure: his supporters have long argued he is able to reach parts of the electorate others can’t, while his critics find his first name alone to be a hair-trigger for impressive amounts of anger. At the bottom of this anger is often a great deal of envy that Johnson seems able to use his brand to get through scrapes and avoid scrutiny in a way other politicians wouldn’t. Both sides know, whether they

James Ball

Sunak’s Job Retention Bonus is a catastrophe

Such is the polarised state of the UK in 2020 that to unite the policy wonks of the left and the right a government policy must be either magnificent, or magnificently stupid. Unfortunately for the otherwise fêted chancellor Rishi Sunak, his policy to encourage companies to keep their furloughed workers in employment has managed to fall into the second category. Like many truly stupid policies, the Job Retention Bonus sounds quite sensible when it’s first set out: for every furloughed employee who is brought back to work and who still has a job by the end of January 2021, the government will pay the company that employs them a £1,000

Robert Peston

What the £15bn spend on PPE tells us about the mess we’re in

The £15 billion spent on PPE, personal protective equipment, since March is one of those numbers that once it’s in your head, it’s impossible to unthink it, like a ghoul from a nightmare. It gauges both the scale of the health and economic crisis we’re enduring, but also quite how astonishingly unprepared the government really was. Remember at the beginning the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said we had more than adequate stocks of PPE because of no-deal planning. Just for the record, the £15bn dispensed on face masks, gowns and visors – which have a user life of anything from a day to a few weeks – would, on the

The Spectator

At last, we have a foreign secretary who’s not shy to make a stand

It is hardly a profound observation to say that the government has not functioned as well as it might have done for the past few months. Yet there is one important exception to the general picture of confused and counterproductive activity. Britain, for the first time in years, is developing a logical and — to use the words of Robin Cook — an ethical foreign policy. In the Commons this week, the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, listed the first 49 individuals to fall foul of Britain’s ‘Magnitsky law’ — a provision to freeze the assets of, and impose travel bans on, foreign citizens who have been implicated in human rights

Martin Vander Weyer

A bailout for the arts is good – but reopening would have been better

The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a chorus of approval from arts panjandrums lined up to offer quotes on the end of the DCMS press release. A nifty media exercise, then, and a smart deployment of the Hank Paulson ‘big number’: when the US treasury secretary unveiled his $700 billion bailout package in 2008, a staffer admitted the number had been pulled out of the air simply because it sounded huge. So it is with this deal, within which the real sum available for grants to be spread across a large number of threatened theatres and other

Rod Liddle

The ineptitude of despots

Displaying the pristine neutrality that has made her such a popular figure, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis apparently tweeted the following last week: ‘No. 10 is trying to control the media, and everyone in our democracy should be afraid.’ Sadly, this typically sane and measured observation was later deleted. Was she told to delete it? Or did she think better of it but was not quite up to tweeting: ‘No. 10 isn’t trying to control the media and we should probably all rest easy.’ I wonder how many other tweets she’s deleted before I got around to seeing them? ‘The schools are closed not on account of Covid but because giant Tory

James Forsyth

The young are the most vulnerable to the Covid crash

Coronavirus is deadlier for the old than the young. But for the young, it is economically devastating. A third of working 18- to 24-year-olds have lost work because of the pandemic. Between March and May, the number of those under 24 claiming universal credit doubled to almost half a million, and those who leave school or university this year can expect to earn less a decade from now than they otherwise would have done. During lockdown the young have, to a remarkable extent, accepted their lives being put on hold to protect their elders. Fairness dictates that steps must now be taken to prevent them from bearing the brunt of

Steerpike

‘Whitelisting’ banned in Whitehall

Brexit, coronavirus and an upcoming Whitehall shake-up is enough to keep the Cabinet Office busy – but it seems some civil servants are still more worried about other pressing issues. In an email on Wednesday to staff from the Cabinet Office’s ‘Digital and Technology Team’ comes an apology. What for? ‘Some people have raised concerns about the use of the term ‘whitelisting’ in our previous email,’ the message says. ‘We’re sorry for using inappropriate language, and we’re currently reviewing all of our guidance and communication to make sure it’s accessible’. The email goes on to reassure worried Whitehall workers that ‘we’ll…be using ‘allow/deny’ list in place of white/black list in future’ and urges civil servants

Steerpike

Mark Sedwill’s golden goodbye

Britain’s top Civil Servant Mark Sedwill, who is standing down as Cabinet Secretary in September, received a pleasant package in the post on Wednesday evening. In a public letter from the Prime Minister, it was announced that the departing civil servant would receive a whopping £250,000 boost to his pension pot – an incredible amount of money for a taxpayer-funded public servant. In 2015 the government promised to cap public sector payoffs at £95,000, but the policy was never implemented. Sedwill’s departure as Cabinet Secretary was announced at the end June, following multiple reports that he had clashed with Boris Johnson’s team about the UK’s coronavirus response. David Frost, Britain’s

Wednesday

8 Jul 2020

Gerard Lyons

Don’t panic about the UK’s high debt

Last week the Prime Minister focused on ‘build, build, build’. For the Chancellor, it was ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ on Wednesday as he outlined an ambitious and interventionist suite of measures to prevent a rise in unemployment. These measures are estimated by the Treasury to be worth up to £30 billion. The last time the UK had high unemployment was in the early 1980s. The labour market was very different then – it was often described as sclerotic, with high unemployment also the consequence of a necessary restructuring of the economy. Today, however, the labour market is much more flexible and the deep recession and threat to jobs is from an economic shock. That is

Katy Balls

Can Rishi Sunak’s jobs pledge keep unemployment down?

15 min listen

The Chancellor has given his mini-Budget in a statement to the Commons today, and among a raft of stimulus measures from a VAT cut to stamp duty reduction, he has announced measures designed to keep down unemployment. But the government is clearly braced for a wave of unemployment when furlough ends, so are his pledges enough? Katy Balls talks to Kate Andrews and James Forsyth.

Lloyd Evans

Rishi Sunak is no threat to Boris

Rishi Sunak made his summer statement this afternoon. The chancellor is never less than immaculately turned out. Skinny blue suit, coiffed hair, silver-grey tie gathered in a discreet knot, a white shirt that glowed like a snow-capped peak at noon. And he oozed board-room competence. One half expected the lights in the Commons to fall and a screen to be unrolled for a Powerpoint presentation. He draws his rhetoric from many sources. In today’s speech we got a hint of Thatcher: ‘I believe in the nobility of work. I believe in the inspiring power of opportunity.’ We heard a reminder of Blair: ‘I am not dogmatic. I believe in what

James Forsyth

Rishi Sunak’s two big fears for the future

The summer economic statement made clear the government’s two big coming worries. First, the whole emphasis on jobs highlighted how concerned the government is about mass unemployment. If you thought that vacancies were going to bounce-back you wouldn’t be – literally – paying firms to take on 16 to 24-year olds. It isn’t just youth unemployment the government is concerned about either. The £1,000 bonus for firms that bring staff back from furlough is intended to preserve marginal jobs that might otherwise be lost. Even with these measures, unemployment is still likely to spike. The question is whether the government’s approach will stop this from tipping over into mass unemployment. The other

Kate Andrews

Can Rishi Sunak’s jobs pledge keep unemployment down?

Everything we heard from the Chancellor today suggests the Treasury is extremely worried about unemployment surging. The measures he’s brought in (detailed below) are designed to keep unemployment figures as low as possible. That’s why jobs were at the forefront of the Chancellor’s summer statement this afternoon: supporting them, creating them and protecting them. But can Rishi Sunak pull off an economic miracle and deliver on his vow to never ‘accept unemployment as an unavoidable outcome’? Among the major announcements today was a Job Retention Bonus – a move along from the furlough scheme – which will grant every employer who brings back a furloughed employee (until January at least) £1,000

Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak: my £30bn plan for jobs

Mr Speaker, I stood here in March saying I knew people were worried. And I know they’re worried still. We have taken decisive action to protect our economy. But people are anxious about losing their job, about unemployment rising. We’re not just going to accept this. People need to know we will do all we can to give everyone the opportunity of good and secure work. People need to know that although hardship lies ahead, no one will be left without hope. So, today, we act, with a Plan for Jobs. Our plan has a clear goal: to protect, support and create jobs. It will give businesses the confidence to

James Forsyth

Liam Fox to be UK’s nomination for WTO Director-General

The UK will nominate Liam Fox to be director-general of the World Trade Organisation. I understand that the decision to nominate the former trade secretary, who has been lobbying heavily for the job, was made last night. There were those in Whitehall who were opposed to nominating Fox. They argued that it was too soon after the UK had become an independent member of the WTO to put forward a candidate and that it would be better to concentrate on some more junior positions that the UK would have a better chance of getting. Boris Johnson, however, wasn’t persuaded by these arguments. He wants to use the UK’s G7 presidency next