Politics

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

Tuesday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Keir Starmer should pull his punches against Boris Johnson

The luxuriantly coiffured soft left Labourite Keir Starmer may, at first glance, appear to have almost nothing in common with the balding Thatcherite Tory Iain Duncan Smith. In fact, when he wins the Labour leadership contest this weekend, as he surely will, he faces a political challenge that is similar to the one IDS accepted when he became Leader of the Opposition on September 13, 2001. IDS arrived at the summit of his party at a moment of profound international crisis, just as an incumbent premier with a prodigious gift for communication was judged by the British public to be rising magnificently to the occasion. The public immediately understood then

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Four graphs that show the effect of social distancing in the UK

Those who tuned into the government’s daily press conference were given a glimpse of what will come to pass if Boris Johnson has to take a break from his duties as a result of his coronavirus diagnosis. The government’s ‘designated survivor’ Dominic Raab led the conference – providing an update on Foreign Office efforts to bring Brits stranded abroad back home. A £75 million fund has been set up with the aim of bringing tens of thousands home.  However, the main update came from Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance who gave a presentation on the effect social distancing has had in the UK so far through four graphs. Vallance said there had

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Overzealous police are taking the lockdown too far

This is an exceptionally difficult time for those working in the emergency services. They are having to respond to situations they never expected to be involved with, often risking being infected with coronavirus themselves. That much is true. What is also true is that this crisis has brought out an interfering tendency in some people which goes along the lines of neighbours calling the police to demand they arrest someone who appears to be going out for a ‘second run’, or sitting on Twitter waiting to pounce on someone who appears to have flouted the rules by buying chocolate bars. This second feature of the coronavirus pandemic is annoying enough

The Spectator

Former Supreme Court Justice: ‘This is what a police state is like’

The former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, QC, has denounced the police response to the coronavirus, saying the country is suffering ‘collective hysteria’. This is an edited transcript of his interview with BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme earlier today.  Derbyshire police have shamed our policing traditions BBC interviewer Jonny Dymond ‘A hysterical slide into a police state. A shameful police force intruding with scant regard to common sense or tradition. An irrational overreaction driven by fear.’ These are not the accusations of wild-eyed campaigners, they come from the lips of one our most eminent jurists Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court. I spoke to him just before we

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Whatever happened to parliamentary democracy?

In the middle of a national crisis, Britain has become a parliamentary democracy without a parliament. The police now have extraordinary powers to fine and arrest those who break the lockdown. Do I hear you say that these are necessary powers for a time of pandemic? Maybe they are. But we have no parliament to raise the alarm if those powers are abused or hysteria and the urge to punish replace the calm implementation of the law. Meanwhile everyone is asking questions about how ministers, the NHS and Public Health England failed to provide enough protective kit for doctors and nurses and wondering why Britain is lagging so far behind

Ross Clark Ross Clark

British farms desperately need workers – yet we’re paying people to stay at home

Is there anything more ridiculous, when we have hundreds of thousands of workers sat idly at home to avoid spreading coronavirus, to be flying in fruit and vegetable-pickers from Eastern Europe? Yet that is exactly what is about to happen. Concordia, which supplies seasonal labour to UK farms from overseas, says it is looking to charter planes to bring in 10,000 workers from Bulgaria. Without them, it says, fruit and vegetables will have to be left to rot in the fields. Sure, there is nothing wrong with using migrant labour on British farms in normal times. Until a few weeks ago we had pretty well full employment; there were few

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

UK coronavirus growth slowing, key adviser reveals

There are now signs of the growth in UK Covid cases slowing, according to Professor Neil Ferguson, who is emerging as the de facto chief strategist of the government response to the crisis. No government data has been issued to confirm this trend but Ferguson has access to other real-time data through SAGE, the medical emergency committee. He was on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and said:- ‘In the UK we can see some early signs of slowing in some indicators. Less so deaths, because deaths are lagged by a long time from when measures come in force. But if we look at the numbers of new hospital admissions, that does appear to be slowing

Sunday

John Lee John Lee

How to understand – and report – figures for ‘Covid deaths’

Every day, now, we are seeing figures for ‘Covid deaths’. These numbers are often expressed on graphs showing an exponential rise. But care must be taken when reading (and reporting) these figures. Given the extraordinary response to the emergence of this virus, it’s vital to have a clear-eyed view of its progress and what the figures mean. The world of disease reporting has its own dynamics, ones that are worth understanding. How accurate, or comparable, are these figures comparing Covid-19 deaths in various countries? We often see a ratio expressed: deaths, as a proportion of cases. The figure is taken as a sign of how lethal Covid-19 is, but the

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Coronavirus testing has reached 10,000 per day

Michael Gove: Coronavirus crisis has ‘a range of potential outcomes’ The UK has now been in lockdown for almost a week as the nation tries to grapple with fighting the coronavirus. The government has said that it will look again at whether to renew the current restrictions after three weeks have elapsed. Sophy Ridge asked the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove about how long the lockdown period could last. Gove replied that it was not ‘absolutely fixed’ and that a lot would depend on people following the official guidelines: MG: There is a range… of potential outcomes, but those outcomes are not pre-determined. Our behaviour can influence

Saturday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Has Boris Johnson acted fast enough for the NHS to cope?

My jaw slightly dropped on Friday when Michael Gove announced that the number of Covid-19 cases in the UK was now doubling every three to four days. This is significantly faster than the five days that was initially built into the government’s forecasts for the rate of increase in sufferers, and the 4.3 days that epidemiologist Neil Ferguson told me on 17 March was the new estimated ‘baseline’ doubling time. On the one hand, this accelerated rate of infection explains why the government moved to enforce much more severe measures to restrict social interaction just over a week ago, because presumably its scientific advisers had more than an inkling that

Simon Walters

Why Boris Johnson’s popularity ratings remain so high

One of the reasons Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was so shocked by the scale of its defeat at the last election is because they just don’t understand Boris Johnson’s appeal. All of their pre-programmed, politically correct left-wing instincts told them that he is anathema to Labour voters. How could a womanising, right-wing Etonian appeal to decent working men and women? Unfortunately for Labour it was decent working men and women who won Johnson two remarkable, against the odds, victories: the EU referendum and an election landslide. Nor was it only the Labour Party that misjudged Johnson. Tory grandees like John Major and Michael Heseltine paraded their haughty disdain and urged the Conservative

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the coronavirus crisis could peak sooner than expected

The government is adjusting to the reality of dealing with the coronavirus crisis, while three of its most important figures – the PM, the Health Secretary and the Chief Medical Officer – are in isolation. All have mild symptoms so far and modern technology means that this is not the devastating blow it would have been even a decade ago. The government now think that this crisis is going to come to a head quicker than expected. The week beginning 12 April, not mid-May, is expected to be the peak of the virus. One of those leading the government’s response to the crisis tells me that after that is ‘when we’d expect

Andrew Foxall

Putin’s plan to exploit coronavirus

Vladimir Putin knows a thing or two about a crisis, having caused a number of them over recent years. And he now appears, belatedly, to be beginning to confront the latest: the coronavirus pandemic. After claiming last week that the situation in Russia was ‘under control’, Putin used a live televised address this week to announce a series of emergency measures to limit the spread of the virus, including a nationwide week-long holiday. Russia’s authorities now admit there have been four deaths and at least 1,036 confirmed cases, in a country of 144 million. The pandemic will no doubt pose challenges to a country which over recent decades has preferred to wage wars

The Spectator

The government must be as ready to remove restrictions as it was to impose them

For days, the Prime Minister had been resisting the kind of measures which have placed many other countries into lockdown, confining their citizens largely to their homes. Civil servants had pointed to studies saying that many ‘social distancing’ strategies might do more harm than good. In the end, the trajectory of the virus — and the global response — meant the restrictions now in place were inevitable. But at every stage, the Prime Minister has made it clear he was acting with reluctance. While he has been criticised by those seeking a heavier-handed approach, opinion polls suggest most of the country is with him. Yet public opinion can be fickle.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How will the ‘war’ on coronavirus change Britain?

In the past ten days we have seen the greatest expansion of state power in British history. The state has shut down huge swaths of the economy, taken on paying the bulk of the wages of millions of private sector workers, and told citizens that they can leave their homes only for a very limited number of approved activities. Boris Johnson likes to say that Britain is ‘at war’ with Covid-19. The parallel is hardly exact, but this expansion in state power is what you would expect in a war of national survival. It is worth remembering, as A.J.P Taylor wrote, that before ‘August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris’s coronavirus pragmatism is confounding his critics

If ever Britain has undergone a period of authoritarian socialism, then this is surely it. Massive state intervention in the economy is taking place alongside state direction of the activities of private citizens that is both intensive and extensive in nature. Yet there are few private sector tycoons to be found arguing not to receive state support or, for that matter, free enterprise economists claiming that the market will, left to its own devices, come up with an optimal solution to coronavirus. Meanwhile more than 90 per cent of us approve of the draconian limits placed on our individual freedom in pursuit of the collective good. And I say that

Katy Balls Katy Balls

William Hague: ‘We are heading for increased nationalism and socialism in the world’

What will the lasting impact of the coronavirus be in the UK? It’s a question William Hague attempts to help answer on this week’s The Edition podcast from The Spectator. The former foreign secretary joins James Forsyth to discuss the politics column in this week’s magazine. He says that any such forecast has to come with a very big caveat:  ‘It’s very hard to predict the longer term effects of a big change in world affairs – if we think of the end of the Cold War and the universal assumption that liberal democracy was going to triumph everywhere for the long term – well it didn’t work out that way’. However, Hague

Friday

Benedict Mcaleenan

The coronavirus crisis reveals the misery of ‘degrowth’

This is an economic horror show. According to YouGov, UK unemployment may have jumped five per cent in a matter of weeks. The consultancy CEBR estimates that global GDP may shrink by twice the rate seen in the Great Recession. This may be the worst hit to British people’s livelihoods since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Except one thing is different: this is a deliberate economic shutdown, made necessary to avoid a deeper, more human one. It isn’t that the economy is failing to work because the credit system has seized up as in 2008. We are actively contracting productive work in order to limit a tragedy. A recession it will