Politics

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

Wednesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Theresa May asks the unanswerable question on Covid-19 at PMQs

Prime Minister’s Questions offered a stark reminder of the situation the UK is in. As a result of coronavirus safety fears, the weekly event was drastically pared down. MPs were only allowed in the Commons Chamber if they were on the order paper – along with the front bench for the Tories and Labour. Those who made it into the Chamber sat far apart. Jeremy Corbyn used what could be his final turn at the despatch box as Labour leader (pending a decision on early recess) to press the Prime Minister on financial measures for the vulnerable and raise concern over the limited testing of NHS staff for Covid-19. Johnson said progress

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Coronavirus social restrictions could soon become compulsory

Boris Johnson has taken to calling his Government a ‘wartime’ one because of the fight against coronavirus. If you accept the logic of that, the flip side of this is that we are going to have to become a ‘wartime’ society. This means people are going to have to accept the restrictions on social interactions which, I understand, will soon move from being advisory to compulsory, at least in London. Society is also going to have to accept things being different. For instance, one of the concerns in Whitehall is that even if the manufacturing effort to produce more ventilators succeeds there might not be enough trained medical staff to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Our politicians are only trying to do their best

This is a time for generosity and kindness; a moment for the cutting of slack and the making of allowances. These are, as most people now accept, unprecedented times. A great disruption to ordinary life that eclipses the two other great shocks to the system experienced this century. 9/11 and the great crash of 2008 were, in their different ways, man-made calamities. This is a beast of a different order altogether. And that, I think, should prompt a reappraisal of our political leaders. To say they are making it up as they go is not a criticism but, rather, obvious reality. What else can be expected in these circumstances? None

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Corbyn’s coronavirus strategy would have been a recipe for disaster

It has become a received wisdom that coronavirus has forced Boris Johnson to morph into Jeremy Corbyn. Vast handouts to business, surging borrowing, open-ended commitments to NHS spending: there’s certainly a whiff of Labour policy in there. Some Conservative ministers even appear to see it that way; ‘We’ll find ourselves implementing most of Jeremy Corbyn’s programme,’ one of them told Robert Peston yesterday. But no, we have not ended up, by accident, with the government that we would have had if we had voted for Jeremy Corbyn in December. There is a world of difference between the measures that Rishi Sunak’s emergency measures and what Corbyn would have unleashed on

Daniel DePetris

Trump’s coronavirus tonic is borrowed from Obama’s economic rescue plan

Coronavirus is having a disastrous effect on the economy and whether Donald Trump likes it or not, the United States is no exception. While the Dow Jones recovered from its 3,000-point drop on Monday with a 1,000-pound rebound yesterday, it’s not alarmist to say that Americans could be entering into a recession.  After initially burying his head in the sand about the impact Covid-19 could have, the president is finally waking up to this new reality. Trump certainly admitted as much earlier this week, when he conceded that what he called the ‘invisible enemy’ could do untold damage to America’s economy. For Trump, this is particularly bad news. Such a financial decline

Tuesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will the Chancellor’s stimulus tackle Covid-19 fears?

Last week’s £12 billion stimulus package to tackle the health and economic consequences of Covid-19 now seems like a drop in the ocean compared to Rishi Sunak’s announcement this evening: an astonishing £330 billion package of guarantees for business loans, up to £20 billion worth of tax cuts and grants for small and medium size businesses to stay afloat. As well: a year of full business rate relief for all companies in retail, hospitality and leisure sectors. And, he says, this is only the beginning. The Chancellor needed to indicate to business (and markets) that this Government is serious about keeping the economy going. But this isn’t a crash: this

Matthew Lynn

Tory taboos must be broken in the fight against coronavirus

A £330 billion package of loans to business. A huge tax break to any company in the hospitality or leisure industry. Mortgage holidays to anyone who has been impacted by the coronavirus. People can accuse the Government of being behind the curve on delaying the spread of Covid-19 through the population. But it is hard to accuse it of not moving quickly enough to mitigate its financial impact.  Only last week, alongside a rate cut from the Bank of England, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced huge rises in Government spending. Today he followed that with a massive round of state intervention, more money for industry, and the hint of a

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Sunak stimulus

Boris Johnson used his daily coronavirus press conference to respond to the economic emergency the country is increasingly finding itself in. Accompanied by his Chancellor Rishi Sunak and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, the Prime Minister said that he was aware the virus would severely impact the economy and that the government was focussed on mitigating this. In light of this, Johnson said: ‘We must act as a wartime government and do anything it takes it takes to support our economy’. In a bid to do just this, Sunak unveiled an economic package of business loans worth over £330 billion. Following on from the Budget, the Chancellor described today’s announcement as ‘the next

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The risk of the NHS collapsing under coronavirus may have just reduced

There was widespread anxiety and concern that the Government was basing its measures to suppress spread of coronavirus on an assumption that the numbers infected were doubling every five days, when the evidence here and internationally suggested a doubling rate of nearer four days. I raised this concern with Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College expert whose forecasting has underpinned the Government’s accelerated moves to constrain our freedom of movement. He told me: ‘I misspoke when I said five days.’ His baseline for the spread rate (R0) is that each sufferer would infect 2.4 people on average (technically: R0 = 2.4) which implies that the numbers infected would double every 4.3

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Why schools haven’t shut yet in response to coronavirus

One of the big sources of confusion in the Government’s latest advice on coronavirus is about schools. You don’t have to go far on Twitter or Facebook to find memes like this one, suggesting Boris Johnson is wrong not to order teachers and pupils to follow the rest of the country: Angry pupils and parents are piling in, calling for schools to shut their doors. MPs are being inundated with calls to intervene. There are reports that some children are already being taken out of school by their parents, while other schools are checking kids’ temperatures when they arrive for classes to determine whether they are allowed to stay or

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s ‘war’ on coronavirus is bringing out the best and worst in Parisians

I missed Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation last night. I popped to the supermarket, guessing (correctly) that the queues of earlier in the day would have dissipated with most people at home in front of their television sets listening to what their president had to say. I stocked up on essentials – wine, cheese and chocolate – and returned to the anticipated news that as of midday today France is under lockdown, or as they say across the Channel ‘confinement’. Bars and restaurants have been closed since midnight on Saturday, and from now until the end of month (and probably beyond) one can only venture outside with a completed

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The new thinking behind the government’s coronavirus approach

As the British public adjust to new social distancing measures, a common question: how long will this last? At the press conference on Monday, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty was keen to stress that the government measures to tackle the coronavirus resemble a ‘marathon not a sprint’. While the elderly have been told they could need to self-isolate at least for three months, increasingly the view in government is that the coronavirus response will go on much longer. The government’s initial strategy was to mitigate the virus and allow for a controlled peak of the virus in the summer – around June – and in the build up cocoon vulnerable sections of society so

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Boris must borrow from Corbyn’s playbook to prevent a coronavirus crash

A few principles should inform how the Government – any government – responds to what is a devastating act of God that affects all of us. They are: 1) The vulnerable, those who can’t look after themselves, need more help than most. 2) If certain behaviours help to keep all of us safe, they should be incentivised. 3) If vital infrastructure and services are at risk of collapse, and the market cannot bear the cost of restoring them, those costs should be socialised, or shared between all of us, with the wealthy shouldering the lion’s share. Here I am thinking of the genuine risks that, if, as the Government has said,

Andrew Willshire

Brexit won’t stop a coronavirus vaccine reaching the UK

The Brexit culture wars are back. On Saturday, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘Brexit means coronavirus vaccine will be slower to reach the UK.’ As usual with such pieces, the words ‘if’ and ‘could’ do more heavy lifting than Atlas. The gist of the article’s argument is that leaving the European Medicines Agency (EMA) means the UK will no longer be able to benefit from processes that expedite the authorisation of pharmaceuticals for use. This is because manufacturers may decide to meet the approval process for the much larger EU market first before applying to the UK regulator for approval here. That might be true, but only if the

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris tells Brits: halt all non-essential social contact

In a dramatic escalation of government advice, Boris Johnson, the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser have said that those with anyone in their household with a fever or a new continuous cough should self-isolate for a fortnight. They also urged even those without any symptoms to avoid non-essential social contact – so no trips to the pub or the theatre – to work from home where possible and that the vulnerable should soon begin to self-isolate. Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, explained that these measures were necessary as we were now moving into the ‘upswing of the curve’. He said, in a slightly defensive note, that

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Youngsters are ill-equipped to cope in this time of coronavirus

We’re all worried about older people right now. But I’m worried about the young too. I fear they lack the social nous and moral muscle to deal with a crisis as profound as the Covid-19 pandemic. I fear that the cult of fragility is so widespread among the youth that some will struggle to rise to the occasion of facing down this wolf at the door of our society. Our first priority must be the elderly, of course. We know Covid-19 is more dangerous for them than it is for other age groups. (Though I wish the media would stop giving the impression that every old person who catches it

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The madness of #ToryGenocide

The hashtag #torygenocide was trending on Twitter all day Sunday. This is because seemingly rational people have got it into their heads that Boris Johnson is using the Covid-19 outbreak to orchestrate a social cull in the UK. There is a debate over the wisdom of the strategy the government has been advised to take by the chief scientific adviser. Robert Peston asks a question about testing that, if I’m honest, makes me wonder about the wisdom of how we’re going about this. Still, I am not a scientist. I don’t know whether Downing Street has taken the right or the wrong approach. I’m happy for others to have that

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Corbyn should be ashamed of his coronavirus point scoring

So there I was being non-partisan by praising the Labour party for its generally mature response to the coronavirus crisis when clearly I should have been putting this down to Jeremy Corbyn’s erratic level of engagement with major events rather than a deliberate strategy. Because it turns out that shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth’s wise mixture of qualified support for the Government underpinned by the asking of sensible, probing questions was not, after all, sanctioned by the Leader of the Opposition himself. Instead, despite his impending exit stage left, Corbyn has found irresistible the temptation to try and weaponise one of the biggest governmental challenges of our lifetimes against the prime minister