Politics

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

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

Wednesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The coronavirus crash could be even worse than we feared

Just how bad will the Covid economic hit be? Today’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 show Britain’s economy shrunk by two per cent, but that takes into account just a few days of lockdown (and suggests that the recession started some time before). The March figure is more like it: despite only formally being in lockdown for eight days in March, the UK economy contracted 5.8 per cent that month alone. As Capital Economics puts it ‘in just one month the economy has tumbled by as much as it did in the year and a half after the global financial crisis.’ Yet some responses to today’s figures reveal a worrying degree of

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Who will challenge the Sunak succession?

At times such as these, politicians like to say that ‘this is not the time for politics’. Which is not true, of course, because politics never stops, and especially not the politics of personal advancement. Just as sharks must always swim forwards to stay alive, politicians must always be thinking about the next thing, the next job, and the next leader. Here is a question that arises from the current state of politics, the government’s handling of the pandemic, and the general condition of the nation: who will face Rishi Sunak in the next Conservative leadership contest? I have no idea when that contest will come and I make absolutely

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris’s sloppy PMQs performances are becoming a problem

A former prime minister once told me that PMQs in the Commons is an event that can only be enjoyed in retrospect, after the final whistle has blown. Even if exchanges with the opposition leader had gone well, there remained the possibility of being tripped up by a minor party leader, an opposition backbencher or a member of the ‘awkward squad’ on your own side. Tony Blair disliked it so much that one of his first acts as PM was to cut the sessions from two a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) to just one: a half-hour joust on a Wednesday. His prime motivation for doing so was that he knew

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Starmer’s swipes leave Boris unbowed

Keir Starmer is a very rum package. His body and his manner seem to belong to different organisms. His physique is martial, sturdy, invincible. The square jaw, the trunk-like neck, the unsettlingly symmetrical face, the blue but eerily lifeless eyes. But his personality has no trace of manliness at all. He seems grannyish, nervy, over-delicate, like an unobtrusive footman who finds himself lord of the manor following a paternity test. There’s something about him that doesn’t ring true. His voice is like the creak of a door in a chapel of rest. But he’s an effective debater. He enjoys using statistics to inflict horrors on his opponent. Today, he unleashed

John Connolly John Connolly

Keir Starmer trips up Boris Johnson at PMQs

The majority of today’s PMQs face-off between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer concerned the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in care homes, after the Office for National Statistics reported yesterday that over 8,000 care home residents have died of Covid-19 – a figure that is expected to rise in the coming weeks. Boris Johnson’s weakest moments in the session were when Starmer criticised the policy of moving elderly patients from hospitals to care homes at the beginning of the crisis, before they received a negative coronavirus test. The leader of the Labour party quoted a cardiologist who claimed that suspected coronavirus cases were discharged from hospitals into care homes

Ross Clark Ross Clark

This study from Iceland suggests reopening schools is safe

Some countries are refusing to open their schools for fear of a prompting a second wave of coronavirus infections. But their policies would appear to be flatly contradicted by evidence from Iceland. There, a company called deCODE Genetics, in association with the country’s directorate of health and the national university hospital, has analysed the results of coronavirus tests on 36,500 people. The tests identified 1801 cases of people suffering from the disease – and ten deaths. Each case was carefully tracked. In not a single case could the researchers find evidence of a child passing on the disease to their parents. The company’s CEO, Kari Stefansson, revealed the findings in

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Peter Bone takes a pop at Boris

Boris Johnson continues to enjoy healthy ratings in the polls but not all of the Prime Minister’s Tory colleagues are pleased with his performance. Conservative backbencher Peter Bone has just taken a pop at Boris in the virtual Commons, slating the PM for revealing his lockdown plan on television on Sunday night rather than in front of MPs:  ‘The television presentation by the Prime Minister was plain wrong. Too many of the Prime Minister’s special advisers and aides think they are running a presidential government. That the Prime Minister goes on television and announces all sorts of executive orders without any reference to parliament. Many of them have clearly been

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris’s Whitehall overhaul has just become even more ambitious

When this crisis is over, reform of Whitehall is going to become a major issue again – as the government’s command paper yesterday acknowledged. Any government reform is going to have to be driven by the Cabinet Office which has today announced an intriguing set of new non-executive directors. The four new appointments are Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner; Henry De Zoete, who worked with Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings at the Department for Education before winning Dragon’s Den and setting up an energy switching service; Gisela Stuart, the former Labour MP and co-chair of Vote Leave; and Simone Finn, a Tory peer who was the coalition’s adviser on

Hardeep Singh

Labour is stirring up Sikh identity politics

It’s good news that next year’s census will not include a separate Sikh ‘ethnic’ tick box. A no brainer, you may say, because Sikhism is a religion (already recorded in the census), which like any other includes people from various ethnic groups. But don’t be fooled: this issue has been highly contentious – and Labour has only made matters worse with its meddling. Campaigners from a group called the Sikh Federation UK (SFUK) point out that Sikhs are recognised as an ethnic group under law (a point I addressed here). However in the current pandemic, the SFUK has made noise suggesting ‘Sikh discrimination continues’ because statistics for death by religion aren’t available, whereas deaths

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Extending the furlough scheme comes at colossal cost

One of the most generous Covid-19 emergency measures in Europe has been extended until the end of October – with some caveats. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has just told the House of Commons that the furlough scheme – which covers up to 80 per cent of an employees’ wages, with a cap of £2,500 per month – will continue to operate unchanged between now and the end of July. From August, furloughing will become more flexible, allowing for part-time work. The scheme remains extended to all sectors, avoiding the optics of industry favouritism, which could easily extend to regional favouritism, given the dependence on certain sectors in different parts of the