All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The government may have resigned itself to keeping schools closed for the majority of pupils until September but there’s a simple solution to the classroom capacity problem sitting at the heart of every town and village in Britain. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has been busy speaking out about everything from future government austerity
Locking down Britain sooner would have saved thousands of lives, according to Neil Ferguson. But while Ferguson’s claims have been rightly contested – and the merits of shutting down Britain, particularly in view of today’s woeful GDP figures – remain debatable, one thing is very clear: lockdown is having a dreadful effect on the lives
It’s been 45 years since the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ first aired on the BBC, in which Basil Fawlty coined the memorable line: ‘Don’t mention the war’. Perhaps now though it would be more apt to say, ‘don’t mention Fawlty Towers’. Last night the Guardian reported that the video streaming site UKTV (which is
What would happen if the government suddenly announced that from next week it was ending all lockdown measures and that life could go back to normal? Would we end up with the dreaded second spike as people were suddenly released to go and celebrate in pubs and clubs, jamming public spaces, spreading the virus as
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Tory MPs are increasingly concerned about the impact of the two-metre rule, with No. 10 facing pressure to relax the policy to help save businesses. Gus Carter talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, was explicit at Wednesday’s press conference about how concerned he was about a second Covid-19 spike in the winter months. This would coincide with the flu season, placing maximum pressure on the NHS. One consequence of this is that if something is not open by the beginning of October,
Which statue will be the next to go? It won’t be Lord Baden-Powell’s if locals in Poole have their way. Campaigners want the effigy of the founder of the Scout movement to go because of his alleged racist views. But those who live in Dorset, where Baden-Powell’s statue gazes across to Brownsea Island, aren’t too
I don’t know how much of a organisational structure there is to Black Lives Matter in Britain but if I were part of it I’m sure I would be furious at the crowd who felled the stature of Edward Colston and deposited it in Bristol harbour. They have set off a tsunami of civil virtue-signalling
One of the greatest prizes from Brexit is the opportunity to make the Global Britain aspiration a reality. Included is a leadership role at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) where the UK, the fifth biggest economy in the world, could help drive much-needed progress to facilitate global trade. Leadership, however, requires respect to back it
Goldman Sachs is still operating out of London. Airbus is still making wings in Broughton, even if the order book is not looking so healthy right now. Nissan has backed its Sunderland factory. Still, at least those who are clinging to the notion that leaving the European Union would lead to a mass exodus of
For nearly a week now, the mob has had JK Rowling in its sights. Her crimes against trans ideology seemed relatively minor but like some authoritarian quasi-religious cult, trans rights activism demands total compliance to its dogma. Following a series of courageous tweets last Saturday in which the children’s author defended biology and reclaimed the word
The parents of Suntara Kohli, Bhagwanti Kohli, Aisha Megwad and Priyanka Kumari continue their protests against the abductions and forced conversions of their daughters. The four Hindu girls were among seven cases of forced conversion in Pakistan reported by local newspapers last week alone. Suntara, Bhagwanti and Aisha are still teenagers; the former only 15. But their
Anyone walking down Oxford’s High Street could be forgiven for missing Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. Of limited aesthetic merit, small, and at a substantial height on Oriel’s north-facing building, he looks as if someone asked Willy Wonka to sculpt a caricature of a Victorian. As recent events have reminded us, however, he is
Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back
The most striking thing about the lockdown easing that Boris Johnson just announced is how limited it is. Single parents and those who live alone will be able to form a support bubble with one other household; churches and other places of worship will re-open for individual prayer, and zoos will be able to admit
Earlier today, Prof Neil Ferguson told a parliamentary committee that the UK death toll would have been halved if the UK had locked down a week earlier. A claim certain to generate headlines – but how confident can we be in his figures? I’m a financial strategist, and like many people whose day-job is analysing complicated
Cancel culture is out of control. Over the past 24 hours Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and Chris Lilley’s brilliant comedy shows have been shoved down the memory hole by Netflix and the BBC. Why? Because the kangaroo court of correct-thinking has found these comedy classics guilty of offensiveness. Punish them, purge them, cast them
The global lockdown has seen economies shrink and unemployment soar across the world, pushing governments to borrow at rates never seen in peacetime. On Wednesday, the OECD published country-by-country estimates for the economic hit – and its projections for the UK are some of the worst. Under the scenario of no second wave (that is, assuming
It’s official. The Labour party now has two leaders. Both are knights. But it’s hard to say which is the real Sir Keir Starmer. Not even Sir Keir Starmer seems to know. Good Sir Keir is the kindly, decent comrade who wants to aid his fellow man at a time of crisis. Wicked Sir Keir
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Prime Minister’s Questions is becoming an increasingly heated affair. This week, Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson clashed over school closures, as well as the government’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests. John Connolly talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
In the run up to December’s election, many on the Left and in the media sought to present Boris Johnson as a ‘Far Right’ politician. His support for Brexit was the foundation stone of this absurd mischaracterisation, built on fragments of his quotes ripped from their wider settings in old newspaper columns he had written
Last week the New York Times praised President Macron’s management of Covid-19 and asked why the French were not impressed. None were more surprised by the article than the French media, who were at least pleased by the external praise. Perhaps the Times’s off-beam musings can be put down to its internecine distractions, for the
At midnight last night Britain passed a milestone: it was two months since a coal plant anywhere in the country fed any electricity into the national grid. You have to go back to the 1880s for the last time this occurred – to 1882, to be precise, when a single coal-fired power station was opened
Yesterday, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced that he was forming a new commission to investigate the landmarks, street names and statues of the capital, to see if they should be knocked down or renamed because of their racist past or links to the slave trade. The announcement came after a statue of the slave trader
After the fall of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, it was only a matter of time before attention turned, once again, to England’s other great slave-trading city of Empire, and the figures behind it. William Gladstone is one of Liverpool’s most famous sons. One of the great Liberal politicians of the age,
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The government has shelved its aim of reopening primary schools before the end of term amid growing pressure from parents and unions. But how will that affect the poorest students? Katy Balls talks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
London mayor Sadiq Khan promised today that he will begin the process of pulling down ‘inappropriate’ statues around London – after Bristolians dumped the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in the river at the weekend. To investigate London’s landmarks, Khan has created a ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’ which will review statues
This will come as little surprise to anyone who has followed my writing over the last few years, but I have accepted that I simply do not understand politics at all. On Tuesday, the government announced that it was no longer urging primary schools in England to get all children back to school for some
What should we make of the clamour for more statues to meet the same fate as Edward Colston’s? One thing to say is that the toppling of monuments is rarely historically literate. During the French revolution, Parisians destroyed twenty-eight statues of biblical kings from the west façade of Notre Dame Cathedral. In their zeal, it
For an instant, it looked as if George W. Bush might be an example of integrity all who believe in liberal democracy could grudgingly admire. Last week, he announced his anguish at the police killing of George Floyd. ‘America’s greatest challenge has long been to unite people of very different backgrounds into a single nation of
So, the Government has abandoned plans to bring all primary school pupils back before the summer holidays, in addition to the two cohorts who have already returned. The opposition of teaching unions and some regional authorities and mayors have seen to that. As for secondary schools, only two of their year groups are returning; no
There seems to be only one certainty with Covid-19: that every day we will be bombarded with fresh evidence and scientific opinion that is contradictory and leaves us a long, long way from understanding this disease. Just when it seemed that antibody tests were indicating infection rates of no more than 10 per cent in