Politics Archives

Thursday

2 December 2021

Will the end of monarchy in Barbados spark a chain reaction?

As of this week, the Queen is down to 15 thrones, after the royal standard was lowered in Barbados in the early hours of Tuesday morning. A presidential flag now flies there. Elizabeth II still remains, by some margin, the host with the most in terms of square miles per head of state. Presidents Xi, Biden and Putin do not come close to the Queen of Canada, Australia and Papua New Guinea plus a chunk of Antarctica, little old Britain and all the rest of her realms and territories. Depending on how much ocean you include, she remains Sovereign of somewhere between an eighth and a sixth of the Earth’s surface. So, at 167 square miles, Barbados may have been a mere blip in the portfolio. This is a significant moment, though, all the same.

Steerpike

Watch: Richard Burgon’s strange defence of China

It’s been many years since the Labour party first idolised the Soviet Union, but it appears that the left’s lingering love affair with communist states is still hard to shake off. The Labour MP Richard Burgon kept the red flag flying last night when he appeared on Iain Dale’s LBC radio show. As the panel discussed the way the UK should deal with the threat of China, Burgon chided his fellow panel member for saying that the communist state has tentacles around the world, arguing this could fuel ‘anti-Chinese racism in our society’.

Lloyd Evans

Donald Trump understands how Prince Harry’s mind works

Last night Nigel Farage delivered the shortest hour-long interview in TV history. GB News had cleared 60 minutes of the schedules for Donald Trump’s bombshell appearance, but viewers soon realised that Farage had spent relatively little facetime with the former president. Did he get half an hour to record their interview? It may have been less. Farage bulked out the material with snatches of personal analysis and Zoom calls with American pundits. And he kept advertising the content with excitable slogans delivered in his shrill Auntie Mildred tones. ‘No subject was off-limits. And goodness gracious me, he wasn’t holding back.’ The location was the Mar-a-Lago golf course, and Trump appeared on a fake antique chair in a small octagonal space.

Jake Wallis Simons

The targeting of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street is a wake-up call

When a friend shared a video of drama on Oxford Street on Monday night, I knew it would go viral. The clip showed a gang of men harassing a group of Jews on a bus, spitting, cursing, making obscene gestures, and even appearing to perform a Nazi salute. This was a group of Jewish teenagers being taken by their rabbi to see the Chanukah lights at Trafalgar Square. They had stopped on Oxford Street and, in their exuberance, left the vehicle to do a Jewish dance on the pavement. That was when it happened. https://twitter.com/JewishChron/status/1466022171143245832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Let’s start with the good news. I knew this story would attract attention because such naked demonstrations of hate are, thankfully, widely pilloried in modern Britain.

Debbie Hayton

Why is a ‘trans ally’ GP trying to fight the gender wars?

Dr Adrian Harrop, a 31-year-old GP, has been suspended from practising medicine for a month. Harrop, a so-called trans-ally, had conducted a personal crusade online, supposedly to protect trans rights. But woe betide anyone who happened to disagree with him. Harrop called one woman who took a different view 'a venomous transphobic bigot'. He said her central aim was to 'demonise trans people' while 'excluding them from public life'. In another message, he wrote: 'Cis people, on the whole, are just awful and there needs to be a massive state-sponsored programme of re-education'. Trans people like me will have to pick up the pieces He condemned women who defend their sex-based rights – 'terfs' (or trans-exclusionary radical feminists), he called them.

Katy Balls

Britain’s relationship with France has taken a turn for the worse

How will Priti Patel’s tour of European capitals in a bid to solve the migrant crisis go? Well, any visit to Paris will be difficult. Relations between the UK and France have taken a turn for the worse overnight, with Emmanuel Macron making a series of comments both privately and publicly that have landed badly with the UK government. Discussing the Northern Ireland protocol, the French President said the EU must not ‘cave in’ to British demands on border checks. In comments viewed as incendiary by ministers, Macron described the issue of the border as a matter of ‘war and peace’. However, where Macron has allegedly been the most critical is in his critique of Boris Johnson.

James Forsyth

The Tories face their biggest problem yet

Up until a few days ago, ministers could see how the government might regain its footing in the polls after several weeks of self-inflicted damage. The argument went like this: as Christmas approaches voters will see that life in Britain — and specifically England — carries on with very few Covid restrictions whereas elsewhere in Europe more draconian measures have been imposed. This scenario seemed plausible. Austria was in lockdown and heading for compulsory vaccination; there had been rioting in Holland after the announcement of an 8 p.m. curfew and several German states had cancelled Christmas markets.

The Spectator

The army can’t be deployed for every crisis

Last week, the government published its blueprint for how it intends to remodel the army. According to the plan, it won’t matter that the number of regular troops is being reduced to the smallest size since the Napoleonic wars because the remaining forces will be more ‘agile, integrated, lethal and expeditionary’. A strange theme is emerging in Boris Johnson’s government: the Prime Minister sees the army as the solution to any given problem — yet he is cutting it back to a record low size. Like Tony Blair before him, Johnson likes to deploy troops — but to help him win battles against his own government machine. He announced this week that the army will be helping out with a speeded-up vaccine booster programme.

Wednesday

1 December 2021

Stephen Daisley

Keir’s Centrist Dad reshuffle is the sign of a decadent party

Sir Keir Starmer has rarely enjoyed such good press as he’s received for overhauling his frontbench. His Centrist Dad reshuffle saw promotions for soft-left pin-ups like Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and Lucy Powell, while Corbynista Cat Smith got told to clear her desk. It was a pitch-perfect signal to Labour moderates that they were getting their party back — not least the crucial newspaper columnist demographic — who got to see all their princes return across the water at once. Well, almost. If Sir Keir had really wanted to earn some sweet, sweet commentariat love he'd have arranged a by-election and the first available flight from JFK to Heathrow for David Miliband.

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s social care plans are hollow

Boris Johnson promised to 'fix social care once and for all' as he became Prime Minister on the steps of No. 10. On the basis of today's social care white paper, he doesn't think it's particularly badly broken. Care minister Gillian Keegan launched the document in the Commons this afternoon, telling MPs that while this set out a 10-year 'vision', 'today's white paper is an important step on our journey to giving more people the dignified care that we want for our loved ones'. Those words — 'important step' — suggest that ministers don't think this is the sum total of their proposals to fix social care, which is just as well, as there are plenty of holes in the white paper.

Isabel Hardman

Is Boris in trouble over No.10’s Christmas party?

12 min listen

Keir Starmer went on the attack today at PMQs. The controversy over last years Christmas party resurfaced, with accusations that No.10 breached lockdown rules. He then went on to criticise the government's new hospitals program. Boris was dealt another blow, this time from his own side. Tory MPs are in uproar about the threats of growing restrictions. Yesterday, two votes in the commons over the new Covid rules led to another rebellion.'40 is considered the problematic number for a rebellion. That second vote was very close to that' - Isabel Hardman.A lot of MPs are worried the UK will just bounce in and out of these restrictions endlessly. But when the government is juggling both the Delta and the Omicron variant, can they hold off from a lockdown forever?

Philip Thomas

Unless Omicron changes everything, Covid is on the way out

There are good reasons to be concerned about the Omicron variant. For starters, this strain has 50 mutations, twice as many as Delta. Early reports from South Africa, where the virus has been circulating for a while, suggest it’s outcompeting Delta and spreading rapidly. There is a concern, too, that it could blunt the vaccines, because more than half of the new mutations affect the spike protein that the jabs are designed against. But all of this is theoretical: we need real-world data. So we won’t know whether it really is more transmissible, or how the vaccines perform against it, until long after Christmas. The concern, for now, remains Delta, as Chris Whitty said last week. On that front, the news is better.

Steerpike

Anti-cancel culture conference cancelled

Oh no! What’s behind the cancellation of GETTR’s ‘Counter Conference’? The right wing festival – due to take place later this month – had promised to tackle cancel culture with a roster of speakers featuring Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox and several US Trump supporters. The organisers had ambitiously booked the O2 Indigo Centre, which has a capacity of almost 3,000. Only they have now cancelled the event with GETTR, the Trumpists answer to Twitter, putting it down to new travel restrictions which mean arrivals to the UK need to self isolate until they have received their day two Covid test result.

Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Boris blows his top

At PMQs Sir Keir attacked Boris for breaking social distancing rules. But not recently. A year ago, alleged the Labour leader, the guidelines had been ignored at a Downing Street Christmas party. Boris was evasive. ‘No rules were broken.’ That’s all he would say. Sir Keir claimed this as an admission of guilt. Not much of an ambush. Last year is pre-history. And the theme of Christmas gave Boris a chance to deepen the rift between Sir Keir and his ambitious deputy, Angela Rayner, whose invitation to Sir Keir’s Christmas bash has vanished in the post. Boris revealed Rayner had been deeply stung by the snub. She said it was, ‘idiotic, childish and pathetic,’ quoted Boris.

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Keir Starmer blunts his own attack

Sir Keir Starmer had two lines of attack at Prime Minister's Questions, both of them strong in their own way. The problem was that it wasn’t entirely clear what held them together and by splitting his six questions between them, he weakened the force of both. Starmer has been building a case for a while that Boris Johnson is playing the electorate for fools Starmer started by asking Boris Johnson about the Mirror front page, which claims the Prime Minister and his aides broke lockdown restrictions last year by holding a party in Downing Street. Johnson brushed off the allegations by arguing that people were more interested in what happens now rather than 12 months ago – though significantly he didn't deny that there had been a party.

Ross Clark

When will the Tories do something about house prices?

Anyone who doubts that the fiscal response to the pandemic has stoked inflation needs to look at the latest figures from the Nationwide on the housing market. Yet again they confirm that the deepest recession in modern history has been accompanied by a boom in house prices. Moreover, the inflation does not seem to have been reined-in by the ending of the stamp duty holiday. The price of the average home, according to the building society, rose by a further 0.9 per cent in November to reach £252,687. This is ten per cent up on last November and 15 per cent up on March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. How can a global crisis which temporarily put several million people out of work in Britain have resulted in a housing boom?

James Kirkup

Who cares about a power cut in the north east?

How long could you cope without electricity, dear reader? And how many days could you endure without running water? Imagine your home was without power or water for four or even five days. What would you expect to happen? How do you think your country and your government would respond to your plight? There’d be a bit of a fuss, right? I mean, this is an advanced industrialised economy where we have, quite reasonably, come to take the supply of basic utilities as a given. If thousands of people were left without power, heat and water -- and in winter too – for the better part of a week, it would be a deal, wouldn’t it? Actually, no. Not if those people were somewhere in the north of England.

Tuesday

30 November 2021

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s booster bet

Boris Johnson is relying heavily on the booster programme to protect Britain from any additional threat posed by the Omicron variant. The Prime Minister made that very clear at this afternoon's Covid press conference in Downing Street, opening by saying that 'there is one thing we already know for sure: right now, our single best defence against Omicron is to get vaccinated and get boosted'. Temporary vaccination centres were going to pop up 'like Christmas trees', he said. He also seemed committed, if not to boosterism in the form of unbridled optimism about how the next few months would go, then at least to a reluctance to tell people to change their behaviour.

John Jenkins

Will we learn the truth about the Liverpool bomber’s conversion?

It's been more than a fortnight since the bombing of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and there remain plenty of unanswered questions. It is a sign of the challenge authorities face that even establishing something as basic as the nationality of the man killed in the blast, Emad Al Swealmeen, has proved difficult. There is also much uncertainty over the circumstances surrounding Al Swealmeen's conversion to Christianity. Al Swealmeen is believed to have entered the UK from Dubai, and his claim for asylum was rejected soon afterwards. Permission to appeal was refused, but, in 2017, Al Swealmeen converted to Christianity. This year, he applied for asylum under the name Enzo Almeni, claiming his Christian faith would put his life in danger in the Middle East.

Ross Clark

How concerned should we be about Omicron?

Ministers accused of overreacting to the Omicron variant will feel vindicated by the comments of Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel. In an interview with the FT, Bancel said he expects his company’s vaccine to suffer a ‘material drop’ in efficacy against Omicron – on the grounds that the new variant has 32 mutations to its spike protein. The protein, which the virus uses to attach itself to human cells, is targeted by the Moderna vaccine. The vaccine seemed to cope with previous variants – but they had fewer mutations. Bancel said the company’s scientists had told him: ‘This is not going to be good.’ Yes, it will be possible to re-design the vaccine to cope with Omicron, but it will take several months.