Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

Cindy Yu

How much trouble is the government in over foreign aid?

13 min listen

After the government cut the UK's foreign aid budget a group of rebellious tory MPs bound together to try and reverse the decision, will it come to a head this week?'This cut has caused some resentment amongst other nations' - Isabel HardmanAnd has the culture war spread to cricket after the suspension of Ollie Robinson for decade old racist remarks?'I think there is a broader question in society about how do we allow people to make up for youthful errors?' - James ForsythAnd with Portugal moving to the amber list, just how limited will the options be for our summer holidays? 'The government now, it's aim is to protect the domestic reopening on June 21st' - James Forsyth Cindy Yu talks with James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman.

Steerpike

NHS agency stonewalls on charity links

It has not been a good year for gay rights charity Stonewall. Last month founding member Matthew Parris accused the organisation of trying to delegitimise anyone who did not agree with its views after a free speech row at Essex University. Stonewall was alleged to have misrepresented the law in its advice to the institution with barrister Akua Reindorf warning of 'potential illegalities' and suggesting the university should reconsider its ties to the campaigning group.  Now it is reported that the Ministry of Justice is preparing to leave Stonewall’s diversity scheme as part of an 'exodus' of government departments severing ties.

Ross Clark

Should the NHS mix Pfizer and AstraZeneca Covid jabs?

Should the NHS be mixing vaccines for better effect, or at least offering people who have had one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine the choice of having the Pfizer vaccine for their second shot?  The question arises because that is exactly the regime which has been followed in Germany since the risk of clotting from the AstraZeneca vaccine became evident. When the German authorities made the decision to administer the Pfizer vaccine in place of a second shot of AstraZeneca there was not much evidence as to whether this would be an effective strategy.  But a study from a group of hospitals in Berlin suggests that a shot of AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer is at least as good as two shots of Pfizer and may even be slightly better at producing immunity.

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson avoids a Commons vote on foreign aid

Update: Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle has announced that a vote on the aid spending amendment has not been selected. Hoyle says the amendment is out of the scope of the current bill, meaning Boris Johnson will avoid a potentially difficult vote on the issue – for now. Hoyle suggested the government should give MPs an opportunity for a vote at a later date on restoring the foreign aid pledge to 0.7 per cent of gross national income. As preparations get underway in Downing Street for this week's G7 summit, trouble is brewing in the House of Commons. The government is facing a potential defeat on a vote it didn't want to have: the cut to the foreign aid budget.

William Atkinson

Oxford’s petty war on smokers

Life is about to get even more miserable for smokers living in Oxford. Oxfordshire county council has announced plans to make the region ‘smoke-free’ by 2025. Smokers will be prevented from having a puff outside cafes, pubs, and restaurants, while employers will be asked to impose smoke-free spaces in workplaces. Hospitals, schools, and public areas will be urged to ban smoking, and lighting up will be discouraged in homes and other private spaces. In short, Marlboro retailers hoping to ply their wares anywhere between Banbury and Henley are going to be out of luck. I’m not a smoker and I have no desire to be. The combination of a wheezy grandfather and a chronic lack of funds has meant a tobacco habit has never held much attraction.

Sunday

Steerpike

My neck, my vacc: Matt Hancock’s dating app

As culture secretary, Matt Hancock developed a taste for technology, even launching his own eponymous social network in February 2018. But now as health secretary it appears his appetite for big data has grown ever greater. Not content with launching the NHS Covid app as part of a £22 billion test and trace scheme, his latest wheeze is to partner up with the UK's most popular dating devices including Tinder, Bumble and Hinge to boost vaccine uptake. A gushing departmental press release proudly details how, from Monday, these apps will provide 'bonuses, stickers and profile badges' for vaccinated users.

James Forsyth

Why the one-metre rule could stay beyond June 21

Matt Hancock said this morning that the Indian variant was 40 per cent more transmissible than the Kentish one. Now, it should be noted that these numbers do tend to move around. But if come 14 June and the decision about the unlocking on 21 June this is still the figure, it would point to a less than full reopening. The view in Whitehall has long been that if it is only 30 per cent more transmissible then it would be safe to go ahead with a big bang unlocking. But if the figure was higher than that, then things would get complicated. This suggests that some forms of social distancing will remain post 21 June. Continued mask wearing seems a near certainty given how little economic impact that measure has.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: I did not lie about care home tests, says Hancock

The Health Secretary was back in front of the cameras this morning, and there was plenty to discuss, from the planned lifting of all restrictions on 21 June to the fallout from Dominic Cummings’ testimony before MPs last week. Dominic Cummings’ most wounding accusation last week was that Hancock had deliberately lied to the Prime Minister’s face during a cabinet meeting in the early days of the pandemic. The allegation concerns the testing of patients who were to be moved directly from hospitals into care homes. Cummings claims thousands of deaths resulted from outbreaks in care homes because such tests were not carried out, despite Hancock confirming to the Prime Minister that they were. Hancock categorically denied Cummings’ allegation: https://twitter.

William Nattrass

How a Polish coal mine risks derailing the EU’s climate strategy

Cracks are appearing in the EU’s climate strategy. An international dispute over the court-ordered closure of a coal mine on the Poland-Czech Republic border has thrown divisions over how to phase out fossil fuels into sharp relief, leading to the first ever environment-related lawsuit between two EU member states. The Czech Republic has taken Poland to the European Court of Justice to oppose the extension of a licence for the Turów coal mine on Poland’s south-western border with the Czech Republic and Germany. The Czech government said that continued operations at the mine constitute a risk to the health of Czechs living nearby due to air pollution and reduced groundwater supplies.

Steerpike

The NHS’s bizarre diversity A to Z

When the National Health Service was formed in 1948, it had three goals: it would meet the needs of everyone, it would be free at the point of service, and its services would be based on clinical need, not ability to pay – a revolutionary, and ambitious, challenge. Fast forward 73 years though and it appears that our NHS – not content with providing health to the nation – has adopted a rather different set of priorities.  Take, for example, the equality and diversity section of its website. Recently it appears that the health service found the time to create a helpful ‘A to Z’ of diverse terms for staff to learn.

Saturday

Steerpike

House of Lords by-elections are back

In a sign that nature is truly healing, this afternoon brought reassuring news of a great parliamentary tradition reasserting itself: the House of Lords hereditary by-election. These contests are held every time one of the 92 hereditary peers still in the Upper House die and see the great and the not-so-good vote among themselves to elect one of their number for a seat on the red benches. Elections have been suspended due to Covid since March 2020 but now they are back, with four spots up for grabs: one as a crossbench peer and three on the Tory side. Mr S has spent the afternoon combing through the manifestos to bring you the best and the worst of the election statements put out by the lucky lords and ladies hoping to make it into the Upper House.

Kate Andrews

The hidden costs of the G7 tax deal

Calls to reform corporation tax are nothing new and don't just come from the left. The inefficient and bureaucratic nature of the tax has been highlighted by free-market advocates for years, as it becomes increasingly obvious that, in the age of multinationals and digital tech giants, the structure is no longer fit for purpose. Action is now being taken. This afternoon the advanced economies which form the G7 agreed a new structure for taxing big corporations. The historic deal will see a major shift in the way companies are taxed: away from the existing model in which they are taxed in accordance with where their product is created to a new system based on where they are operating.

Matthew Lynn

The G7 tax deal is an unworkable mess

Poverty will be abolished. Governments will be able to spend again. Inequality will be eradicated, our welfare systems secured and the power of the tech giants will finally be curbed. We will hear a lot of hype about today’s global tax deal. Given that the liberal-left have spent the last decade complaining that the main problem in the world is that Apple and Facebook don’t pay enough tax, a lot will be riding on the agreement reached by the finance ministers of the G7 today. There is just one small problem, however. The deal is an unworkable mess. Sure, the headlines are fine. There will be a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 per cent designed to stop countries from unfairly competing with one another.

Steerpike

Sebastian Shakespeare out at the Daily Mail

It’s been a tough year in the diary world. Covid has wrecked the usual party circuit of canapés and cocktails, with hard pressed hacks forced to pump their sources for a rapidly diminishing supply of gossip for the past 15 months. Now it appears that not even the legendary Sebastian Shakespeare is safe. Shakespeare, an Oxford contemporary of Boris Johnson who once dated his sister Rachel, has long been regarded as the doyen of diary reporters. A fifteen year stint editing the 'Londoner's Diary' at the Evening Standard between 1998 and 2013 saw his column earn multiple awards and the ire of one well-known public figure who attacked him with a bucket of horse manure.

Nick Tyrone

Ed Miliband’s Brexit ‘embrace’ isn’t fooling anyone

Ed Miliband gave an interview this week in which he decided it would be a good idea to bring up the topic of Brexit. The interviewer spotted an opportunity and asked Miliband if he had ‘embraced’ our departure from the EU. ‘You’ve got to embrace it because that argument is over,’ was the former Labour leader’s response. That one sentence was a perfect demonstration of the way Labour’s top figures keep getting Brexit wrong, and continue to fail to understand why the issue hurts them as it did in Hartlepool a month ago. Labour now have two basic ways to go on Brexit. One is to become the soft anti-Brexit party they were before the last election – and that a lot of voters still see them as, deep down.

John Connolly

What can the west do about China?

14 min listen

As China changes its two child policy to a three child policy over fears of population decline, the west is also having to regularly change its approach towards the world's next superpower. John Connolly talks to James Forsyth and Cindy Yu about our precarious relationship with China.

John Keiger

Why is Macron feigning outrage at the Danish spying scandal?

The feigned outrage in Berlin – but mostly in Paris – at the USA’s proxy use of Denmark’s intelligence services to intercept submarine cable traffic to spy on European leaders raises more than a wry smile. Allies have always spied on allies for legitimate reasons. Few have done so, and continue to do so, as much as the French.  As president of France and commander-in-chief of the French armed forces, Emmanuel Macron will be perfectly aware of this. The French foreign intelligence service, DGSE, runs an interception programme on submarine cables that listens in to potential enemies and friends in similar fashion to the US National Security Agency or Britain’s GCHQ.

Nick Cohen

Labour is in last chance saloon

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end of the decade, and that ought to terrify anyone who wants to stop the rest of the country becoming a one-party Tory state.

Friday

James Forsyth

Have we hit peak graduate?

The Tory party has turned sharply against the idea of ever larger numbers going to university. The reasons for this are both economic and political, I say in the Times today. On the economic front, the taxpayer is bearing more of the cost of the expansion of higher education than expected — the government estimates that it will have to write off 53 per cent of the value of student loans issued last year — and there is a belief that the lack of funding for technical education is contributing to the UK’s skills and productivity problems. Politically, the issue is that graduates tend not to vote Tory Politically, the issue is that graduates tend not to vote Tory. At the last election, the Tories beat Labour by 44 per cent to 32 per cent.

Cindy Yu

Can Rishi Sunak get the G7 on side?

13 min listen

With the G7 looming the range of subjects on the agenda is vast. One of the first items up is the proposal of a global corporate tax rate which President Joe Biden has already endorsed. The potential issue with this that James pointed out on the pod was:"For this to work, this global corporate minimum tax, you need all the major players in the world economy signed up to it."But how will the first meeting of Boris and Biden go and is possible the G7 could become the G10?"For Boris Johnson, not to over stress it, but it is about making personal connections, that haven't been possible because of the pandemic" - Katy Balls Katy Balls and James Forsyth discuss with Cindy Yu their thoughts on what to expect.