Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Saturday

Hugh Thomson

BBC Four and the dumbing down of British television

The announcement this week that BBC Four is to stop making new programmes and become a largely repeats-only channel – which they are cheekily calling ‘archive’ to make it sound better – is a depressing reminder to viewers of a very long-term trend. When BBC Four was launched amidst much fanfare in 2002, its slogan was 'Everybody Needs a Place to Think'. Has the BBC decided that they no longer do? Or perhaps the corporation – in focusing on ‘youth programming’ like BBC Three – thinks it isn't its job to provide one. Oh dear. Whatever happened to television? And in particular, the area that BBC Four was particularly supposed to promote: factual and arts television.

Friday

Cindy Yu

Does Sadiq Khan deserve a second term?

11 min listen

Sadiq Khan hasn't been a particularly awe-inspiring London mayor, yet he is still tipped to win in the upcoming elections. Why are his opponents failing to cut through? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.

Steerpike

Labour shadow equalities minister in anti-Traveller storm

It is Good Friday today but a bad one for Labour frontbencher Charlotte Nichols. The 29-year-old Warrington North MP was elected in 2019 and despite her Corbynista credentials was named shadow minister for women and equalities by Keir Starmer in November. Six months on, Starmer may be having cause to regret such a rapid promotion today after Nichols inadvertently caused a storm over a classic 'great response on the doorstop' style tweet while out campaigning in Orford. https://twitter.com/charlotte2153/status/1377713847142858752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw A Labour campaign leaflet which she was pictured delivering told residents Labour is 'dealing with Traveller incursions' causing an outcry from Labour Gypsy, Roma and Traveller campaigners.

Kate Andrews

Talking down vaccines is a short-sighted tactic

How strange to have spent a year in a world where to hug someone outside of your household is not allowed. For the past five days, six people in England have been able to meet up outdoors again, but only in a socially distanced way. Previously, the argument for crackdown on such instinctive human behaviour centred around hospitals being overrun. Today, the Covid data tells a very positive story, with infections, hospitalisations and deaths all down by 90 per cent or more since the most recent peak. Meanwhile, the right data is going up, with over half of the UK adult population having received at least their first dose of a Covid vaccine, and the top nine priority groups still on track to have been offered a first jab in less than two weeks' time.

James Forsyth

London’s mayoral race is a warning to Tories nationwide

The London Mayoral election is more of a procession than a race. The only real question is whether Sadiq Khan can manage to win on the first round or not. Shaun Bailey, the Tory challenger, is struggling badly. As I say in The Times today, there are a slew of reasons why the Tories are doing poorly in London: the capital was heavily for Remain and its demographics skew against the Tories. But perhaps the single most important factor is housing.  At the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, in 1990, the home ownership rate for London households headed by someone aged 35 to 44 was 69 per cent. At the time, the Tories held 57 out of 84 seats in the capital.

Katy Balls

Backlash builds over vaccine passports

As Boris Johnson prepares to deliver an update on Monday on government plans for immunity passports and international travel, the Prime Minister is already facing a parliamentary backlash. More than 70 MPs have voiced their concern over the use of 'divisive and discriminatory' immunity IDs in England. The cross-party group opposing ranges from Iain Duncan Smith and Steve Baker to Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott.  While the government insists no final decision has been taken, the expectation in government is that immunity IDs are coming. MPs on the various 'listening exercises' Michael Gove has hosted this week, came away thinking immunity passports are a done deal – no matter what they make of them. There's also a sense that they could underpin any easing.

Yahya Cholil Staquf

Why Muslims like me are worried about the Batley protests

To some, the persecution of a schoolteacher who showed his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed may seem like a local quarrel. Does it really matter, many Britons will ask, that a few dozen men gathered at the gates of a school in West Yorkshire? Surely it will blow over before long, goes the thinking. Alas, this view – all too common in officialdom throughout the western world – is deeply naïve. To those of us in the Muslim world who work to counter Islamist extremism, what is happening at Batley Grammar School is disturbingly familiar. What may look like a local incident is in fact one with national implications and strong international parallels. That is why it draws our attention.

Stephen Daisley

The economic case for the Union isn’t enough

There is a certain kind of critic of independence who hears the news that public funding for Scotland is 30 per cent higher than for England and sits back thinking: ‘Job done’. The latest analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies does indeed confirm that the Union is a bargain for Scotland. It finds that, while real-terms resource funding for the Scottish Government is two per cent lower per capita than in 2010 (the beginning of the Tories’ austerity experiment), the spending drop is lower north of the border than in England. Scotland gets more than £1.30 per person for public services for every £1 spent in England.

Andy Shaw

A handy guide to flags

The Union Jack is back. No TV interview with a government minister is complete without a flag and their departments have been ordered to hoist them above their offices. Soon our country will look like a never-ending Golden Jubilee street party, but with neither refreshments nor festivities. We’d all like a street party, but many are embarrassed by constant flag waving, especially when the flag in question is the Union Jack. The students of London's Pimlico Academy were so put out by the idea of flags that they even went as far as to argue that the Union Jack flying outside their school was an emblem of racism, demanding that the headteacher took it down. Since it's now the job of pupils and protestors to decide school rules, he duly granted them their wishes.

Paul Wood

Isis’s weakness is now its strength

As coronavirus swept the globe a year ago, Isis began issuing pronouncements. ‘God, by his will, sent a punishment to the tyrants of this time and their followers,’ said one such; ‘we are pleased about this punishment from God for you.’ With the world on lockdown, Isis followers were urged not to sit around at home but to ‘raid the places’ of the enemies of God. ‘Don’t let a single day pass without making their lives awful.’ The virus might have begun as God’s punishment to China for persecuting the Uighurs but, as one Isis video put it, the pandemic was a chance to attack Americans, Europeans, Australians and Canadians. For a moment, the jihadis toyed with the idea of sending infected volunteers to sicken the enemy.

Henry Hill

Boris has a trump card in denying Sturgeon an ‘illegal’ referendum

Amidst all the dry economic arguments, one of the more emotive fronts on which the 2016 referendum was fought was whether Brexit could lead to the dissolution of the Union. Some Remainers made the argument that dragging Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland out ‘against their will’ would turbocharge support for independence. Unionists such as myself – who ended up on the Leave side – saw it differently: EU membership was actually making it easier for the SNP to sell separation as a low-risk proposition. Shared membership of the EU would, after all, allow Scotland as a newly-independent country to enjoy relatively normal social and economic relations with England.

Colin Brazier

Britain’s Covid baby bust is bleak news

These are lean times for hospitality and retail. But at least pubs and shops have their champions, popping up on our television channels and radio stations. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, or in this case, taxpayer-funded grants. Where, though, are the voices raised for another activity – also struggling before lockdown – and now facing its own unprecedented crash. Who cares about babies? Truly, births need a push. Predictions of a boom in coronababies were way, way off. Britain, in common with many other developed nations, is experiencing a sharp new slump in fertility, the full extent of which remains unclear. If our neighbours are anything to go by, we are in for an epidemic of empty cradles. The number of babies born in France is down by 13 per cent.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Did Matt Gaetz do nothing wrong?

37 min listen

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that congressman Matt Gaetz is being investigated over whether he had sex with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him. Freddy Gray speaks to Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump and a friend of Gaetz, about the story.

Isabel Hardman

Covid has forced ministers to reassess mental health

Has the pandemic really been good for the way the NHS treats mental health? That’s the rather startling claim I report on today in my i paper column. Ministers have started to talk — equally surprisingly, it has to be said — about the possibility that they are close to reaching parity of esteem between the treatment of mental and physical health, and that the chaos of Covid is partly responsible. Covid has certainly made it harder for the government to just offer talk and no cash on mental health Now, it slightly depends on what your definition of ‘parity of esteem’ is.

James Forsyth

Why is New Zealand afraid of criticising China?

It is becoming harder and harder to ignore China’s aggressive behaviour. As I say in the magazine this week, China wants to pick off its opponents. Only a unified western response can stop this, but all too often that has been lacking. New Zealand was strikingly absent from the statement issued by 14 countries When Beijing turned on Australia for suggesting that there should be an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, there was a shocking lack of solidarity from New Zealand. Wellington’s trade minister, while negotiating an upgrade to its trade deal with China, suggested Australia should ‘show respect’ to China. New Zealand now exports almost half its meat and wool to China.

Steerpike

Eustice farm reaps what it sows

George Eustice has had a rocky relationship with farmers since taking over as environment secretary last year. Trying to balance agricultural interests with Boris Johnson’s vision of ‘Global Britain’ has proven a difficult challenge at times, with Eustice facing flack over the lack of food safety protections in the Trade Bill and criticism over his suggestion that lamb farmers rear cows in the event of a No Deal Brexit. The industry itself has endured a difficult time during Covid, with the pandemic forcing supply chains to be drastically restructured to take account of the closure of bars and restaurants. So Mr S was pleased to read this morning that the Eustice family farm Trevaskis is doing rather better at present.

Kate Andrews

Pfizer trial finds vaccine ‘100% effective’ against South African variant

Pfizer and BioNTech have released some extraordinary findings from a Phase 3 trial involving 46,307 participants, between seven days and six months after a second dose was administered. The vaccine was found to have a 91.3 per cent efficacy rate. These findings line up with the real world data coming out of Israel, which has used the Pfizer vaccine to inoculate its population, and reported several weeks ago that it proved 94 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic illness. But on top of the overall efficacy rate came even better news: Pfizer is reporting that the ‘vaccine was 100 per cent effective in preventing severe disease’ as defined by the US Centers for Disease Control.

Steerpike

China’s toothless wolf warrior diplomacy

Xi Jinping's overseas diplomats have attracted much controversy in recent years for their aggressive use of 'Wolf Warrior' tactics to denounce criticism of China on online platforms. But while past trolling incidents have sparked anger or dismay, the rest of Twitter was left baffled by the Chinese Embassy in Ireland's most recent foray into statecraft-by-social media. Following the news on Wednesday that RTE journalist Yvonne Murray has been forced to leave China, the official account of PRC tried to make the light of the situation, asking its 2,900 followers 'Who is the wolf?' before riffing on Aesop's fable 'The wolf and the lamb' and claiming 'the wolf is the wolf, not the lamb. BTW [by the way] China is not a lamb.

Steerpike

Clive Lewis and his Ku Klux Klamnesia

Oh dear. Onetime Labour leadership hopeful Clive Lewis, the soft left’s answer to Richard Burgon, has waded into the Sewell Report row with his usual tact, guile and diplomacy. Responding to an Independent headline which read: ‘No proof of institutional racism, claims key report’, Lewis, a former shadow defence secretary, tweeted a picture of a Ku Klux Klan member standing in front of a burning cross with the caption: ‘Move along. Nothing to see here #RaceReport’ adding in a subsequent tweet: ‘To be crystal clear this image represents structural racism. Just so we’re clear.’ Lewis clearly has a short memory about who the KKK’s electoral preferences in Britain.