Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Rod Liddle

My eight ‘good reasons’ for leaving the country

We commemorated one year of lockdown by sacrificing a goat to the Highly Revered Virus Deity on a hastily assembled altar in the back garden, in front of a blazing fire. We then drank a little of the creature’s blood and danced naked around a pentagram, delivering incantations to the Covid Divine — Oh Great Lord Of The Slightly Ticklish Persistent Cough. Vaccines were presented and respirators borne aloft. It all seemed a bit rough on the goat, frankly, which had done nobody any harm. But it was preferable to the usual rituals which we are these days enjoined to observe — the endless minute silences for everybody who has died of anything ever, taking a knee, banging saucepans to thank nurses for turning up to work.

The Spectator

Britain must help Europe fight a third wave

During the referendum campaign five years ago, the pro-Brexit side argued that by freeing ourselves from the EU’s native protectionism and over-application of the precautionary principle, Britain could revitalise its economy and democracy. The EU wanted to seize more power, they argued, by taking control of ever greater areas of public life. Remainers thought these fears were exaggerated. They saw in the Leave vote an eruption of nativism. The EU’s vaccine war, however, could not have better demonstrated the problem of Brussels overreach. While the vaccine programme rolls on in Britain, with more than half of all adults now inoculated, the EU is being drawn ever further down a blind alley of its own making.

James Forsyth

Sturgeon fights on ­– but at what cost?

A year ago this week Alex Salmond was acquitted on all 13 charges in his sexual assault trial. In normal times the conclusion of the most significant political trial since the Thorpe affair in 1979 would have dominated the news for weeks. Instead, the story was overshadowed by the start of the UK’s first lockdown. But the aftershocks of this trial continue to rock politics in Scotland and beyond. A Holyrood committee this week concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had misled it regarding her conversation with Salmond at her house about the Scottish government’s inquiry into him. The committee, which has a pro-independence majority but not an SNP one, decided this by majority vote.

Fraser Nelson

Can Britain’s new military policy end decades of pretence?

Like most prime ministers, Boris Johnson has grown fond of deploying the military — albeit so far on the home front. Enthused by the army’s service in the London Olympics, he turned to them when the pandemic struck and 101 Logistic Brigade have been embedded in government ever since. They distributed PPE to frontline workers in March last year, and this year have become an integral part of the vaccine rollout. ‘The military don’t moan about health and safety regulation or a 40-hour week,’ says one minister. ‘Everything just works.’ The future of the military was this week laid out in a blueprint billed as the biggest strategic rethink for a generation.

Steerpike

New poll gives Brexit a shot in the arm

On New Years’ Eve former Labour minister Andrew Adonis grandly declared on Twitter: ‘The campaign for Britain to rejoin Europe starts at midnight.’ Since then it’s not exactly been going swimmingly. The last nine weeks have seen a stark contrast between vaccine procurement and rollout in Brussels and in Britain, replete with swipes at the Oxford jab, sneers at the UK’s vaccine nationalism and even the spectre an Irish hard border in January. Adonis will join other Remainer panjandrums like Michael Heseltine and Caroline Lucas this weekend to discuss precisely these issues at the European Movement conference, whose programme incidentally makes no mention of the word ‘vaccine.

Steven Barrett

The EU’s vaccine grab breaches the rule of law

The EU is discussing confiscating and requisitioning private property. It is surprisingly brazen about this. The bloc is proposing both a ‘bespoke’ vaccine export ban and has identified 29 million doses in Anagni in Italy which it wants. The EU wishes to rectify its own error in vaccine procurement. That is a breach of the rule of law. The rule of law is very simple. It means that no one is above the law and there is one law for all. The EU asserts, regularly, that it has a legal case against AstraZeneca. I, and many other legal commentators, rubbished that assertion in January. But as I stated publicly eight weeks ago, if the EU believes it has a case it must bring one – in the perfectly capable and serviceable court in Belgium.

Wednesday

Hugh Thomson

Has Britain learned from its failures in Afghanistan?

As the Americans prepare to leave Afghanistan, and in the UK we hold our own Defence Review, should we not be asking: have we really learned from the lessons of our failures there? I was in Afghanistan for a brief and intense time in 2007 when I was filming for Channel 4 Dispatches and CNN. We saw a country that had been brutalised for decades by the Russian occupation, the ensuing civil war and then American carpet bombing to ensure US troops met no resistance. A country which was becoming restive as the allies seemed increasingly unable to help them rebuild, or for that matter interested in doing so once they had been distracted by Iraq. It was a pivotable moment. In the first five years after the 2001 invasion, only a handful of British troops had died in Afghanistan.

Ross Clark

Is AstraZeneca’s Covid jab effective against the South African variant?

The AstraZeneca vaccine has been under attack ever since the results of its phase three trials were announced in December. When the results of US trials were released this week showing 79 per cent efficacy against symptomatic disease and 100 per cent protection from serious cases of Covid 19 – and failing to show up any serious side-effects – it seemed to help bolster its reputation.  Yet some of that was undone by subsequent accusations by the US Data and Safety Monitoring Board that AstraZeneca may have included out of date data in its trial results. The company has been asked to come back and present new calculations, using data gathered from its study up until March, rather than data up until February.

Katy Balls

Will you need a vaccine passport to go to the pub?

Boris Johnson has spent the afternoon giving evidence to the Liaison Committee made up of select committee chairs. The Prime Minister was quizzed on a range of topics from the UK's vaccination programme to Brexit issues for the music sector. Here are five main takeaways from the session:1. Vaccine passports could be needed to go to the pubIt wasn't so long ago that ministers in Boris Johnson's government were insisting that immunity certificates were most definitely not coming to the UK. How times have changed. Today Johnson said the 'basic concept of vaccine certification should not be totally alien to us'.

Stephen Daisley

Sturgeon suffers courtroom blow over church lockdown rules

The Scottish government has suffered a major reversal in court over its Covid-19 regulations. The Court of Session has found its blanket ban on public worship to be unlawful. In January, Nicola Sturgeon closed places of worship across Scotland ‘for all purposes except broadcasting a service or conducting a funeral, wedding, or civil partnership’. She said at the time that, while ministers were ‘well aware of how important communal worship is to people… we believe this restriction is necessary to reduce the risk of transmission’. Canon Tom White, parish priest of St Alphonsus in Glasgow's east end, and representatives of other Christian denominations, sought judicial review.

Steerpike

Watch: Boris’s Brexit music gaffe

Boris Johnson appeared before the Liaison Committee this afternoon to face a smorgasbord of select committee chairs on everything from pubs to passports. After culture chief Julian Knight grilled Johnson on the continued problems facing British musicians touring Europe, Liaison chair Bernard Jenkin took his chance to nimbly interject. Westminster's answer to the 'capo dei capi' took the chance to pose a question of his own: would the PM would join him on a Zoom call to hear performers' vociferous concerns for the purpose of 'listening and gathering intelligence'?

Katy Balls

Are summer holidays abroad off the table?

14 min listen

What's the point of vaccinating the population, if fear of new strains will prevent a return to normality when it comes to air travel? That's the question the government is facing this week, after comments by Professor Neil Ferguson suggested that foreign travel may still be forbidden this summer. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about what the future holds.

Michael Nazir-Ali

Boris, ‘greed’ and the moral case for capitalism

I, for one, was not surprised by the Prime Minister’s remark to his parliamentary colleagues about greed fuelling the race to develop a vaccination for Coronavirus. I well remember some years ago, when he and I were both on the Any Questions panel, he said to me in an audible aside:  'Bishop, greed is good isn’t it because it makes us rich?'  I replied quickly to say something like you would expect me to say no, and the reason is that it makes a few people rich but it impoverishes many. Greed also causes some to fall into debt and even crime, because of the desire to ‘get rich quick’. Greed makes us turn in on ourselves The Judaeo-Christian tradition is uniformly negative about greed.

Lloyd Evans

Keir Starmer morphed into Ed Miliband at PMQs

Sir Keir Starmer will want to forget today’s PMQs. And fast. The Labour leader began with a strategic error. Instead of hounding the Prime Minister on a single issue he chose three unrelated topics: Covid, army numbers and steel production. Typical Sir Keir. Why use effective tactics when useless ones are available? To be fair, he had a trump card up his sleeve. The Tory manifesto in 2019 specifically ruled out cuts to the size of the military. And in a newspaper interview, Boris said that the number of 82,000 personnel would be maintained. But 10,000 are about to go. So the PM fibbed. The game was up. And what happened? The greased piglet wriggled free.

Steerpike

Will MPs back compensation for gay veterans?

Campaigners for LGBT+ rights have recently been most occupied with proposals to ban gay conversion therapy and the rights and wrongs of such a move. But could another battle soon be underway on an appropriately military subject? The Armed Forces had a ban on homosexuality until 2000 when the Blair government lifted it following a ruling in the European Courts of Human Rights. Veterans dismissed or forced to resign for their sexual orientation or gender identity before this date often suffered loss of ranks or pension. Some were given criminal convictions or placed on the Sex Offenders register, affecting them to this day.

Steerpike

Prince Harry gets his second job in 24 hours

President Biden's stimulus splurge is clearly working wonders, given the new found desire of American companies to stuff dollars into Prince Harry's pockets. Following the news yesterday that the exiled royal would be joining billion dollar tech start up BetterUp, America's answer to George Osborne has now bagged himself a second gig alongside existing million dollar content deals with Netflix and Spotify. The new role will be at international nonprofit the Aspen Institute, where he will serve on the Orwell-esque 'Commission on Information Disorder'. Prince Harry – or should we call him Commissioner Harry – will join 14 others and three co-chairs to hold a six-month study on how inaccurate information spreads across the country.

Joanna Rossiter

Should we vaccinate kids against Covid?

Children could start getting Covid vaccines over the summer as part of the government's herd immunity strategy. As Katy Balls reported last month, the current thinking in government is that vaccinating the majority of the population is the best way to stop the virus in its tracks. But where does this leave parents like me who have concerns about giving their children the jab? NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens has already mooted the idea of combining the flu and Covid vaccinations into one dose. And streamlining the two vaccinations makes perfect sense for adults. But it could put parents in a difficult position.

Stephen Daisley

How Unionists are playing into SNP hands

There is a chance pro-Union voters in Scotland are about to shoot themselves in the foot, but every time I try to pry the gun away I’m met with outrage and incredulity. The source of the consternation is All for Unity (previously known as Alliance for Unity), or rather my insistence on pointing out some facts they would rather I didn’t. AfU is standing on the regional list in May’s Holyrood elections, hoping to capture the hardcore anti-SNP vote and those frustrated with the mainstream pro-Union parties. AfU urges Unionists to vote tactically to send a group of anti-independence MSPs to Holyrood. I have pointed out the flaws in this proposition a couple of times now. My problem with AfU is simple: what it says isn’t true.

Matthew Lynn

Boris is right: ‘greed’ did give us the Covid vaccine

Boris Johnson might have started back-pedalling furiously. He might have tried to dismiss it as an off-the-cuff comment. And the spin doctor might have preferred it to have remained private. Even so, the Prime Minister was surely right when he told MPs last night that ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ gave us the Covid-19 vaccine. And rather than backing away from the remarks, the PM should be doubling down on them. He was spot on. Free enterprise and the multinational corporation are getting us out of this mess, and we need to talk about that a lot more than we do. The pioneering MRNA technology used by BioNTech and Moderna was funded by Wall Street through years of hopeless losses It was typical Boris.

Steerpike

Is Reddit censoring The Spectator?

What's going on over at Reddit? The popular chatroom, which bills itself as 'the front page of the internet', has been accused of blocking Spectator articles. Earlier this week, the most popular UK politics page was suspended from public view and users who posted a link to a Spectator article were blocked. The article in question mentions one Aimee Challenor, a former ‘rising star’ of the Green party and transgender activist, who left the party in disgrace after she appointed her father — a violent paedophile — as her election agent. According to the moderators on the Reddit group r/UKPolitics, Aimee has since been hired by the tech firm, which is now zealously blocking content about her.