Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

Ross Clark

One year after Brexit, Britain is reaping the benefits

A year ago today Britain awoke to a rather muted celebration – which seemed to consist largely of a bubble car driving around Parliament Square with a Union Jack in tow – ready to face up to a brave new future outside the EU. Who would have imagined then that the Observer would mark the first anniversary by running a leading article condemning the EU as 'shambolic' and instead praising Boris Johnson’s government for something Britain did all by itself? Of course, the Observer’s judgement is only in respect to one thing: the EU’s joint vaccination procurement programme. Nevertheless, it is something rather important, on which a great number of people’s lives are dependent.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Liz Truss guarantees vaccine supply from EU

Liz Truss – We can guarantee UK’s vaccine supply The European Union’s attempt at vaccine procurement has not been its finest hour. Concerns about lack of supply across Europe prompted the EU Commission to consider how it might override Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s prior commitments and commandeer the output of their Belgian factories for the bloc’s own internal use. Signalling that the EU might block the export of the jabs, many of which had been intended for use in the UK, triggered an immediate backlash, and the EU eventually climbed down. The International Trade Secretary Liz Truss spoke to Andrew Marr, who asked her if she could be certain that the UK would be receiving its expected doses in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Matthew Lynn

Ursula von der Leyen has always left a trail of disaster

The German Army had to join a NATO exercise with broomsticks because they didn’t have any rifles. It’s special forces became a hotbed for right-wing extremism. Working mothers were meant to get federally-funded childcare, to help fix the country’s demographic collapse, but it never arrived, and the birth rate carried on falling. Every child was supposed to get a hot lunch at school every day, but somehow or other it didn’t quite happen. There is a common thread running through the career of Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission. A series of catastrophic misjudgements, and a failure to deliver.

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

The cost of school closures

How can ministers stop one of the worst legacies of the pandemic being a generation of children left behind after a year out of the classroom? This week, when Boris Johnson confirmed 8 March as the earliest schools will return, he also announced money to help pupils catch up and a long-term plan for education. There's a glimpse of the scale of the task facing the government as it develops a long-term plan in this report from the Education Endowment Foundation, which found not only a significant fall in attainment for primary age pupils as a result of the disruption to the school year, but also a 'large and concerning attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and non-disadvantaged pupils'.

Andrew Tettenborn

The SNP may never recover from its bungled Hate Crime Bill

The SNP has, until recently, looked unassailable. But amidst the drama surrounding the Alex Salmond inquiry, could a backlash to one of the party's headline policy proposals sink the unsinkable? Opposition to the SNP's proposed hate speech law is clearly growing. The Holyrood government assumed that pushing through the hate speech component of its Hate Crime and Public Order Bill, published in April 2020, would be plain sailing. It would probably attract the middle-class progressives who traditionally supported the SNP; it also looked fairly easy to sell to ordinary Scots as a technical updating of the law inspired by a carefully-drafted official report from a Court of Session judge.

Friday

Steerpike

Remainers turn on the EU

Tonight we have witnessed some remarkably bad behaviour from the EU, after the bloc unilaterally announced that it was controlling the exports of vaccines from its territory – a move that threatens to introduce a hard border on the island of Ireland. But perhaps more surprising is that the EU’s poor behaviour has even managed to convince some die-hard Remainers that the apex of civilisation no longer resides in Brussels. And while some prominent anti-Brexit campaigners appear to prefer to stay silent today, it appears that the EU’s continent-wide tantrum over its inability to procure vaccines has almost united the country in disgust. Below are a handful of surprising new additions to the Euro-sceptic cause.

Freddy Gray

Has wallstreetbets changed the stock market forever?

27 min listen

Freddy Gray talks to Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast and presenter of What'd You Miss on Bloomberg TV, about the GameStop short squeeze. Where did wallstreetbets start, have they revolutionised the stock market, and do they know what they're doing?

Kate Andrews

The EU’s vaccine opportunism will not be forgotten

At first, it sounded like empty rage. The European Union had spent all week making wild statements about controlling vaccine exports — even challenging the notion of contract law. On Friday, it has started to act on its words and announced it will introduce controls on vaccines made in the EU — potentially giving itself the power to stop Pfizer sending Britain the vaccines it has paid for. Worse, when it made the announcement, it included Northern Ireland. The EU was set to use the ‘last resort’ mechanism in the recently-agreed Northern Ireland Protocol, Article 16, that can unilaterally impose a land border: something both the UK and EU spent years trying to avoid.

Katy Balls

The EU unveils vaccine export controls – what happens next?

The war of words between the EU and AstraZeneca over a shortfall in vaccine doses has just escalated rather dramatically. The EU have today confirmed they will introduce export controls on coronavirus vaccines made in the bloc. This means that as of Saturday, the EU will be able to keep track of all vaccines that are produced on the continent - and have the power to block exports to the UK and other countries. What's more, the EU is invoking Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol (designed to be a last resort) to impose  border restrictions in Ireland. The controls will be in place until March. The decision by the EU to invoke Article 16 has been widely condemned by political parties in the UK.

Ross Clark

Could this drug offer immediate protection from Covid-19?

When Donald Trump returned to the White House after a brief spell in hospital with Covid-19 last October he made a video attributing his rapid recovery to a drug he called ‘Regeneron’. ‘They call it a therapeutic drug, but to me it wasn’t therapeutic – it made me better,’ he said. ‘I call that a cure.’ Naturally, given that Trump had on a previous occasion appeared to advocate injecting humans with disinfectant, there was an element of scepticism on the part of many viewers. However, the drug he was talking about went on the receive emergency use authorisation in November from the US Food and Drug Administration. We now have interim results from a Phase 3 trial in which the drug was used as a ‘passive vaccine’.

Robert Jackman

Who are the Reddit traders?

The anarchic traders of Reddit stunned stock-markets this week, boosting the share price of struggling retailer GameStop by some 400 per cent. It's the latest stunt from WallStreetBets - an infamous Reddit page for novice millennial traders (which was featured in The Spectator last February). But who are the Redditors behind the great Wall Street coup? Here’s what we know: RoaringKittyRoaringKitty (YouTube) The initial interest in GameStop has been credited to YouTuber and Redditor 'RoaringKitty’ who has been plugging the stock as a value buy since September 2019, just after its shares slumped to an all-time low of $3.32.

Steerpike

EU accidentally un-redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract

Oh dear, can the EU do anything right at the moment? This morning, the bloc escalated its battle with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca by publishing its vaccine purchase contract with the company online. The EU was hoping the move would bolster its demands for AstraZeneca to hand over vaccine doses meant for the UK, to make up for shortages at the firm’s European factories. As you would expect with such a sensitive document, large portions were redacted when the contract was published by the Commission.

Steerpike

What the experts said: the doomsday predictions over the UK’s vaccine programme

The UK's vaccine programme may now be regarded as a big success but that wasn't always the case. As the UK injects at five times the speed of the EU-27, even ardent-Remainers are coming around to the pros of going it alone. Only the UK would not be in this fortunate position had ministers taken the advice of a number of leading opposition politicians and commentators. Back in the summer, Mr S could barely log onto social media without seeing warnings of the brazen foolishness of the UK government choosing not to be a part of the EU vaccine taskforce.

Steven Barrett

Can the EU win a case against AstraZeneca? I’m not convinced

The contract between AstraZeneca and the EU has now been published. It confirms my view, expressed on Coffee House, that the EU does not – despite its claims – have any form of ‘strong case’ or way to jump a queue to speed up its vaccine rollout. Both contracts (the one, published previously, which I used as an example in my last post, and today's) are what the EU calls advance purchase agreements, or APAs. The latest contract has slightly different wording in some places. But the differences are not substantial. This, then, appears to be bad news for the EU if it is serious about taking action against AstraZeneca. The words ‘Reasonable best efforts’ remains in the contract and is the cornerstone of the obligation AstraZeneca is under. Clause 5.

James Forsyth

Covid has proven the benefits of ‘Made in Britain’

Thatcherite Tories have long been suspicious of the idea of an industrial strategy. Their view was that it wasn’t the job of government to pick winners (or, more likely, protect losers). But the pandemic has changed all that, I say in the Times this morning. The old certainties of globalisation have come crashing down. One influential secretary of state’s view is that ‘it proves the error once and for all of the Blair-era assumption that the location of your manufacturing doesn’t matter.’ The last year has shown that even in this globalised age the nation state trumps the market.

Katy Balls

Should Britain give away its vaccines?

13 min listen

Novavax's vaccine has shown 89 per cent efficacy in UK trials. The government has bought 60 million doses of the jab, and it's expected that production will begin in Teesside later this year. But, as the EU's rollout languishes and their row with AstraZeneca escalates, should Britain consider giving away its vaccines? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson.

Ian Acheson

The grim reality of being locked up during lockdown

What's it like being locked up during lockdown? The latest statistics on prison safety paint a grim picture of life behind bars, which has been made worse by the pandemic. Even the good news must be caveated. Assaults on staff have reduced quite dramatically, which in any circumstances must be a good thing given a backdrop of record-breaking rates of violence until the virus struck. However, they have reduced mainly as a consequence of an unprecedented lockdown introduced to prevent the spread of Covid-19. This has dramatically reduced the time inmates spend outside their cells; as a consequence, it has rather limited the available opportunities for prisoners to knock seven bells out of prison officers and each other.

Katy Balls

Britain gets a boost to its vaccine programme

As the blame game gets underway in Brussels over the EU's sluggish vaccination programme, the UK government has fresh reason for cheer: a new coronavirus jab. The Novavax vaccine has successfully completed its phase three trials — finding it to be 89 per cent effective in large-scale UK trials. This data will now be passed to the MHRA to assess whether the vaccine can be approved for UK use. While the vaccine is thought to be highly effective against the Kent strain of Covid, it is less effective against the South African variant. While it still offers some protection, Novavax is following Moderna's lead in developing a booster shot to tackle this.

Nick Tyrone

The EU vaccine debacle poses a dilemma for Remainers like me

There is no question about it, at least if you want to evaluate things objectively: the UK has handled Covid vaccine rollout well (at least so far) and the EU has dealt with it badly. For a Remainer like me, this raises a difficult question: does this prove that Brexit was a good idea after all? Compared to the EU27, the UK has been able to act nimbly in vaccine negotiations. While Brussels has been held up by various delays and supply issues, these have not affected the UK. This is thanks in large part to the fact that its contract with AstraZeneca was signed three months before the EU vaccine deal. The UK also took a gamble, betting on a vaccine that had not yet passed clinical trials.