Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Steerpike

Sturgeon advisor: independent Scotland would have handled Covid better

Scottish nationalists put a lot of stock in the mystical powers of independence, but this is a new one to Mr S: independence would apparently have improved Scotland’s response to Covid-19. At least according to Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University and member of the Scottish government’s Covid-19 advisory group. Interviewed on Holyrood magazine’s podcast, she was asked whether a separate Scotland would have made different decisions on the pandemic. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she reportedly replied.

Katy Balls

Priti Patel admits Boris got borders wrong

The government's border policy has become an increasing cause of bemusement among MPs and the country at large. The UK did not close its borders during the first lockdown when countries such as New Zealand did. When they did eventually bring in tighter border restrictions, it was just at the point Conservative MPs thought they ought to be opening up.  This time around, things are stricter, yet there were still delays. A new requirement to have a negative Covid test 72 hours before travelling to the UK has been brought in but even that had little sense of urgency with confusion over whether it would come into effect last Friday or Monday. Border restrictions will be in place for some time, even if the vaccine rollout goes well.

Katy Balls

How Boris plans to win over Biden

For all the recent talk from ministers that the UK government has plenty in common with the new Biden administration, there hasn't been much of an opportunity yet for Boris Johnson to build ties. After Joe Biden's inauguration today that will change. Until Biden and his team are sworn in, there can be no direct contact between them and a foreign government. This is why in recent months ministerial teams have instead focused their attention on meeting influential Democrats in the wider party and working out their plan of action for when channels open. So, who are the key players on the UK side when it comes to building on the special relationship?

Steerpike

Lisa Nandy’s Biden no-show

Oh dear. It wasn't so long ago that Labour brains were suggesting to the Sunday Times they would get one over the government by sending a member of Keir Starmer's frontbench team to the inauguration of Joe Biden. The idea was that shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy would attend after months of building relations – thereby shining a light on the Conservative party's comparatively slow progress. Yet as inauguration day finally gets underway, it turns out that Nandy is not in Washington D.C. Instead, she's is in the UK doing a morning media round. In an interview with the Guardian, she said that while she had been due to attend she pulled out once England entered its third Covid lockdown.  A curious state affairs.

Nick Tyrone

Ed Davey is leading the Lib Dems to extinction

Ed Davey became leader of the Liberal Democrats almost five months ago. Since then, his party has achieved nothing. The Lib Dems currently poll at around five per cent, meaning that a party that only six years ago was in government now enjoys less support than the Greens. If this is embarrassing, it isn't surprising: the Lib Dems have had little to say for a very long time and certainly not since Davey took the reins.  Davey fought hard to become Lib Dem leader. But it seems that his ambition stopped there. So why did he ever want to become leader in the first place? Don't get me wrong: I have something of a fondness for a party I was a member of for ten years.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Why is Labour calling on Gavin Williamson to resign?

Why has Labour chosen today to call for Gavin Williamson to resign as Education Secretary? This morning, shadow education secretary Kate Green released a statement saying 'it is time for Gavin Williamson to go', arguing that his 'record throughout this pandemic has been shambolic' and 'he has bounced from one crisis to another without learning from his mistakes or listening to the parents, pupils and hard-working education staff who have been left to deal with the fallout'. It is unlikely that he will stay in the job when Boris Johnson carries out his next reshuffle It's true that Williamson has had probably the worst pandemic out of any minister and that the rows and mistakes don't seem to be going away, either.

Tom Hodgkinson

Of course Boris Johnson should take an afternoon nap

Does Boris Johnson take an afternoon nap? Yes, according to a Downing Street insider who told the Times today that a post-lunch slumber was not unusual. Boris's press secretary took a different view: 'The Prime Minister does not have a nap. Those reports are untrue', she said. Well, he should. For one, Boris would be delighted with the inevitable comparison with Churchill that springs to mind. Winston slept deeply every afternoon during the war. 'Take off your clothes and get into bed,' he advised in a letter to his nephew. 'Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one.

Katy Balls

Are Tory sinosceptics the real opposition?

14 min listen

Today the Commons debates the 'genocide amendment' to the Trade Bill, which would allow judges to restrict the government's ability to sign trade deals with countries deemed guilty of genocide. It's a clear swipe at China and its treatment of the Uyghur minority, and on the podcast, Katy Balls discusses with James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman what this means for the Conservative party's new stance on China.

Robert Peston

The difficult vaccine debate we’ve shied away from

The Prime Minister only has himself to blame for the public outcry over 70-year-olds being vaccinated when there are still many over 80-year-olds waiting even to be invited to be vaccinated. What I mean by this is that there was a perfectly good argument for vaccinating 70-to-80 year olds before the more elderly, or at the same time. But Boris Johnson eliminated all debate about that when he ordered the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to organise the vaccination programme so that deaths from or with Covid-19 should be cut as rapidly as possible.

Anthony Browne

A proportional property tax would be a disaster

Two of the most unpopular taxes in Britain are stamp duty and council tax, property taxes both, seen as economically damaging and unfair. So it is not surprising there is a noisy campaign, gaining widespread coverage, to abolish them both and replace them with a simple 'proportional property tax'. The more your home is worth, the more you pay — what could be fairer and simpler? Although well intentioned, this new property tax is a genuinely bad idea. To be revenue neutral for the Treasury, campaigners estimate it needs to be set at 0.48 per cent of the value of the property per year — so that someone with a £1 million home will pay £4,800 a year in this tax.

Robert Jackman

Madam Vice President: who’s who in the Harris clan

Nearly three months since the US election, Kamala Harris will soon make history as the first woman to be sworn in as Vice-President. As the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, Harris has made much of her historic background. And not always without controversy - the recent ‘fweedom’ gaffe being a case in point.  So who's who in the new Vice President's family? The inspiration - PV Gopalan (1911 - 1998), Harris’s grandfather Born into a Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu, Painganadu Venkataraman Gopalan joined the Indian civil service during the final decades of British rule. After independence, he specialised in the resettlement of refugees, eventually being stationed in Zambia to help with the flow of people fleeing neighbouring Rhodesia.

James Forsyth

Will Britain trade its morals for Chinese markets?

The debate over the so-called 'genocide amendment' to the trade bill raises interesting questions about the balance of powers, and responsibilities, between the executive, parliament and the courts. The amendment, which has already passed the Lords, would give English courts the power to rule on whether a state is committing genocide — should the government seek a trade deal with that state, the executive would have to seek parliamentary approval first. But beyond the constitutional questions, the amendment also tells us a lot about how UK policy towards China is likely to evolve in the coming years. In the last year, the UK’s position on China has shifted dramatically.

Ian Acheson

Britain’s prisons are a breeding ground for Islamist terror

Was Reading terrorist Khairi Saadallah radicalised behind bars? What we do know is that locking Saadallah in HMP Bullingdon to develop a ‘close’ relationship with radical cleric Omar Brooks was an extraordinary lapse in operational security. Only 16 days after leaving the prison, the violent, troubled and combat experienced Saadallah launched his murderous attack in Reading. At the very least, it is clear that prison served little purpose in stopping him. Once again, this raises the question of whether Britain's jails are a breeding ground for radicalisation.

Pravina Rudra

Politicians of Instagram: from #DishyRishi to Liz Truss

There is something highly amusing about the thought of a politician on Instagram. It’s like letting a University Challenge panelist loose in Victoria’s Secret. How will they know what to do amid this world of pink, sexed-up, candy floss? They might have mastered other platforms (Twitter, for example), with their fierce duels over facts. But Instagram doesn’t care for such things. Instagram wants you to be cool and curated and know your Lark from your Lo-fi.  Instagram might not land you with death threats, the way Twitter does with MPs, nor get you deselected because of something you once liked - like Facebook - but some would argue Instagram is far more terrifying for MPs.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

A Universal Credit u-turn seems inevitable

Labour's opposition day motion calling on the government not to drop the £20 uplift in Universal Credit has just passed in the Commons – because the government abstained on the vote. This was expected, but what was more of a surprise was that there was a vote at all: no one was there to oppose the motion, to the extent that the tellers were all Labour MPs, who had all voted for the motion (normally two tellers are from the ayes and two from the noes). So why was there a division at all? As usual, the Speaker asked for those who supported the motion to say 'aye', which they did, and then for those who opposed it to say no'. Strangely, there were shouts of 'no!' from MPs who then went on to support the motion.

Katy Balls

Matt Hancock tight-lipped on when Covid restrictions might end

As ministers voice their hope that the country can start to lift restrictions from early March, questions are being asked as to when restrictions can go altogether and normal life resume. Members of the Tory Covid Recovery Group have argued that most restrictions should go as soon as the vulnerable are protected. While officials remain tight-lipped on the issue, Matt Hancock did offer an insight in today's press conference as to the key factors the government will consider when making that decision. Announcing that over four million people have now been vaccinated in the UK, the Health Secretary urged the public not to blow it as the route out was clear. In the Q&A, he pointed to the factors that will decide when restrictions can go.

Isabel Hardman

Gavin Williamson licks his wounds in the Commons

Of all the government ministries grappling with the impact of the pandemic, the Department for Education has probably had the most torrid – and least impressive – time. There is currently no sign that things are improving, either: in the past week, ministers have had to deal with a highly politically-toxic row over the quality of free school meals for children during lockdown. That row formed the backdrop to today's education questions in the Commons, where Gavin Williamson and his colleagues were very visibly licking their wounds. Williamson was accused – as he is every time he appears in the Chamber – of being 'incompetent', with Labour's Kate Green complaining that the food parcels were 'entirely in line with the government's own guidance.

Nick Tyrone

Why attempts to cut red tape almost always fail

Rishi Sunak has been appointed to chair a new committee that will be tasked with cutting red tape, particularly anything that originated from a European Union directive. Part of me thinks Boris has tasked Sunak with this as a means of taking some shine off of his Chancellor’s star — this latest venture to cut down on red tape is bound to fail as badly as the many other attempts that have been made over the years to drastically change the regulatory environment in this country. A lot of the thinking around regulatory reform in the UK is deeply wrongheaded, not from a left-wing or Remainer standpoint but from the perspective of anyone who really wants to make doing business in the UK easier and better.

Lloyd Evans

Inside the first Corbynite International

Jeremy Corbyn launched his 'Project for Peace and Justice' on Sunday with a Zoom conference featuring a starry panel of left-wing activists. The online format is a weak and feeble beast compared with a live rally. You miss the crackle and excitement in the air. You long for the cheers and whoops of a properly pumped-up crowd. Instead we got the beaming face of Baroness Blower, a former teacher, who introduced the participants from a desk in her sitting room. After each speech she offered sugary compliments like a kindly aunt feigning wide-eyed surprise while opening her birthday presents. ‘That was absolutely fantastic,’ she said as Scarlett Westbrook finished the opening contribution. Ms Westbrook is a rabble-rouser-on-the-make who has spotted an opportunity.

Steerpike

Labour MP: I’ll try not to cry for Jeremy

This weekend former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn launched his ‘Project for Peace and Justice’. Ostensibly, the organisation has been set up to campaign for a ‘fairer society’ via worldwide progressive networks. It does sometimes seem though as if the group’s real purpose is to act as a branding exercise for Jeremy Corbyn himself, with the message ‘Founded by Jeremy Corbyn’ plastered all over the organisation’s website. Rather giving the game away, the Twitter handle of the group is the ‘@Corbyn_Project’. The speakers at this weekend’s online launch did not exactly dispel the notion that this was all about Corbyn either.