Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Wealth taxes are not the answer to our financial woes

Today the Wealth Tax Commission, an initiative involving the LSE, has recommended a ‘one-off’ 5 per cent levy on the assets of Britain’s wealthy residents to pay for the costs of the pandemic. Two immediate problems jump out of the proposal. First, to raise the money it would not be a one-off levy, but rather a 1 per cent tax for five years on the total wealth — property, savings, you name it — on households worth more than £1 million (the tax is estimated to hit one in six adults). Second, this five year period is estimated to raise £260 billion — close to the £280 billion the Office for Budget Responsibility says can be ‘directly attributable to the package of support’ announced since March to tackle Covid-19.

Robert Tombs

We should not accept Brexit in name only

Given the seemingly highly technical nature of the current negotiations, members of the public who have normal lives to lead might be forgiven for thinking that the same issues are still being debated after more than four years. They might be forgiven for thinking this as much of the media, including the BBC, are happy simply to parrot the official line coming from Brussels: that this is just about compromise, both sides making necessary adjustments, and the EU simply acting in a normal and rational way. Rational it may be. Normal it is not. The EU is being rational in ruthlessly pursuing its own interests. But it is entirely abnormal to try to impose on the UK restraints that are incompatible with political autonomy.

Steerpike

Watch: Speaker attacks Labour MP’s ‘disgraceful behaviour’

Avid PMQs watchers will have spotted an odd occurrence in the Commons just now. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle chastised the Labour MP Chris Bryant, shooing him away and admonishing him for his 'disgraceful behaviour'. But what was the set-to all about?  Apparently, Hoyle's former opponent in the election for the speakership last year had been standing in the door of the voting lobby. Unhappy that the Rhondda MP was blocking a door, supposedly open for Covid ventilation, he tried to signal for Bryant to move.  There was then a standoff in which Bryant pulled faces and allegedly even swore at the Speaker, perhaps why Hoyle then suggested a Labour whip go and have a word with the clearly agitated MP. Feisty stuff from the former challengers.

James Forsyth

Starmer’s willingness to vote for a Brexit deal is wise

Keir Starmer normally avoids the subject of Brexit. But with Boris Johnson flying to Brussels tonight for dinner with Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, he could not avoid it at PMQs. But Boris Johnson, who was in the chamber in contrast to Starmer who is self-isolating, attempted to turn the tables. Johnson asked whether Starmer would vote for a deal. This was a bit premature given that there is no certainty that there will be a deal. But Starmer’s answer was interesting. He said Labour’s vote would be based on the national interest, not the party interest.

Robert Peston

The EU’s remaining Brexit stumbling block

Here is the fundamental stumbling block to a free trade deal, one that the Prime Minister has just confirmed in PMQs. And it is not clear how it can be sorted. The EU wants the unilateral right to toughen up its labour laws, or environmental standards or other so-called level playing field rules.  Any such new rules would not automatically apply to the UK. But the EU wants an arbitration mechanism to determine whether the change in rules would confer a competitive advantage to the UK. And if the balance of competitive advantage tilted to the UK, the EU would want to allow the possibility of tariffs being imposed on relevant UK exports. The UK would have the symmetrical right if it so chose to toughen its labour laws etc.

Steerpike

Watch: Boris mocks Starmer’s ‘Islington’ exile

Keir Starmer was forced to conduct PMQs from his home this afternoon, after one of his staff members tested positive for coronavirus, and he was instructed to self-isolate. The Labour leader’s image was therefore beamed out from the House of Commons television screens as the Prime Minster stood below. Boris Johnson used the opportunity to get in a dig at the Labour leader’s apparent champagne socialism. The PM declared that he was: ‘delighted to welcome the right honourable gentleman from his vantage point of exile in Islington – his spiritual home – and I wish him all the best in his self-isolation.’ Mr S wonders if the jibe touched a nerve.

Steerpike

Kay Burley backtracks online

Oh dear. Kay Burley's 2020 has taken a turn for the worse after she was caught breaking Tier 2 rules with her 60th birthday celebrations. Burley was taken off air while Sky News bosses began a disciplinary process against her to investigate the claims. As Mr S reported yesterday, her colleagues are seething and she is not expected to return to the screen until the new year at the earliest. So, how is the Sky News anchor taking the news? On Tuesday evening, she posted a tweet in which she insisted that it was always the case she was going to be off over Christmas – owing to a pre-planned trip to Africa to 'sit with lions'. She then cryptically added, ‘they kill for food not sport’.

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

There’s nothing ‘fair’ about the SNP cancelling exams

Whenever the Scottish nationalists start talking about ‘fairness’, you know someone’s getting shafted. SNP education minister John Swinney has cancelled Scotland’s higher exams for 2021. Not out of concern over safely administering the assessments in a socially-distanced manner, but because letting them go ahead at all could be ‘unfair’. Nicola Sturgeon’s deputy told the Edinburgh parliament on Tuesday: ‘Exams cannot account for differential loss of learning and could lead to unfair results for our poorest pupils. This could lead to pupils’ futures being blighted through no fault of their own. That is simply not fair.’ You might remember Swinney from his previous stance on exam fairness.

Katy Balls

Can Johnson’s dinner date break the Brexit deadlock?

The mood music on Brexit talks may be rather gloomy but there are signs suggesting progress is still being made. As well as an agreement in principle on all the outstanding issues in the Northern Ireland protocol, a date has been set for Boris Johnson's meeting with Ursula von der Leyen. The Prime Minister will travel to Brussels on Wednesday for dinner with the European Commission president. Is this a crunch meeting? The strong suggestion from the UK side is no. Instead, it's being billed as a 'continuing process' of talks, and the idea of it leading to a firm decision on the shape of a deal – or a decision to go for no deal – is being played down. No.

Ross Clark

How robust was the evidence for lockdown?

Ever since it was first published in May, the Office of National Statistics’ weekly infection survey has been looked upon as the gold standard of Covid data. It is based on swab testing of a large, randomised sample of the population who are tested repeatedly to see if they are infected with the virus – the results from which are scaled up to arrive at an estimate of incidence of the disease in the population as a whole.  Being a randomised sample, it does not suffer from the drawback of the daily Public Health England figures for confirmed infections – which are heavily influenced by how many tests are being conducted. As the number of tests has expanded, so, too, the number of confirmed infections has risen.

Isabel Hardman

The vaccine may not stop a Tory tier rebellion

Matt Hancock sounded like a man who had just been rescued from a rapidly sinking ship when he welcomed the start of the vaccine programme in the Commons this afternoon. Almost visibly dripping with relief, the Health Secretary told MPs that it was an 'emotional' day, and paid tribute to his civil servants and team in the Department of Health for being 'amazing'. The Health Secretary has naturally had one of the most challenging years of anyone to hold that post, and he hasn't always had the back-up of his colleagues as he has tried to grapple with the pandemic.

Isabel Hardman

Has Matt Hancock been vindicated?

14 min listen

The world's first doses of an authorised Covid vaccine were administered today, with ninety-year-old Briton Margaret Keenan first in line for the Pfizer jab. Health secretary Matt Hancock said it 'makes me proud to be British', after confirming that restrictions could begin to be lifted once the most vulnerable were protected. Has his approach been vindicated? Isabel Hardman talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth.

James Forsyth

Boris drops his controversial Brexit bill clause

Today brings some surprising Brexit news. The UK and the EU have announced that they have come to an agreement in principle on all the outstanding issues in the Northern Ireland protocol. As a result, the clauses of the Internal Market Bill, which breached the UK’s international law obligations in a ‘specific and limited way’, will be dropped. The reason why this is surprising is that the assumption had long been that some of these differences would only be resolved once a trade deal was done. (A tariff-free trade agreement between the UK and the EU would make it much easier to fix various of these issues). The details of the agreement will not be out until tomorrow. So, we will have to wait until then to see precisely how this has been done.

Robert Peston

What the EU still wants from the Brexit talks

There is a tonne of contradictory stuff flying around about what Michel Barnier says is the EU's bottom line for fair competition in any free trade agreement with the UK. As I understand it, what follows is the EU's position. For the 'level playing field commitments' there should be 'non-regression' — i.e. on standards for working practices, environmental rules etc., the UK must stick to current EU rules and subject to tests. There would be a risk of legal challenge if there is a perceived breach of the obligations. And the non-regression rules apply to the EU as well as to the UK. They are mutual symmetrical obligations in that sense.

James Forsyth

Could Brexit talks drag on past Christmas?

Brexit deadline after deadline has slid to the right. There is, however, one deadline that is set in law: that the transition period finishes at the end of this year. Comments from the UK government and the European Commission today suggest that this now is, really, the only deadline. The European Commission has said that ‘hopefully’ the talks will continue after the Boris Johnson-Ursula von der Leyen meeting in Brussels this week. This is to be expected given that the gaps are too big to be bridged in one meeting. The Commission’s spokesman also suggested that the talks could carry on even in the event of a no deal on 1 January – which rather underestimates how acrimonious things would become in these circumstances.

Steerpike

Downing Street’s royal snub

Making the case for the union is a rather uphill task these days. With the SNP on course for a majority in next year's Scottish parliament elections and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon polling well with the public, many Tory MPs comes across as rather defeatist on the issue. But try they must. So, Mr S was curious to listen in to today's No. 10 lobby briefing. Sturgeon has had some rare negative press this week after she refused to endorse the decision by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to embark on a three-day tour – stopping in Edinburgh. Critics suggested she was being a misery-guts – putting nationalism ahead of an effort by the popular couple to thank those workers who helped guide the country through the Covid crisis. So when a No.

Steerpike

Is it one rule for Sky News, another for everyone else?

Kay Burley is hardly what you would call a ‘sympathetic personality’ – but Steerpike is a magnanimous sort and he can’t help feeling a little sorry for her on this chilly winter’s morning. The poor presenter is having a miserable time because, having spent much of the year berating others for their failings vis Covid, she has been caught breaching the stop-the-spread rules herself in order to celebrate her 60th birthday. Who doesn’t deserve a little bit of a dinner out — or two — to celebrate becoming a sexagenarian (her special day is actually on December 17th, but hey who’s counting)?

Nick Tyrone

Blame Theresa May, not Remainers, for our Brexit crisis

Are Remainers to blame for the looming hard Brexit? The theory goes that had Remainers compromised and accepted soft Brexit, none of what is about to unfold would ever happen. It’s true that the behaviour of some Remain campaigners in the aftermath of the referendum has hardly been exemplary. The whole Russian conspiracy thing was deeply alienating to anyone who might have listened to their case otherwise. These campaigners helped turned Brexit into a skirmish in the culture was, unconsciously saying that Brexiteers weren’t just wrong but a malign force in British politics. Some remain campaigners also sucked up to Corbyn in a fruitless and embarrassing manner. Yet hard Brexit isn’t their fault for a very simple reason: it is the fault of one person alone.

Robert Peston

Did false data lead to lockdown?

When shaping policy to protect us from Covid-19, the government relies on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to provide the scientific basis for its actions. The weekly ONS coronavirus survey is supposed to be the information gold standard — and in particular it underpinned Boris Johnson's controversial announcement at the end of October to put England back into national lockdown. No other course of action seemed sensible, given that the ONS survey on 30 October showed the incidence of coronavirus in the community in England had surged from 4.3 per 10,000 people on 3 October to 9.52 on 17 October, the latest date for data then available. This was a terrifyingly fast doubling rate.

Steerpike

Has Kay Burley just been cancelled?

It's a big morning for news in the UK as the first patients receive the Pfizer coronavirus jabs and Brexit deadlines loom. So, one would have imagined Kay Burley would be front and centre of her self-titled morning breakfast show. Apparently not. Mr S was curious to note Burley's absence on today's show — with Sky News's Sarah Hewson instead broadcasting from Coventry University Hospital, where the first vaccinations are taking the place. It appears Burley has been deemed a safety risk after Guido broke the news that the Sky News anchor had breached social distancing rules with her 60th birthday celebration. Her crime?