Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Steerpike

New Yorkers rally against lockdown

Here in the UK, Britons are regularly told that the country's handling of coronavirus is mocked right across the world. There have been countless round-ups of international press cuts in which Boris Johnson has been heavily criticised – even if the author is often a Brit known to harbour little admiration for the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, so-called liberal lights such as Emmanuel Macron and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo are praised for their response – even if the death toll also makes for a bleak picture. So, in the interest of international balance, Mr S was intrigued to see an article in the New York Post suggesting that Cuomo's current handling is poor – and the lockdown need end now.

Toby Young

Liberal fears are contagious

It has become a commonplace among social psychologists that one of the characteristics that unites conservatives is our sensitivity to disgust. A succession of experiments carried out over the past ten years seems to show that a person’s political views are linked to how disgusting they find the idea of, say, touching a toilet seat in a public lavatory. The more repulsed you are, the more likely you are to hold conservative positions on issues like gay marriage, immigration and abortion. These findings have been lapped up by liberal social scientists since they confirm their view of conservatives as uptight control freaks whose love of hierarchy and tradition is rooted in an irrational fear of contagion.

John R. MacArthur

Is Trump more left-wing than Biden?

Just when it seemed that Donald Trump had finally committed political suicide — his notion of injecting disinfectant to cure coronavirus marking only one of his recent reckless absurdities — he says something off the cuff that makes one lament the sight of so much raw political talent going to waste in the cause of solipsistic mania. A leftist anti-Trumper I may be, but I’ve been strangely impressed by the President’s capacity for perfectly credible, progressive--sounding political analysis, especially on the trade issues that sometimes bring together on common ground right-wing nationalists and left-wing defenders of labour rights.

James Forsyth

Brexit is back – and Covid has transformed negotiations

We will know in the next few weeks if Britain is to leave the European Union without a trade deal. The ‘high-level’ meeting in June has been earmarked by the UK and the EU as the moment when they decide whether to take the negotiations to the next stage or not. If there is to be a deal, then the contours of it will need to start to become clearer at this meeting. If they don’t, then both sides will need to decide whether their time would be better spent preparing for trading on WTO terms than in unconstructive negotiations. The Covid pandemic, far from pausing the talks, has made it all the more urgent that an agreement is found quickly.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Keir Starmer’s big weakness was exposed at PMQs

It has come down to a classroom contest. The swot versus the wag. The smart Alec against the rugger captain. The chemistry nerd who wants to join the cool kids behind the bike-sheds. Sir Keir has been praised for his ‘forensic’ attacks on Boris at PMQs. What is ‘forensic’? ‘Forum’ means a market-place and later it referred to an arena where trials were held. ‘Public square’ more or less covers it. And though Starmer is adept at court-room dissections he’ll never appeal to the throng. He isn’t box-office. His great distinction is also his curse. He’s like the prosecutor in a fraud trial methodically piling up an impenetrable tonnage of evidence while the jurors daydream, the clerks doodle and the judge dozes.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson is facing a rebellion over lockdown

Today is the last day of the hybrid parliament. When MPs return after recess on 2 June, it will be to a traditional House of Commons – albeit with social distancing and limits on how many people can enter the Chamber. This is being seen as a victory for the Tory whips. But the whips should be careful what they wish for. Tory MPs are, at the moment, spread out across the country but I suspect bringing them all to Westminster will lead to more vocal demands for a greater easing of the lockdown. Tory MPs are becoming increasingly panicked about the economic consequences of the lockdown. One senior Tory MP calls me every morning from their commute to lament how few cars there are in the station car park; 2 in the 100 available spaces the last two days.

Katy Balls

PMQs: Boris Johnson is having to adapt to a new opponent

A sign that Downing Street is having to adapt to a new opponent in Sir Keir Starmer could be found in today's Prime Minister's Questions. After two successive PMQs in which Boris Johnson was accused of being out of his depth by critics and even some supporters, there was a concerted effort to try and show he was in control. In the socially distanced Commons chamber every seat that was allowed to be used by a Tory MP was taken. Those assembled made a concerted effort to make supportive noises when Johnson spoke and disapproving ones when Starmer stood. It was a tense outing for all concerned. At one point Health Secretary Matt Hancock came close to being kicked out of the Chamber by the Speaker for talking back from the benches at Starmer.

Kate Andrews

Could negative gilt yields be Boris Johnson’s magic money tree?

A few months ago, Boris Johnson fought a general election saying that there was no 'magic money tree' and accusing Jeremy Corbyn of naively believing otherwise. This morning, something strange sprouted from the economic undergrowth, looking very much like a magic money tree. Britain sold its first long term bonds with negative yields: ie, sold at an average of -0.003 per cent. This dip below zero means investors are knowingly making a loss – paying more overall for the bonds than what their investment will return.  The yield may be only a fraction below zero, but its cross into negative territory marks a difficult moment for the prevailing economic narrative: that markets will punish the Government through the bond market if it overspends.

Stephen Daisley

The SNP’s media war conceals their Covid failures

Sarah Smith is the Scotland editor of BBC News. On Monday night’s Ten O’Clock News, she was in the middle of a ‘live’ from Glasgow on Scotland’s divergent lockdown arrangements when she said this: Nicola Sturgeon has enjoyed the opportunity to set her own lockdown rules and not have to follow what’s happening in England or other parts of the UK. If you don’t see it, that’s probably because you’re in the pay of MI5 too. Smith’s choice of words made her meaning unclear. Did she mean Sturgeon was taking the chance to make her own decisions? Or that she was fortunate or glad to be doing so? Was she suggesting Sturgeon was seizing an opportunity to differentiate Scotland from England?

Ross Clark

Stanford study suggests coronavirus might not be as deadly as flu

One of the great unknowns of the Covid-19 crisis is just how deadly the disease is. Much of the panic dates from the moment, in early March, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent – which turned out to be a crude ‘case fatality rate’ dividing the number of deaths by the number of recorded cases, ignoring the large number of cases which are asymptomatic or otherwise go unrecorded.  The Imperial College modelling, which has been so influential on the government, assumed an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.9 per cent.

Ian Acheson

Tougher terrorism laws are popular. But will they actually work?

Social media is predictably swamped by the usual well-heeled, left-wheeled liberal rights activists decrying the major changes to terrorism laws introduced by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland this morning. The new Counter Terrorism and Sentencing Bill entering Parliament today delivers swingeing changes to the sentencing, risk assessment and supervision of this countries violent extremists. Fatal defects in the system had become all too apparent in two acts of jihadi terrorism that straddled last Christmas. The murderous rampage of Usman Khan, who killed two young people involved in an educational charity supporting him when on licence from prison, was followed by Sudesh Amman’s dramatic assault.

Katy Balls

Is the government blaming the scientists?

With ministers and officials involved with the country's coronavirus strategy braced for an eventual public inquiry, this week we're being given a glimpse of how it might play out. During a morning broadcast round on Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey set the cat among the pigeons when she was asked about mistakes the government may have made. It's clear that this is a row No. 10 does not wish to be having right now Coffey replied by saying ministers can 'only make judgments based on the advice' they are given. She went on to say that on issues such as testing capacity, if the scientific advice at the time was 'wrong', she would not be surprised if people think 'we made the wrong decisions'.

Jim Sillars

Beware Scotland’s hate crime bill

Burns, Hume, Adam Smith, and others who shone in that remarkable intellectual period in Scotland’s history, were not the cradle of the Enlightenment; but it is indisputable that they were major contributors to its emergence and influence. Now, north of the border, the Scottish government has set out to divorce us from the heritage those minds gave us: to be unafraid of, indeed willing, to discuss, probe, dispute ideas and thoughts in the liberating realm of fearless free speech. Scots are now locked in a woke chamber: virtue signalling, pandering to perceived victimhood, punishing any who assert biological fact, placing a halter of criminality on free thought when articulated by speech, abandoning common sense.

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

Sunak’s coronavirus rescue package looks increasingly unsustainable

The number of people claiming unemployment benefits in Britain rose by over 856,000 to 2.1 million in April, the first full month of the lockdown. Figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that the number claiming benefits due to unemployment has increased by nearly 70 per cent. This marks an unbelievable u-turn from the start of the year, when UK employment figures were hovering at record highs. These figures do not include ‘the furlough effect’: those who are still counted as employed, paid by the Government to stay home and wait for the green light to return to work.

Matthew Lynn

Macron and Merkel’s coronavirus rescue fund is a stitch-up

It is finally here. Die-hard European Union federalists have plotted for it for years. Economists and thinks tanks have argued for it. The Greeks and Italians have pleaded for it. And French presidents have made no end of grand speeches, full of references to solidarity and common visions, proposing it. The Germans have finally relented and agreed, at least in part, to share debt within the EU and the euro-zone, and bail-out the weaker members of the club. France’s president Macron and Germany’s chancellor Merkel last night agreed a 500 billion euro (£450bn) plan that will re-distribute fund from the stronger members to the weaker. There is a problem however. It will make a British exit without a deal a lot more likely.

Steerpike

Watch: Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19

As scientists around the world race to find a cure, treatment or vaccine for Covid-19, the US president Donald Trump revealed that he had been doing his bit of medical experimentation this week. At a press conference last night the President revealed that he had been taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine every day for a week and a half, to ward off the virus. Trump said that ‘a lot of good things had come out about’ the drug, that frontline workers were using it, and that there was no harm in taking it, even if it didn’t stop the disease. Hydroxychloroquine has been touted as a potential treatment for Covid-19 after French studies seemed to show that it inhibited the infection of cells.

Monday

Katy Balls

Why Tory MPs are pushing for a speedy return to parliament

This Wednesday, MPs will head home from the virtual parliament and go into recess. When they come back to work, the government is pushing for a return to normal. Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg wants MPs to return to parliament rather than work from home. There are no current plans to renew measures that had allowed MPs to work from home such as the ability to question ministers via the video app Zoom or vote online. This decision has not been universally well-received. Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has expressed safety concerns while Labour MPs have warned against the move.

James Forsyth

Three mistakes the UK made at the start of the corona crisis

There are three areas where government policy now implicitly accepts that they made mistakes in their earlier handling of the pandemic. The first is the desire to increase testing to 200,000 tests a day. This suggests that the earlier decision to pull back from a test and trace strategy because the infection was being spread in the community was due to a lack of a testing capacity; something that could have been remedied if the government and Public Health England had adopted the collaborative approach to testing that they now have. The second is care homes.