England

England’s players being booed by their own fans is not a new phenomenon. But for the booing to be about politics rather than obnoxious personalities and tournament underperformance is. The furore over players taking the knee represents a new and exciting stage in the testy relationship between team and fans, in which each can take actions calculated to annoy and upset the other side, while believing themselves to be entirely in the right. The England team – in the words of manager Gareth Southgate – believe they’re just ‘trying to move towards equality and support our own teammates.’ For the FA, taking the knee is nothing more than ‘a show

It’s Saint George’s Day, which means it’s that time of year when Unionists must once again don their armour, saddle their horses, and ride out to slay that most terrible of dragons: an English parliament. This proposal rears its head every so often as a possible solution to the increasingly undeniable strain that two decades of devolution has put on the constitution of the United Kingdom. It is in fact one of the surest means of guaranteeing the dissolution of the Union. Unfortunately, the reasons for this are pretty much exactly the same reasons that the creation of the other devolved legislatures was a bad idea. That means that there

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, has been doing his LBC radio phone-in show. If you believe LBC, he has ‘schooled’ a ‘caller’ who told him he is not English. If you listen to the exchanges in question, you’ll realise he did something much more impressive, and important than that. The clip, which is all over social media, is here: The short summary is that ‘Jean’ tells Lammy he cannot be English because of his Afro-Caribbean heritage. Lammy, who was born in London, politely examines her arguments and disagrees. There is no shouting and no fighting – that suggestion has been added by LBC to stir up anger and get some

Every year, one match during the Six Nations – either in the heart of Cardiff or the depths of West London – sets the heart rate of Welsh rugby fans to dangerous levels. When Wales face England this weekend there is no doubt that millions west of Offa’s Dyke will be captivated by one of the oldest rivalries in sport. England versus Wales is a battle steeped in rugby history. In modern times it has produced moments etched in Welsh rugby folklore: Scott Gibbs’ blistering try in 1999 that robbed England of a Grand Slam at Wembley; Gavin Henson’s long-range kick in Cardiff six years later, which raised the curtain

How does Labour plan to win back the Red Wall? A leaked internal Labour strategy document gives one answer: it says the party must make ‘use of the flag’. This sounds like a sensible way to woo those voters put off by Jeremy Corbyn. But the deranged backlash from some Labour activists suggests that not everyone agrees. It also shows why the party is doomed to fail in its bit to change its image for the better. Labour activists took to social media yesterday to decry Keir Starmer on the strategy, asking why the Labour leader is risking alienating so many of his party’s core support. That just mentioning the Union flag in a positive

Back in 2006, when he was close to executing his masterplan to chase Tony Blair out of Downing Street, Gordon Brown sought to address something that worried many voters: his Scottishness. ‘My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it,’ he pronounced, as if Middle England were a town somewhere off the M40. In fact, though Sarah Brown was born in Buckinghamshire, she spent most of her early childhood in Tanzania and her family moved to North London when she was seven. By mistaking a term denoting the provincial English psyche for a geographical area, Brown merely demonstrated that he was indeed all at sea. He has

Will England’s lockdown end on 2 December? Even before this morning’s media round there was good reason to suspect it might not. The first national lockdown – we were originally told – would be for three weeks, with the explicit aim of building more capacity in the National Health Service. But the goalposts shifted and three weeks turned into more than three months: despite daily Covid deaths peaking in April, pubs and restaurants didn’t reopen until early July. Weeks later gyms and other leisure sectors followed, and public transport guidance changed to encourage employees back to their offices. This morning, half a day after the Prime Minister laid out his

What political opportunities Covid-19 has presented for Nicola Sturgeon. Day after day in recent weeks she has appeared at her press conference, presenting a picture of a Scotland where the disease has been all but eliminated – placed in contrast with England where, she says, the government is merely trying to contain the disease, and not very well at that. It is an image which, naturally, aides the cause of Scottish independence. To remind us of the game she is playing, she has several times pointedly raised, or failed to rule out, the threat of imposing quarantine on visitors from England. But is the image of a Covid death-free Scotland

On 12 May, the government stopped publishing international comparisons of its Covid-19 death toll in the daily press briefings. The argument was that the data wasn’t helpful, and perhaps even misleading: the way calculations were carried out varied country-by-country, with each nation on a different timescale when experiencing the peak of infections and death. There would be a time for international comparisons, but that time wasn’t now. Today, the ONS picks up where the press briefings left off, comparing excess mortality rates throughout Europe. The data is not specifically calculating Covid-19 deaths, but rather all causes of mortality on a five-year average. This is the metric the UK’s chief medical officer