Ross Clark

So, Christmas, it seems, will not be cancelled after all. The government has decided instead to tackle fears of a January spike in cases with tougher messaging, telling people that just because they will have the legal right to mix for five days next week doesn’t necessarily mean they ought to avail themselves of that freedom. In other words, we’re not changing the rules, but we’d really rather you didn’t take advantage of them. But could the vaccinations which have already been performed save us from a post-Christmas spike? The Pfizer vaccine – the only one being given to the general public so far – is designed to be given in two doses, 21 days apart. The first people to be given the vaccine had their first jab last Tuesday, 8 December.

Just how widely is the economic pain from Covid-19 being felt? Still surprisingly little, according to the latest employment figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The absence of an explosion in unemployment goes some way to explaining why the lockdowns and restrictions have been accepted so meekly by the population at large. That said, unemployment is beginning to rise significantly now. There are now 819,000 fewer payroll employees compared with the start of the crisis in February. The employment rate stands at 75.2 per cent, 0.9 per cent down on a year ago, and the unemployment rate is 4.9 per cent, up 1.2 per cent.

Should we worry about the emergence of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19? News of the new variant – which, it seems, might transmit more easily than previous versions – was the big surprise of Matt Hancock’s statement to the Commons this afternoon. The other big announcement – that London and parts of Essex and Hertfordshire will be going into Tier 3 – was a foregone conclusion. As I wrote here in May, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has already mutated once into a form that might be more transmissible. This could possibly explain why Europe and North America have found it harder to contain the virus than have Asian countries. Were we fighting a slightly different disease to the one which emerged in Wuhan in January?

No, the Channel isn’t going to erupt into naval warfare, and neither is the Prime Minister engaging in ‘gunboat diplomacy’ by deploying Royal Naval vessels to keep French fishing boats out of UK waters in the event of Brexit transitional arrangements ending on 31 December with no trade deal. Yet that seems to be the view of Tobias Ellwood the Conservative chairman of the Defence Select Committee, who protested to the Today programme this morning: ‘This isn't Elizabethan times anymore, this is global Britain - we need to be raising the bar much higher than this.’ Actually – although it may be news to Mr Ellwood, even in his role holding the government to account over defence matters – it is not really a new deployment at all.

SAGE has already poured cold water on the NHS Test and Trace system in England, suggesting in September that it was making only a ‘marginal’ difference to Covid infection rates. Now the National Audit Office (NAO) has had its say, publishing its interim report into whether it has been value-for-money. It is not much more flattering.  It depicts a hugely-expensive system which leaves many of its staff sitting around with little to do and which is failing to make contact with nearly as many people as it needs to in order to work as SAGE says it needs to. The budget for Test and Trace over the whole of 2020/21, it says, is £22 billion – quite a lot more than the £12 billion that is commonly quoted as the cost of the scheme.

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.

Beware data that is released on the eve of a Commons vote on lockdown restrictions. That was the lesson of the graph presented by Sir Patrick Vallance at the Downing Street press briefing on 31 October, which included a scenario of 4,000 deaths a day by December unless drastic action was taken. The figure quickly fell apart when it was revealed that the data was several weeks out of date and the curve shown on the graph was already running well ahead of reality. What, then, to make of the React study published this morning, reported on the BBC news and elsewhere this morning, claiming that Covid cases have 'fallen by about a third over lockdown'? Does the research show that cases fell because of lockdown?

Just what is the essential difference between our two main political parties? Certainly not their respective attitudes towards fiscal prudence; the thing which used to provide clear blue water between the two. Now we have two parties which don’t give a damn about public debt, who think that they can spend willy-nilly and that something, somehow will come round and save them in the end.  No, the message of today’s spending review is that the Conservatives and Labour are entrenching their respective positions as the representatives of two tribes: private sector workers and public sector ones. We all know there’s bad news on the horizon in the shape of tax rises and, inevitably at some point, spending cuts.