Politics

Cineworld is to close its 128 cinemas – saying that the Covid restrictions have made its business “unviable”. It’s terrible to see that word applied to the cinema industry – and even worse to think of the 5,500 jobs this will impact. But the truth is that many businesses can’t survive what will be a year’s worth of restrictions – based on PM’s timeline where he’s talking about some kind of scientific breakthrough by Easter. The final straw for Cineworld was the delay of the new 007 film No Time to Die, now due out next April on the logic that this would maximise takings.  But how many cinemas will still be around then to show this

As Conservative party conference gets underway online, Boris Johnson used an appearance on the Andrew Marr show to warn of the difficult months ahead. With over ten million people currently under local lockdown restrictions, the Prime Minister said that while he is aware people are ‘furious’ with his government, things are not about to get better. Johnson said it was going to be a bumpy few months – which could extend well beyond Christmas:  ‘It’s possible that we will make significant progress on the vaccine this year. I went to see the scientists at AstraZeneca in Oxford and those teams and they seem to be doing fantastically well. But I don’t want to get

The recent warnings of exponential growth of Covid-19 cases, inevitably followed by a rise in hospital admissions, is one focus of the Government’s Covid messaging. Jeremy Hunt described this spike in admissions as a ‘wake-up call’ for the Government. But while this year the disease is newly identified, warnings of a winter crisis in the NHS occur annually. So should we be worried? For 20 years, ‘influenza’ has been blamed for putting hospitals under pressure in winter. Now, this fear has been substituted by ‘Covid’. Yet both are one-track, one-pathogen scenarios, which ignores the reality that there are scores of different pathogens that cause respiratory infections across a community at

Michel Barnier has very politely confirmed that the EU will be suing the UK in a respectful manner. That has all the validity of a child using his younger brother’s arm to hit his own face while stating, ‘why are you hitting yourself?’. Passive aggression is still aggression. Suing someone is an aggressive act. Now, as I sue people for a living, it would ill behove me to argue that the EU must not ever sue the UK. It is a political question on which people will naturally disagree. There is however an important legal question — whether or not the EU can sue the UK in law. It is

Donald Trump has confronted a long list of adversaries and weathered an even longer list of scandals in his nearly four years as President of the United States.  In 2017, there was FBI director James Comey, special counsel Robert Mueller, and the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. In 2018, there was the felony convictions of Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, and his long-time fixer Michael Cohen — the latter for arranging hush money payments to a porn star on behalf of Trump. In 2019 and the beginning of 2020, impeachment dominated Trump’s state of mind. He would go on to survive all of them. This year’s Covid-19 crisis, however, has proven to