Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
20 min listen
Pandemic finances are different to normal finances, as seen by today’s new figures from the OBR which show that the UK’s economy will not be back to pre-pandemic levels until 2022. In today’s spending review, the Chancellor broke a manifesto pledge by cutting the overseas aid budget. Is this a taste of things to come? Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and James Forsyth.
The House welcomed the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, as he announced his spending commitments for the coming year. Rish the Dish delivered all kinds of goals and priorities for the UK but he left his personal plans in obscurity. Or did he? The Chancellor’s naked ambition may be sheathed in a Jermyn Street suit but his strategy is easy to read: knife the Honey Monster and evict him from his lair. Today he was addressing himself to his colleagues in cabinet, and in the wider party, and he wanted to show political intelligence and presentational shrewdness. His critics have already accused him of betraying the NHS by freezing pay settlements for
Sir Keir Starmer is continuing to use his Prime Minister’s Questions to build a narrative about the government’s lack of competence, particularly when it comes to awarding contracts. This has had varying impact in each session, but by returning to the matter on a weekly basis, the Labour leader is developing a theme. Today he attacked the government’s procurement process for personal protective equipment, pointing to an admission from ministers that they have purchased around 184 million items of PPE which are unusable. Johnson’s retort to this question was very similar to the way he has dealt with all the others: he suggested that Starmer was displaying a ‘deep underlying
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
Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting – albeit denied by Riyadh – shows it is surely only a matter of time before Saudi Arabia and Israel formalise their covert relations. Israel’s recent peace deals with Bahrain and the UAE could not have materialised without Saudi backing. MBS is also arm-twisting Pakistan to help ‘normalise normalisation’ by extending the Muslim world’s recognition of Israel to South Asia. Such political manoeuvrings are not isolated; they are accompanied by religious rationale for Muslim-majority states to establish relations with the Jewish state. The imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca Abdulrahman al-Sudais, used a sermon in September to preach the need for kindness and dialogue with Jews. Earlier this year, Saudi cleric and
There may be worse times to slash international development spending than the middle of a pandemic but it’s got to at least be in the top five. The reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 represents a drop of £4 billion in investment. As Katy Balls notes, the current level was not only a manifesto commitment in 2019 but is enshrined in law, so ministers will have to ask parliament to legislate to allow them to break their own manifesto promise. International development is like foreign policy: there are no votes to be gained from it. In fact, abolishing it altogether would make the Tories more popular with their target
It’s been no secret that Covid-19 has sent the UK’s finances into disarray — but today we received a further insight into just how bad the books are looking. Alongside Rishi Sunak’s Spending Review came updated forecasts and scenarios published by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which confirm the UK economy is set to shrink by 11.3 per cent this year — the largest economic fall in 300 years. The road to recovery is forecast to be a long one: economic output is not expected to return to pre-Covid levels for another two years: Q4 in 2022. There is still no sign of a sharp, V-shaped recovery, but rather another
There is a view that we don’t have to worry about the record debt the government has accumulated since coronavirus laid waste to our way of life and our economy. And in two senses I would half agree – though the other half of me is wracked with anxiety. First, this is not a uniquely British problem; it is a problem of all developed economies. However, you should not underestimate the geopolitical significance of the explosion of debt in the rich West, because it represents by implication the fastest transfer of wealth and power to China and Asia in our lifetimes. Second, there is the important counterfactual – namely what
Rishi Sunak’s spending review is already dividing opinion in the Tory party. The Chancellor has confirmed reports that he intends to go back on a Tory manifesto pledge and cut foreign aid from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 per cent. He insisted this amounted to a one-off cut — the idea being that it will be a ‘temporary’ response to exceptional circumstances — and the exceptional strain on public finances as a result of coronavirus. As the current target is written into law, the understanding is that the government will likely have to pass new laws in order to cut its overseas aid budget. This has led to fresh concern among critics
Unsurprisingly, health spending will be a key part of Rishi Sunak’s spending review announcements this afternoon, with the Chancellor expected to pledge £3 billion for the NHS as it recovers from the pandemic. Part of that will be a £500 million boost for mental health, which accompanies a ‘winter care plan’ that was published earlier this week. Ministers are very keen to say they recognise the pressure that the pandemic has put on services and people who may be developing mental health problems for the first time, as a result of the strain they have found themselves under this year. But this money won’t go very far. The Strategy Unit
Boris Johnson has negotiated his way into a corner. With the naïve view that the EU would eventually buckle and accede to the UK’s desires, we are now just over five weeks away from the end of the transition period. The choices in front of Boris are to either cave in to the EU’s demands in order to sign a weak, thin, bad deal – or walk away without a deal. I think he should do the latter. Of course, there are obvious advantages for the Prime Minister in signing a deal (even a bad one) with the EU at this stage. It would cause slightly less disruption than no
Claims that Priti Patel broke the Ministerial Code and the resulting furore have exposed one of the greatest problems facing modern politics. No, not the widespread bullying of civil servants by ministers. But rather a systematic breakdown in the effectiveness of the fundamental ideals of liberal democracies. We politicians have for years increasingly outsourced political power to various incarnations of an unelected establishment: civil servants, bureaucrats, experts, committees and quangos. In so doing, we are giving away something that is not ours to give, effectively disenfranchising the voters. Political power is owned by the electorate and only lent to their representatives for a few years at a time. Yet to an ever
Ministers have been keen to stress that Christmas this year will not be normal. Boris Johnson went so far to say on Monday that it ’tis the season to be ‘jolly careful’. However, as expected, there will be a softening of the current rules. Following a Cobra meeting this afternoon, the UK government and devolved administrations have agreed on a joint approach to socialising over the Christmas period. The rules will be relaxed so that people can form a ‘Christmas bubble’ made up of three households for the period from December 23 to 27. During this time, travel across the UK will be permitted, including between tiers so that people can meet
The Tory MP and former 1922 committee chair Charles Walker appears to have become involved in a lockdown protest outside Parliament today. The MP was outside the House of Commons when he witnessed an elderly woman being arrested by police. In response, Walker told the officers that their arrest was an ‘outrage’ and was not necessary: Walker then appeared in the House of Commons to make a point of order. He said that the woman had been taking part in a peaceful protest outside Parliament before she was carried ‘spread-eagle’ to a police van. He described the arrest as a ‘disgrace, un-British’ and ‘unconstitutional’ and called on the Prime Minister or
What will the new map of tiers look like when England exits lockdown next week? It certainly won’t be the same system we left behind when we went into lockdown on 5 November. For one thing, we have been told that restrictions are tightening and that more areas will be shunted into Tier 3. The epicentres of new infections at the moment are not as much in the cities as relatively low-income suburban and semi-rural areas in Lincolnshire and North Kent. Swale (528 new infections per 100,000), East Lindsey (467) and Boston (433) currently top the infection charts. Liverpool by contrast — the first place to go into Tier 3 —
13 min listen
The Prime Minister announced yesterday that the nationwide lockdown would come to an end on December 2. In the updated tier system, pubs and restaurants will be closed at the highest level of restrictions, but gyms and non-essential shops will remain open. Isabel Hardman speaks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about whether Conservative MPs will accept the changes.
After a brief spell in the Labour hinterland after losing her Durham seat in 2019, the former MP and Corbynite Laura Pidcock returned to frontline politics this year, after being elected to the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC). Unfortunately though it didn’t take long for the former Durham MP to once again indulge in the Labour left’s favourite pastime: factional infighting. At an NEC ‘away day’ today, Pidcock and 12 of her colleagues decided to stage a digital walkout of the Zoom meeting, after the committee elected Margaret Beckett to be chair of the committee. The group appeared to be particularly aggrieved that Beckett had described herself as a ‘moron’
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for Boris Johnson to keep track of the many different revolts within his own party. There are the groups pressuring the government on its response to coronavirus, on its treatment of Northern seats, and on Brexit. Now there’s a new row brewing on a completely different matter: cladding. As Emma Byrne recently explained, this scandal has been building for months, but ministers seem to be doing very little about it. Currently, there are hundreds of thousands of people stuck in properties which have flammable cladding similar to that used on Grenfell Tower. Many of them are facing eye-watering bills of tens of thousands of pounds because
When Rishi Sunak gets up at the despatch box tomorrow to announce his spending review, the Chancellor is expected to commit to a public sector pay freeze — with NHS workers exempt. Ever since this was first reported in the media, the idea has met heavy opposition from Labour while Tory politicians have had to get used to being asked on air why their own pay is set to go up at a time when the bulk of public sector workers’ pay is not. That well-trodden answer tends to go along the lines of ‘it’s a matter out of our control as Ipsa (the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) sets MPs’ salaries’.
In one of his early lockdown press conferences, the Prime Minister suggested that those who tested positive for Covid could be released from lockdown because they’d be immune. The idea of an ‘immunity certificate’ was then dropped, as it raised obvious questions of unfairness: would you really have a caste of immuno-privileged people exempt from the lockdown rules? But now the idea seems to be back. The Sunday press reported on an Orwellian-sounding ‘freedom pass’ that would be granted to those who complied with a government-mandated testing regime. A source told the Sunday Telegraph that such a pass would ‘allow someone to wander down the streets and if someone else asks why
