The failures of Britain’s pandemic planning have been brutally exposed in the past few weeks. The scandalous lack of protective equipment for NHS workers, the failure to prepare for mass testing: there will be plenty of time, when this is over, to apportion blame for all this. But what is even more striking is the
For days, the Prime Minister had been resisting the kind of measures which have placed many other countries into lockdown, confining their citizens largely to their homes. Civil servants had pointed to studies saying that many ‘social distancing’ strategies might do more harm than good. In the end, the trajectory of the virus — and
For the Chancellor to produce an emergency bailout package just six days after delivering his Budget is an extraordinary state of affairs, but such is the fast-moving nature of the coronavirus crisis. The virus itself is growing along the expected trajectory, testing the limits of the NHS — but no one could have modelled the
It’s always tempting for governments to respond to economic trouble with a debt-fuelled spending splurge, but it’s a notoriously blunt tool. The root of the current problem is not financial panic but a rational response to the coronavirus. People are travelling less, staying away from shops and the workplace, delaying various projects, and they will
Thirteen years ago, when John Reid became Home Secretary, he declared the ministry he presided over ‘not fit for purpose’. He was talking about border control but he might well have been referring to the department in general. When Theresa May became PM, things at the Home Office went from bad to worse. Her paranoid
A cornerstone of any -functioning democracy is the separation of police and the courts on one hand, and government and parliament on the other. Where the latter are charged with making the law, they should never, ever be allowed to interfere with the enforcement of that law. Politicians have no power to tell the police
After the vote for Brexit, it was often said that our departure from the EU was most likely to harm the very people who voted for it: the industrial workers of the Midlands and North. Didn’t they know that a vote for Brexit would, in itself, lead to 500,000 more job losses? Couldn’t they see
The nature of the Johnson government is still not clear, but has become more so with the announcement this week that HS2 is to go ahead in its entirety. Until recently, it had seemed that the project would be, if not dropped altogether, cut back in order to rein in its ever-accelerating budget. This is
After being sacked as the chairman of the COP26, the UN climate conference which is to take place in Glasgow later this year, Claire Perry O’Neill did not lose any time in settling scores. Boris Johnson, she said, does not ‘get’ climate change. In a sense she is right — but not in the way
The moment of Britain’s departure from the EU was always likely to be an anticlimax, both for those who expect great things from Brexit and for those who had been braced for disaster. Departure day is not much of an event in itself, merely a moment at which new economic policies become possible. Thanks to
The news this week could easily have led with the deaths of 14 Afghan and Iraqi migrants in the English Channel, drowned as they attempted to reach Britain. In the event this didn’t happen, but only because their boat proved to be so unseaworthy that it capsized before they made it out of sight of
When fossil fuel divestment was merely a gesture by universities, the Church of England and the Prince of Wales it was easy to ignore; it is rather less so when the head of the world’s largest fund management company says that he is going to start ‘exiting investments’ in coal producers and other companies he
What is the point of a Conservative majority? The answer might once have been to implement Conservative policies. But now it’s not so clear. Budgets are normally the way to judge a government, but we didn’t have one last year. On 11 March, we will learn how Sajid Javid intends to govern the public finances
Britain’s parliamentary democracy is easily mocked: the medievalisms, the men in tights, the ayes to the right. But it has been preserved because it tends to work. It focuses minds and makes order out of chaos. Yet again we have a general election result that almost no one predicted — and one that offers plenty
Boris Johnson stood for party leader as a One Nation Tory, he fought the campaign as a One Nation Tory and this is the agenda that has given him the largest Tory majority since 1987. Much is being made of the collapse of the Labour party’s vote, but something more profound is under way. The
Next week, voters will decide the future of the government, of Brexit, and perhaps of the Union. Jeremy Corbyn has been admirably clear on what he offers: a radical experiment in far-left economics, going after the wealthy to fund the biggest expansion of government ever attempted in this country. Boris Johnson proposes to complete Brexit
There is a large vacuum at the heart of this general election campaign. Aside from the topic of our relations with the EU, and Nicola Sturgeon’s statement that she would decline to press a nuclear button which is never going to be hers to press in any case, no leader has had anything of interest
To say one thing for John McDonnell, he shows a refreshing preparedness to use a general election to lay out big ideas. While so many candidates for high office will retreat into platitudes rather than risk upsetting some target group of voters, the man who could be Chancellor of the Exchequer in three weeks’ time
This week’s political fuss over whether the floods in Yorkshire constitute a ‘national emergency’ misses the point. It is too easy to declare an emergency for political purposes, to give the impression that the government is taking an issue seriously. It’s quite obvious that the scenes we have seen this week represent an emergency —
There is an unspoken truth about British life: we have two classes of citizen. The first are those born or formally settled here, who have all the rights and protections of the law. Then there are perhaps a million others who may have lived here with their families for years but without the proper documents.