UK Politics

First minister Nicola Sturgeon has announced that the Covid self-isolation period will be cut from 10 to seven days in Scotland, bringing the country in line with rules in England.Ms Sturgeon also said that Scots who test positive with a lateral flow test will no longer have to take a PCR test to confirm the result, with the changes coming into force from midnight.The SNP leader said she wanted to see “sustainable” ways of dealing with Omicron and other variants – but warned the latest wave still the potential to “overwhelm” the NHS in Scotland.Strict limits on large gatherings and table service rules for hospitality will remain in force across Scotland for now, said Ms Sturgeon, adding that she expected restrictions to remain until at least 17 January.One in 20 people in Scotland now have Covid, according to the Scottish government’s latest weekly figures. “Covid is significantly more widespread than at any stage in the pandemic,” said Ms Sturgeon.She said the increasing pressure on the NHS was being managed by a “depleted and ever-more exhausted workforce”, as the number of Omicron cases continues to grow.The first minister said the encouraging evidence that Omicron leads to a milder illness, particularly in people under the age of 60, “does appear to be strengthening”. But she said the highly-infectious variant was “creating a volume of cases … which still has the potential to overwhelm us”.The first minister announced that 16,103 new cases of the virus were recorded across Scotland on Tuesday, with 1,223 Covid patients in hospital – up 71 from the previous day.Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross welcomed the “sensible and proportionate” changes to testing and self-isolation rules – but challenged Ms Sturgeon on why it took so long to cut the time spent at home to seven days.Ms Sturgeon said her perspective had changed because of the “burden” on the economy of so many staff absences. “Last week I did not think it was the case that the benefits of changing self-isolation would outweigh the risk. The higher the transmission now, the bigger the burden of self-isolation on the economy, has changed that judgement.”New data breaking down hospital admissions in Scotland – including analysis on those admitted to hospital because of the virus, along with Covid cases detected in patients in hospital for other reasons – will be released on Friday, Ms Sturgeon said.Scots who test positive for Covid will be able to leave self-isolation on day seven if they return two negative lateral flow tests and do not have a fever. Those self-isolating will be asked to take a lateral flow test no earlier than day six of isolation and a second at least 24 hours later.Ms Sturgeon also made changes to the isolation protocol for household contacts who are under 18 years and four months old or who are fully vaccinated with three doses. For this group, contacts will be asked to take a lateral flow test each day for seven days and self-isolate if one test is positive.Earlier on Wednesday, the UK Health Security Agency said that from 11 January, asymptomatic people in England who test positive from a lateral flow test will no longer require a confirmatory PCR test. More

Tens of thousands of Brexit-related websites have been taken offline by the EU agency in charge of domain names – including the Leave.eu site set up by the pro-Brexit campaign group.Owners of .eu websites based in the UK were warned they needed to prove eligibility for an EU domain name after the Brexit process or they would be officially “revoked” this week.The EURid agency said around 48,000 domain names had been revoked and would now be made available for registration on a “first come, first serve” basis.“As previously communicated, all Brexit-related domain names, which were moved to the “withdrawn” status on 1 July 2021, will be revoked and released on 3 January 2022,” said a spokesperson.EURid added: “About 48,000 domain names will become available for general registration on first come, first serve basis.”The Leave.EU group – founded by businessman Arron – had moved its website registration from the UK to the Republic of Ireland at the end of 2020 in a bid to get round a rule stating that .eu addresses can only be used by individuals and organisations based in the EU.But an investigation by EURid led to the domain name being given “withdrawn” status, with the EU agency citing the failure to respond to data verification requests.The website has now been revoked – with visitors to the web page greeted with the error message: “This site can’t be reached.”However, the Leave.EU group now has a website using a UK domain name, leaveeuofficial.com.Neale Richmond, an Irish member of parliament, wrote to the Republic of Ireland’s communications regulator last year to complain about the attempt to register in Waterford.“It is utterly ridiculous to think that Leave.EU could brass-plate an address in Waterford to maintain their domain name – they wanted to leave the EU, they have, that means they leave their domain too,” he said.Anyone who has EU residency or citizenship, or organisation established in the bloc, will be able to re-register the .eu domain names which have been revoked.The Leave.EU group has been contacted for comment. More

Tories view Boris Johnson as a leader like the discredited Edward Heath rather than their hero Margaret Thatcher, a former cabinet minister has warned him.Liam Fox also agreed that accusations that the prime minister broke Covid rules “will be hard to dispel” – after the controversy over lockdown-busting No 10 parties crashed his poll ratings.The former trade and defence secretary urged Mr Johnson to revamp his “chaotic” Downing Street operation, by appointing “someone with the authority to make the right calls”.But he urged fellow MPs to step back from an expected bid to topple him this year, saying: “This is absolutely the wrong time for the Conservative Party to think about a leadership challenge.”Unhappy Tory MPs are circling after a disastrous two months for Mr Johnson, which began with his bungled bid to fix Commons sleaze rules to rescue the disgraced Owen Paterson.The Omicron crisis has put any attempt to force him out on hold, but the prime minister has been put on notice to change his governing style and end the damaging own goals.In an article for the Conservative Home website, Dr Fox urged fellow MPs to ignore the polls, rather than “engaging in a bout of navel-gazing that will lead to division and paralysis”.But he warned: “This is not remotely to suggest that all is well in the Johnson premiership.“For many Conservatives, including myself, the current government smacks too much of “big tax, big spend, big state”, more reminiscent of Edward Heath than Margaret Thatcher.”Mr Heath, the prime minister between 1970 and 1974, is viewed badly for U-turns which hiked spending – while the three times election-winning Lady Thatcher put the party back on a path of true Conservatism.Dr Fox also warned Mr Johnson must make good on his pledge to axe the trade rules of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which threaten its devolved government.“The question of the Northern Ireland border remains a thorny subject and, for many, a continued border within the United Kingdom is incompatible with the entire ethos of a Conservative and Unionist Party,” he wrote.And, on the No 10 parties, he added: “The current investigation into whether Covid rules were broken has opened a “one rule for one and another rule for others” narrative that will be hard to dispel.“Perhaps more importantly, it has exposed what many of us have believed for some time to be a chaotic internal management system. Johnson has many strengths. Campaigning is one of them, administration is not.“It is important that the prime minister builds the right team around him, with someone with the authority to make the right calls on what needs to go into his box.” More

Parents should be given a £30-a-day catch-up voucher for each day their child is off school because of coronavirus, to help pay for the costs of remote learning, Liberal Democrats have said.The call came as schools in areas of England including Middlesbrough and Birmingham remained closed to pupils after the Christmas break due to significant staff absences.Lib Dem education spokesperson Munira Wilson said that Omicron will “wreak havoc” on schools in the coming weeks, with large numbers of pupils likely to be sent home because of illness or staff absences.She accused ministers of leaving schools “woefully unprepared” for the coming chaos, and said they had failed to make support for schoolchildren a priority despite research suggesting that disruption to learning due to the pandemic will cost them as much as £46,000 in lost earnings over their lifetimes.In an open letter to schools earlier this week, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi urged them to “do everything in your power to protect face-to-face learning” but accepted that staff absences will make that impossible for some.He has called on retired teachers to come forward to fill gaps left by isolating colleagues in order to keep lessons going.Ms Wilson said the most recent figures showed around 120,000 students off each week in December.She said that the £30 voucher would cost around £3.6m a week – just over 1 per cent of the government’s initial catch-up fund – and would allow parents to pay for catch-up tutoring.“The Omicron variant is without doubt going to wreak havoc as our schools return this week and the government has left schools woefully underprepared to deal with the chaos this will cause pupils, parents and teachers alike,” she said.“No child should be left behind as we enter a time of unprecedented staff absences and case rates. Funding catch-up vouchers would empower parents to restore their children’s education, which the Conservatives have demonstrated time and again is not their priority.“From a botched catch-up package to a complete failure on getting air purifiers into schools, the Government must act radically so children are given the opportunity to catch up on the education they are missing due to the Conservatives’ incompetence.” More

Patients with suspected heart attacks who have been told to get a lift to hospital are receiving unacceptable care, a health minister has admitted.Gillian Keegan has ordered an investigation into the action taken by North East ambulance service – because Omicron has hit its staff levels – even as the government ruled out further Covid restrictions.“That doesn’t sound to me like that’s an acceptable approach,” the health minister said, as she claimed more ambulance crews are in operation than ever before.“People should be able to get an ambulance if they have a heart attack and that’s why we’ve put that extra funding in place, and why we’ve been building up our ambulance service over the last couple of years.”The head of the North East Ambulance Service has defended its move, arguing rising staff sickness left no alternative if it was to protect “the critically unwell”.It comes as the government shifts it stance, after long insisting the NHS can cope through the winter, rejecting its pleas for tougher curbs to combat the Omicron threat.On Wednesday, Boris Johnson admitted the health service is “under huge pressure” and – for the first time – that parts of it are struggling to stay above water.“I won’t provide a definition of what being overwhelmed would constitute, because I think that different trusts and different places, at different moments, will feel at least temporarily overwhelmed,” he said.Ministers have been accused of setting the bar for “overwhelmed” too high – the health secretary, Sajid Javid, once suggesting it would be children not receiving treatment after car crashes.But NHS staff the current worrying situation – with long ambulance waiting times and cancelled operations and appointments – is evidence that they are already overwhelmed.Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman, said, of heart attack patients being refused an ambulance: “It’s shocking that it’s come to this.”A note from North East Ambulance director, Mathew Beattie, leaked to the Health Service Journal, said call handlers are using taxis to get people to hospital.It gives the example of a person with chest pain who should get an ambulance within 18 minutes, but may now have to wait two hours.The note said staff should “consider asking the patient to be transported by friends or family”, the publication reported.Dr Beattie told the Health Service Journal: “We need to weigh up the risk of delays for ambulances against alternative disposition or transport options. We have no option than to try to work differently.“Patient safety is our top priority and the impact of increased activity and staff sickness, linked to Omicron. meant that we needed to act to protect our response to the critically unwell.”The north east and Yorkshire have experienced the highest rate of growth in hospital admissions – up 122 per cent in one week.There were 1,975 Covid patients in hospitals on Monday, compared with fewer than half that – 889 – the week before. More

Tony Blair’s former defence secretary Geoff Hoon has claimed he was told by Downing Street to “burn” a memo that suggested the invasion of Iraq could be illegal.The ex-Labour minister said his own adviser was told “in no uncertain terms” to get rid of a memo written by former attorney general Lord Goldsmith.Details of Mr Hoon’s claims, which appear in his recently-published memoir See How They Run, comes as the former prime minister faces a campaign to block his knighthood.More than 680,000 people have signed a petition to rescind the gong, and a YouGov poll indicated that 63 per cent of Britons are against the move to turn Mr Blair into Sir Tony.Mr Hoon claimed the order to burn the legal memo came from Jonathan Powell, Sir Tony’s then-chief of staff at No 10, according to details published in the Daily Mail. Mr Powell denies the allegation.The former Labour minister said he was sent a copy of Lord Goldsmith’s memo “under conditions of considerable secrecy” and told he should “not discuss its contents with anyone else”.He wrote: “I read the opinion several times; it was not an easy read. Eventually I came to the view that the attorney general had decided that invading Iraq would be lawful if the Prime Minister believed that it was in the UK’s national interest to do so. It was not exactly the ringing endorsement that the Chief of the Defence Staff was looking for, and in any event, I was not strictly allowed to show it to him or even discuss it with him.”Mr Hoon added: “Moreover, when my Principal Private Secretary, Peter Watkins, called Jonathan Powell in Downing St and asked what he should now do with the document, he was told in no uncertain terms that he should ‘burn it’.”The former defence secretary said he and principal private secretary decided the memo should be locked in a safe at the Ministry of Defence rather than destroy it.Sir Tony’s office described the allegation that the memo was ordered to be burned as “nonsense” when it first emerged in 2015.Mr Powell denied telling Mr Hoon to burn the memo. He told the Daily Mail that Mr Hoon had been sent copies of a separate “minute” on the legality of the invasion months earlier. He had asked Mr Hoon, at the request of Lord Goldsmith, to “destroy the minute – not burn it – and the attorney general’s advice came later”.Human rights lawyer and academic Philippe Sands said Mr Hoon’s claims offered “further confirmation of what has long been known – ministers, parliament and the public were misled by Mr Blair into supporting a war that was seen by many as unlawful and a crime”.He added: “In modern Britain, it seems, such a manifest act of wrongdoing does not preclude the offering of a high-level gong.”Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer came out in support of Sir Tony’s knighthood on Tuesday, saying: “I think he deserves the honour.”Questioned about the strength of feeling about the Blair government’s invasion of Iraq, Sir Keir said: “I understand there are strong views on the Iraq war, there were back at the time and there still are.”He added: “But that does not detract from the fact that Tony Blair was a very successful prime minister of this country and made a huge difference to the lives of millions of people in this country.”The Independent has contacted the office of Tony Blair and the office of Jonathan Powell for comment. More

Boris Johnson has already been forced to introduce social restrictions to combat the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus and rocketing infection numbers in January could ultimately see him forced to tighten them still further.The prime minister has already brought back mandatory mask-wearing on public transport and in shops, cinemas, theatres and places of worship, asked citizens to work from home where possible and made an NHS Covid Pass or negative lateral flow test a necessary requirement for entry to crowded venues and events involving mass gatherings.However, Mr Johnson has so far stuck to his guns and refused to impose tighter restrictions in England for now despite the record-breaking of infection over the New Year, insisting on Monday 3 January that the current “Plan B” measures in place remained the “right” course of action, adding: “The way forward for the country as a whole is to continue with the path that we’re on.“We’ll keep everything on the review course we keep all measures under review, but the mixture of things that we’re doing at the moment is I think, the right one.”The PM reiterated his hope that Britain would be able to “ride out” the assault from Omicron without further measures in a press conference from Downing Street the following Tuesday evening, despite several NHS trusts reporting “critical incidents” of staff shortages.He previously pledged not to introduce further measures before the Christmas weekend but fears persist they may yet be needed to beat back Omicron, with government scientific advisers pushing for new restrictions as soon as possible to stop the spread and meeting opposition from senior Cabinet ministers reluctant to jeopardise the economy and impose further constraints on public freedom.The prime minister is understood to be waiting for more concrete data on Omicron to become available and for the high case numbers to begin to translate into a wave of mass hospitalisations before he makes a call on ordering a tighter clampdown, a stance that has seen him accused of “dithering” by opponents. The daily statistical update will take place this evening as usual and we can expect to hear more from Mr Johnson in the coming days as the national situation develops. The precise characteristics of the new strain of the virus are still not clear at this early stage in its development, although it is feared it may soon usurp the Delta variant as the dominant strain of Covid-19 given its high transmissibility.Mr Johnson warned the public in December that a “tidal wave” of infections could break on these shores unless people adhere to the current measures, exercise extreme caution and get their vaccine booster jab as a matter of urgency.The rollout of third shots has accordingly been greatly expanded to include all over-18s to address the Omicron threat, placing further pressure on the NHS to administer them.That move came in response to findings by the UK Health Security Agency concluding that two jabs do not offer strong protection against symptomatic infection from Omicron, with the current suite of vaccines less effective against it than they were against Delta.However, that same analysis also concluded that those who had received a booster remained up to 70 per cent protected, underlining the importance of getting a third shot as soon as possible.The UK has meanwhile recorded 246,780 confirmed cases of the strainso far and at least 75 deaths.London mayor Sadiq Khan has declared a major incident over the extent of the Omicron outbreak in the capital while NHS England has announced a return to its highest level of emergency preparedness, level four national incident, meaning that the health service’s response will be coordinated as a national effort, rather than led by individual trusts.Just 59.8 per cent of British adults have had their booster injection so far, although demand is high so that figure should continue to climb rapidly as more people make an appointment and roll up their sleeves. More