Politics explained

Boris Johnson had hoped that announcing the end of England’s Covid curbs would be a moment of triumph; a chance to herald the glorious day lockdown is lifted forever and life can get back to normal.But instead, our usually care-free prime minister appears fretful. Officials at Downing Street are anxious about the risks which lie ahead once controls end on 19 July. There is no talk of “freedom day” inside No 10.The prime minister claimed only last week that the link between coronavirus infections and hospitalisations had been “severed”. But the government’s modelling shows the number of seriously ill people in hospital from Covid is set to soar again this summer.If virus cases reach 100,000 a day in the weeks ahead as the government expects, then hospital admissions could reach 2,500 a day, says leading statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter.Johnson has talked for many months about the final big step in his roadmap out of lockdown being “irreversible” – promising an exhausted population the process was a one-way deal. Things can only get better, as it were.Betterment no longer appears inevitable. What if some reversals become necessary if the virus lets rip once again? What if some restrictions need renewed? Not only would each change in policy be highly embarrassing for the PM, but it could also significantly weaken his authority.A return to full lockdown anytime soon appears unthinkable for political reasons. But even small shifts and changes in guidance will be extremely difficult to manage. Labour, the Lib Dems and the more cautious scientists will shake their heads and say, “We told you so”.More damaging still, a significant chunk of a weary public may decide to switch off. Will anyone really listen to what the prime minister has to say once he has ended all legal controls?There is reason to believe Johnson will have to keep on tinkering with his public health messages. The legal requirement to wear a mask will be ditched in England on 19 July. But the rhetoric on mask-wearing has already shifted towards a more cautious approach.In recent weeks cabinet ministers shared glee at no longer having to wear a face covering. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said at the end of last month he would stop donning one “as soon as possible”.Now, Downing Street insists there will be clear guidelines and an “expectation” to carry on wearing face coverings on public transport and closed spaces.There has been a subtle change in the big push to get workers back into the office. The government is lifting the advice to work from home where possible – but will recommend companies look at only a “gradual return” to workplaces over the summer.Nightclubs will be allowed to open from 19 July without any legal requirement for clubbers to show Covid any certification. But venues owners will now be encouraged to use the NHS app in the same way it has been used at big pilot events.Johnson also faces an enormous challenge in asking the public to stick with the concept of contact tracing and self-isolation. A poll by the Sunday Times found four in 10 people have already deleted the NHS Covid app.The test and trace service, meanwhile, is said to be “panicking” as it scrambles to fill thousands of positions needed to deal with the imminent rise in Covid cases.Each fresh rise in cases and hospitalisations will pile pressure on the PM in the weeks ahead. Opposition parties and public health officials asking why 19 July had to be a big bang moment, and why it had to come before Britain’s young adults were double-vaccinated.Over the past six months, the success of the vaccination rollout has gifted Johnson some of the credibility and popularity lost at the height of the Covid crisis last year.But the months ahead are fraught with difficulty. The prime minister will be asking the country to enjoy normality but remain vigilant for the virus – not unlike last year’s Matt Lucas parody of our leader offering mixed messages. Johnson’s authority and credibility are once again on the line. More

After a long period of drought, we are now halfway through a series of four parliamentary by-elections in quick succession. There had been no by-election since Brecon and Radnorshire in August 2019, won by Jane Dodds for the Liberal Democrats (who then lost in the general election four months later), until the Hartlepool contest last month.Labour’s defeat in Hartlepool was significant, crystallising the view that, although Keir Starmer had started well as leader of the opposition, he is struggling to make his mark against a vaccine-boosted prime minister.A second by-election a week later, by contrast, was barely noticed, as Anum Qaisar-Javed retained Airdrie and Shotts for the Scottish National Party after Neil Gray gave up the House of Commons for a seat in the Scottish parliament. More

“Keep politics out of sport” is a slogan we’re hearing a lot of again, thanks to the controversies over historical tweets by members of the England cricket team, and some booing of the “taking the knee” protests by the English and Welsh teams, though not the Scots, at the Euro football championship. The truth, though, is that sport and politics have always been tangled up, particularly at the international level. We can think, for example, of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Jessie Owens, the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa and the athlete Zola Budd, of the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and the Los Angeles games in 1984, when the US and Soviet blocs applied sanctions to one another, and right up to the design of the Ukraine football shirt at the Euros, depicting the Crimea as part of Ukrainian sovereign territory. Images such as an England football team making the Nazi salute at a “friendly” match in 1938, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute on the winners’ podium at the Olympics in 1968 remain stark and powerful decades on. Politics doesn’t stay out of sport for long. It can’t. Politically, “taking the knee” at the Euro football competition presents an acute difficulty for the government, and a familiar one – what should the line be, and how to make ministers stick to it. It poses particular problems for the Westminster government vis a vis the England team. Thus far, the government has played a poor game, its defence in disarray and its attack at best muted. There are three current versions of the policy. Boris Johnson has given the lead by indicating that the players have the right to make the protest, and make their feelings known, but has not actually said he supports it. Gillian Keegan, an education minister, says it is “divisive”, deriding it as “symbolism more than action” and adding, in an oddly oblique formulation that: “There are some Conservative MPs (that) are very much against it, why? Because Black Lives Matter stands for things that they don’t stand for. It’s really about defunding the police and the overthrow of capitalism, which is, you know, Black Lives Matter the actual political organisation.” More

In his four-hour long evidence session to MPs, the greatest compliment that can be paid to Matt Hancock is that he survived, he did not add to his own considerable difficulties, and his political career may not, after all, be over. You see, in the world of Hancock, it’s China’s fault. As a novel excuse he thus neatly plays into the current Sinophobia and increasingly credible suggestions that the new coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. In any event, the Chinese failed to close their borders and alert the world. This is but the latest mutation of a clever stratagem developed by the secretary of state for health and social care in recent months – to spread the blame for failings on Covid across as many possible suspects as possible, as if it were a game of Cluedo. The list of suspects is long, and pinning guilt on any of them tricky.In the past he has suggested that it was the public’s fault, because they disregarded lockdown rules, which were, of course, all perfectly clear and logical: “what matters is, yes of course, the rules that we put in place, but it is also about how people act” Hancock declared in January about the shortcomings in the tier system. Hancock also has the permanent all-purpose alibi that he was “following the science”, which is another way of blaming the experts for offering duff opinions. Plus, of course, there is the undeniable fact that the pandemic was “unprecedented” and therefore could not have been prepared for (despite evidence of planning that had taken place). The shortages of protective equipment and testing (and thus the care home scandal) can be explained away in that way. The plea that he and his department have been working incredibly hard has found some sympathy among non-partisan members of the public, though many would still be happy to see him fired immediately. For now, he remains insulation for Boris Johnson. More

There are few things more intrinsically funny than a sausage, and the very mention of a banger can defuse even the most fraught of political arguments. When the sausage becomes a symbol and cause of political dispute, as now with the UK-EU “sausage war”, it tends to raise a smile. Indeed, many years ago the satirical Whitehall sitcom Yes, Minister had a whole episode devoted to the imposition of a new EU directive that would have meant that the British sausage was to compulsorily be renamed the “Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube”, with hilarious consequences. Jolly as all that may be, the “sausage war” is merely the latest symptom that Brexit isn’t working. As with so many of these arguments, it arises from the rushed UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement of October 2019, and in particular the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol. As was clear at the time, in order to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland was left behind in the EU Single Market and Customs Union, as well as being inside the UK internal market – a complicated arrangement. It meant a trade “border” between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. More

During his gripping recent testimony to a Commons committee, Dominic Cummings shed a little light on the relationship between Britain and America. In a day of chaos when lockdown, the American bombing of Syria and a press story about the prime minister’s “girlfriend” and their dog vied for the attention of Boris Johnson, one outcome was that the British declined the US invitation to join in the air assault. In the past, during say the Thatcher or Blair premierships, joining in with such a limited but powerful symbolic action would have been almost automatic. But times are changing. “Special relationship” is, arguably, one of the most vexed and least useful expressions in the British political vocabulary. According to well-informed reports in The Atlantic, it seems that Boris Johnson is sceptical about its usage, and dislikes it because it makes Britain seem “needy and weak”, and pushed back on it when President Biden used it, no doubt thoughtfully, in an inaugural phone call to Downing Street in January. It might just be a sign that Johnson is attempting to make the best of what will never be a particularly warm friendship with the Biden administration, given the president’s public aversion to Brexit and devotion to the Good Friday Agreement. For the prime minister, it might also be simply a recognition that the “special relationship” has been, mostly, fetishised by a succession of British diplomats and politicians, but largely neglected or ignored in Washington. Sadly, that has largely been due to the long-term decline in Britain’s power and influence since the Second World War. Whether Brexit enhances or weakens the UK’s international status remains to be seen. It is, though, apparent that a UK-US free trade deal is as remote as ever. Despite his affinity with Brexit, Nigel Farage and Johnson, aka “Britain Trump”, Donald Trump’s trade policy was strictly America First and protectionist, and so is Joe Biden’s. When Barack Obama warned Britain it would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal if it voted for Brexit, he was merely stating the reality of the imbalance in the “special relationship”. Trade policy towards the UK has been more or less constant across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, and owes little to sentiment. More

Will Boris Johnson have to reverse his cuts to foreign aid? The latest recruit to the rebel side is Theresa May, a famously loyal and cautious figure who, as a former premier, cannot have made such a decision lightly. She joins a (mostly) distinguished list of senior figures determined to side with the opposition parties to reverse the reduction in the overseas aid budget from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent. Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Damien Green, Karen Bradley, Johnny Mercer and Stephen Crabb almost constitute a government-in-exile, and they seem sincere in their belief that the historic pledge made and delivered under the Tory governments of David Cameron and Ms May should be protected. They claim to have around 30 allies, which is almost enough to overturn the government’s majority. On the other hand, depending on their mood and developments on the Northern Ireland Protocol, the government might be able to rely on the eight DUP MPs for support. It might be tight, either way, come Monday.Much will also depend on the views of Speaker Hoyle. The unusual route being taken is an amendment to a bill on a quite different matter – the new hi-tech Advanced Research and Invention Agency. The rebels say the government acted unlawfully in changing the aid target without changing the law; ministers say they are allowed to suspend the target temporarily. In any case, there has not been a parliamentary vote on the matter. It is certainly a noble cause, but it is also aided by a certain amount, perhaps, of personal political rivalry and pique, for obvious reasons, plus some wider general disquiet about what might be termed the Johnson style of government. The recent rows over cronyism and sleaze, his flat refurbishment and Dominic Cummings’s insider account of the lazy and chaotic response to the Covid pandemic might not have bothered the public much, but will have registered with the MPs. There is the fear that a gradual accretion of sleazy stories will damage the party. However, for now, the Conservatives enjoy a lead over Labour of around 10 per cent, Mr Johnson mostly did well in the May elections, and he has some political credit back in the bank thanks to the “vaccine bounce”. It is also fair to add that the British electorate is not as sympathetic to foreign aid as the political classes tend to be. More

To much merriment, Tim Martin, chair of Wetherspoon and campaigner for a hard Brexit, now wants to make it easier for workers from the European Union to work in his ubiquitous pub chain of some 925 establishments. “If only there was some way of bringing this about” and “Tim Martin is going to be very annoyed with Tim Martin when he finds out” go the typically sardonic remarks on Twitter. Very droll, but at least a tad unfair. During the 2016 referendum, Martin actually did express the view that he thought EU labour should still be able to move more or less freely to the UK, and doesn’t seem to have had immigration as his principal motivation in seeing the UK leave the EU; but of course exiting the single market made the end of free movement of workers inevitable. So it has come to pass, and the loss of such labour is complicating the economic recovery from Covid, with the impact of the end of the furlough scheme yet to be felt. Certainly there will be a period of adjustment; and businesses such as Wetherspoon may face higher labour costs in future, which may mean lower profitability and/or higher prices. We shall see.Martin’s appeal, though, does serve to highlight two difficulties with the new post-Brexit points-based immigration system recently approved by Parliament. The first is that the general plot of the immigration policy is to attract the “best and the brightest”, skilled and professional workers, and people who will be earning at least around the average UK salary, and often much more. In fact the list of occupations eligible for a mainstream UK work visa is currently surprisingly broad – everything from medical radiographers to senior care workers to ballet dancers to vets to archaeologists. There seems little or no impediment to anyone from anywhere in the world, suitably qualified, to apply to come to the UK and work as a nurse, as any type of engineer or as any kind of “artist”, given certain salary expectations. All are classified as “shortage” occupations. There are also special routes for those, for example, nominated by a transnational company or bank, and those named by the likes of the Royal Society, the British Academy and UK Research and Innovation. More