Politics explained

Elections may be the last thing on Britons’ minds as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic and the prospect of summer holidays beckons. But in just a few weeks most of the country is facing polls which could have a fundamental impact not only on the political direction of the 2020s but on the future of the UK itself.On 6 May, voters will cast their ballots not only in elections for the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd, London Assembly and 149 English councils, but also choose 39 police and crime commissioners and 13 elected mayors, in one of the largest democratic events ever seen outside a general election. More

Like the House of Windsor has found, without trust nothing much works. This certainly applies to the 2019 UK-EU withdrawal agreement, which has now, once again, been unilaterally suspended by one side, this time the UK. The secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, has announced that certain checks and procedures that were soon to be imposed on goods moving from Britain to Northern Ireland will be suspended, with the agreed grace period for adjustment being extended apparently indefinitely by the UK. Lewis may be reminded of a famous remark he made the last time the UK threatened to agree the treaty, only last autumn, which was that it was indeed a breach of international law, albeit in “a specific and limited way”. A few weeks ago the EU unilaterally announced it would invoke Article 16 of the withdrawal agreement and suspend the Northern Ireland protocol, to the shocked surprise of everyone. The backlash from all parts of Ireland caused a hasty retreat. Since then the war of words and sniping has ground on. Last weekend the new British minister for Brexit, Lord (David) Frost accused the EU of “sulking”. “We never sulk” came the reply. Maybe everyone is sulking.Now, the European Union has said it will see Britain in court. Two courts, in fact. The EU is about to initiate two separate lines of attack. First, it will serve formal notice that it is to trigger “infringement proceedings” against the UK, which will in due course end up in the Court of Justice of the European Union, though that has no jurisdiction, formally, over the UK in fresh judgments. More

You might not believe it by the long-running and often vicious arguments about the incomes of junior doctors and nurses, but the issue of NHS pay was supposed to have been taken out of politics long ago. The NHS Pay Review Body dates back half a century and was designed to bring a rational, fact-based approach to arbitrating annual pay awards, with the aim of avoiding industrial action, which all concerned agree would have some detrimental effect on patient care. The heat was to be taken out of the arguments by delegating them to experts. It hasn’t always happened. The concept is a typically corporatist one, and made into reality through a tortuous bureaucratic procedure. This has the disadvantage of being complicated and cumbersome; yet it has the great advantage of being flexible enough to allow for the shifting positions of government, health trusts and the unions to be accommodated in the process of agreeing an eventual messy compromise. Thus, all interested parties involved submit a “recommendation” about a pay increase to the Pay Review Body around now. (This is all the government’s “offer” of a 1 per cent rise represents – the very first stage in a long rigmarole. It may be an “insult”, but it is not the final insult.) Similar pay review bodies operate for the police, armed forces and civil servants. More

However, the sheer scale of the television audience and the gravity of some of the claims being levelled against the palace are so serious that he may yet have to furnish his advice to the Queen on the current crisis. Constitutionally, she is obliged to take it, even when it relates to members of her own family and her staff. She might feel doubly dubious about doing so, given that Johnson wasn’t entirely frank with her about the prorogation of parliament last August. That was soon ruled unlawful and void by the Supreme Court, and she might well feel ill-used by her prime minister. Yet she knows the rules of the game and will follow them.What though could Johnson advise her to do? He has plenty of personal experience of family rifts, embarrassing racist remarks and no doubt knows the personalities involved. However, presentation isn’t necessarily his strong point, and he’s hardly the most woke personality in public life. His advice, if sought or offered, is likely to be non-committal. More

Now that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have both given lengthy testimony to the Scottish parliamentary inquiry into the events of recent years, things may go a little quiet. The opposition parties will continue to press the Scottish government by tabling questions and confidence votes, and they will demand more documents be disclosed, but the main action is probably fine. Further witnesses seem unlikely to add much that is conclusive to the areas presently in dispute. For the next few weeks, then, the committee of MSPs, divided on partisan lines, will try to move forward to a conclusion about how the Scottish government handled its response to allegations about the behaviour of Salmond when he was first minister; and also how and why the Scottish government fought against the judicial review into the investigation that Salmond launched in 2018. Or, to put it into lurid but understandable terms, did Nicola Sturgeon engage in some conspiracy to “get” her predecessor as SNP party leader and first minister?As the saying goes, the jury is out. More

A Budget statement is about the last place you might expect to find the announcement of a significant change to the franchise, but so it has turned out. Tucked away among the big plans and bigger numbers in this year’s “red book”, the collection of documents published by the Treasury, we find paragraph 2.41. It states: “Overseas Electors – the government is providing an additional £2.5m to remove the limit preventing British citizens who live overseas from voting after 15 years.” The news shouldn’t, however, come as a huge surprise because the move was promised in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 Conservative manifestos, the most recent one pledging: “We will make it easier for British expats to vote in parliamentary elections, and get rid of the arbitrary 15-year limit on their voting rights.”Although the new limit, if any, is unspecified, it is bound to be a controversial move, and potentially an important one. Before a drive to register expats in 2015 and a rush to qualify to vote for the 2016 EU referendum, the number of voting expats was about 35,000, roughly half the size of a parliamentary constituency. Now that has risen to 233,000 people, equivalent to about four Commons seats. A number of legal actions and, possibly, some partisan interest by the Conservatives has now put “votes for life” firmly on the agenda. Expatriates were not permitted to vote at all before 1985, when a five-year limit was applied, and it has varied ever since before settling at the present level in the early 2000s. More

One of the oddities of British political tradition is that it is the leader of the opposition, rather than the shadow chancellor, who responds to the Budget statement (and the deputy speaker rather than the speaker presides over proceedings). Often, this has wrongfooted the leader of the opposition for a number of reasons. First, the opposition leader may not be as thoroughly grounded in the contemporary political debate over the economy as the shadow chancellor, who lives and breathes it. Second, the chancellor may do something quite unexpected, and complicated, that renders the opposition leader’s pre-prepared speech instantly out of date and useless, and leaves them utterly exposed. For example, a chancellor introducing a dramatic new lower tax rate of, say, 10p or 20p in the pound (as Gordon Brown and Norman Lamont did, respectively, in 1999 and 1992) left William Hague and Neil Kinnock, in their turn, having to bluster through it, unable to tell, at a glance, whether it necessarily made taxpayers better off. Third, the response is more or less immediate, with little time for improvisation. With social distancing in the Commons chamber, it wasn’t even easy for the shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, to whisper an answer or two in Keir Starmer’s ear. This year was rather different all round. The most striking departure from the past, apart from the scale of the numbers for borrowing and spending, is that the Budget was trailed so extensively. The whole convention of Budget secrecy has been silently abandoned with hardly anyone seeming to notice. In the past, Budget “leaks” have warranted the resignation of ministers, but no longer. So far from the “purdah” under which the chancellor and his colleagues used to remain silent for weeks before Budget day, they now do the media round and drop as many heavy hints as they wish. The rest is provided to the media, with suitable spin. More

Every time a people trafficker loads a refugee or an economic migrant on to a flimsy dinghy and launches them into the English Channel, they are passing a potential death sentence on those they exploit. Should the people traffickers themselves not be subject to a commensurate sentence of life imprisonment? It is already a serious offence, carrying a jail sentence of 14 years as a maximum. However, the home secretary, Priti Patel, is not satisfied with how this has worked in practice, pointing to what she says is an average sentence of three years. Natural justice might demand a more punitive sanction. Patel also has highly attuned political instincts for what her party and its electoral base would wish to see. Immigration is obviously an issue that has climbed up the political agenda during the Brexit process, and the home secretary must be aggrieved to see Nigel Farage and his Reform Party making political capital out of the continuing arrival of migrants at the shores of Dover. More