As No 10 announces Covid-19 press conferences are to end, here are some world-beating moments
The daily Downing Street coronavirus press conferences, watched by millions since early March, are coming to an end. Here are some of the most memorable moments.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson has announced a raft of new measures aimed at easing England's coronavirus lockdown and restarting the economy. The 2-metre physical distancing rule will be dropped in favour of a '1-metre-plus' approach from 4 July. Members of two different households will be able to eat, drink or dine together, pubs restaurants and hairdressers will reopen with Covid-19 mitigation measures in place
Continue reading...English pubs, restaurants and hairdressers to open from 4 July; gyms to stay closed. English schools to fully reopen in September
Richard Graham, a Conservative, asks if schools and FE colleges will be able to go back normally in September.
Johnson agrees. He says that is what he wants.
Johnson says the government wants to get the prevalence of coronavirus down so much that shielding is no longer needed.
Continue reading...Mouths to feed, rent to pay: there’s always an excuse if you’re tempted to do the wrong thing
Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Where? I sat through the four episodes of Filthy Rich, the Netflix documentary on Jeffrey Epstein. I had to force myself, not because it was so upsetting – which, of course, it also was – but because the tales of his sexual abuse were so monotonous. Brave and defiant, his victims had to numb themselves slightly to tell and retell what happened to them when they were as young as 14. The interviews with the monster himself, as always, were disappointingly banal. Monsters often are tediously ordinary. The magnetic charm, the immense intellect, is one of the biggest delusions of “true crime”. See also Ted Bundy.
Anyway Ghislaine, accused of procuring underage girls for Epstein, is said to be a free woman in Paris, living in the swanky 8th arrondisement. French law prevents her extradition. Many of those implicated in Epstein’s world of obscene exploitation, including all the art world and socialite scum, must have a clue where she is. Alleged scum, I should say. They love their children just like we do. Sure.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Christopher Steele claims May government turned blind eye to Trump allegations
Boris Johnson and Theresa May ignored claims the Kremlin had a “likely hold” over Donald Trump and may have covertly funded Brexit, the former spy Christopher Steele alleges in secret evidence given to MPs who drew up the Russia report.
In testimony to MPs, the MI6 veteran accused the government led by May and in which Johnson was foreign secretary for two years of turning a blind eye to allegations about Trump because they were afraid of offending the US president.
Continue reading...The lawyer representing 200 victims of the Windrush scandal says systemic racism is at the root of the problem
For the past three months, Jacqueline McKenzie says her front room has been covered with Windrush compensation files. Since lockdown, she has stopped going to the offices of the law firm she co-founded in 2010 and has been working from home. But her study is too small to accommodate the huge amount of paperwork that goes with the 200 separate claims she is filing on behalf of people affected by the Home Office citizenship scandal, during which thousands of people were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants because they could not prove they were British citizens.
“I think they are treating people with contempt,” she says. She is frustrated at the slow progress towards paying compensation to people who lost their jobs or their homes, were denied healthcare or the right to travel, or who were, in extreme cases, detained and deported. Part of the problem, she says, lies with the structure of the scheme, which requires claimants to gather large amounts of documentary proof of the losses they have incurred as a result of being miscategorised as unlawful residents (a problem that often arose because those affected were unable to gather the large amounts of documentary proof required to show that they had been living legally in the UK since the 1960s).
Continue reading...Home Office says it will launch ad campaign to ensure people are aware of support available
A cross-government working group has been launched in an attempt to address the challenges faced by the Windrush generation, two years after the then prime minister, Theresa May, promised to right the wrongs faced by those mistakenly classified as illegal immigrants by the Home Office.
Duwayne Brooks, a campaigner and friend of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, has agreed to join the group, in recognition of the “terrible” treatment faced by the Windrush generation. He said he was “looking forward to working with the home secretary to ensure all those affected come forward to claim the compensation they deserve and get the support they need to move on”.
Continue reading...Pressure group claims disproportionate number of black people held for longer periods to ‘reduce black and brown migration to UK’
Black people are detained significantly longer than white people inside the UK’s immigration detention system, prompting fresh claims of “institutional racism”.
Although the Home Office does not record ethnicity data for detainees, analysis of nationalities of those recently held within the immigration detention estate found that citizens from countries with predominantly black and brown populations are held for substantially longer periods than those from predominantly white countries.
Continue reading...British firms fulfilling fighter jet contracts which enable kingdom to wage war in Yemen, despite the trade being ruled unlawful
The government stands accused of ignoring a landmark court ruling restricting UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
In a judgment handed down a year ago, the court of appeal ruled it was “unlawful” for the government to have allowed the sale of arms to the kingdom for use in Yemen, where independent estimates suggest a Saudi-led coalition has been responsible for the deaths of more than 8,000 civilians since 2015.
Continue reading...Backbenchers and party activists are unimpressed by U-turns and dithering as public support continues to fall
Ministers are expecting a wide-ranging government reshuffle in September in which Boris Johnson will sack key figures who are judged to have underperformed in the Covid-19 crisis.
Cabinet sources said the move was now seen as inevitable. They believe sweeping changes will be made in an attempt to defuse mounting discontent on the Tory backbenches following a stream of U-turns and a fall in the party’s poll ratings.
Continue reading...Failure to establish key scrutiny committee is also criticised as ‘unprecedented underhand behaviour’
The government’s apparent refusal to release a report into Russian infiltration in the UK and to delay establishing a key scrutiny committee has been condemned as unprecedented and “utterly reprehensible”.
The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has not met since before the general election in December – – its longest break since it was established in 1994 – and critics say the government has sat on the committee’s report into Russian interference for nine months.
Continue reading...Former US national security adviser reveals series of tensions and pressure points
Donald Trump dashed British hopes that he would take a tougher line on Hong Kong, including by refusing to condemn the Tiananmen Square massacre, according to John Bolton’s book about his time as the US president’s national security adviser.
In one of many episodes in the book that reveal the fragile nature of the UK’s relations with the Trump administration, Bolton writes that the president said Tiananmen Square was decades ago and he did not want to jeopardise a potential trade deal with Beijing.
Continue reading...Call to speed up compensation for people wrongly detained and deported by government
Survivors of the Windrush scandal have delivered a petition to Downing Street signed by 130,000 people calling on the government to speed up compensation payments and implement all the recommendations in the Windrush Lessons Learned review.
Paulette Wilson and Anthony Bryan – who were wrongly held in immigration detention centres and threatened with deportation to Jamaica, a country they both left as children in the 1960s and had not visited in more than 50 years – handed the petition to police officers at the gates of Downing Street on Friday.
Continue reading...Official toll passed a thousand on 22 consecutive days – far more than daily briefings said
Ministers have been accused of playing down the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic after it emerged that more than 1,000 people died every day in the UK for 22 consecutive days – in stark contrast with daily tolls announced by the government.
According to an analysis of official figures, the darkest day came on 8 April as the country prepared for Easter under lockdown, when a record 1,445 people died from Covid-19 in 24 hours.
Continue reading...Exclusive: party has mountain to climb to return to power, says Labour Together review
Labour has a “mountain to climb” if it is to get back into power, according to a major review of the 2019 general election defeat, which paints a picture of dysfunctionality, toxicity and drift inside the party’s election-fighting machine.
Negative perceptions of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, doubts about the manifesto and the party’s ambivalent Brexit stance reinforced each other in a “snowballing” effect to deliver December’s catastrophic result, the 150-page report by the party group Labour Together argues.
Continue reading...French president holds talks with PM on UK visit to mark second world war anniversary
Boris Johnson has told Emmanuel Macron that he sees little point prolonging UK-EU talks on a future trading relationship into the autumn.
The French president was in London on Thursday for a largely ceremonial visit. No 10 said Johnson had welcomed a recent agreement to intensify talks on the issue in July. However, comments dismissing the idea of “prolonged negotiations” suggest that Johnson is increasingly prepared to end the talks without an agreement and thinks both sides would need time to prepare for this rather than make last-minute adjustments in December when the existing transition period expires.
Continue reading...How the government came to scrap its contact-tracing app in favour of Apple and Google’s
Designed to be a key component of the test, track and trace programme to forge a way out of lockdown, the NHS Covid-19 app has been beset by problems from day one – despite repeated claims to the contrary.
After a trial on the Isle of Wight at the start of May, the contact-tracing app was meant to be rolled out to the rest of England by the middle of the month. That soon slipped to some time in June. Then on Wednesday it emerged that we would have to wait until the winter. Now – after much behind-the-scenes scrambling, and head-scratching in Westminster – officials have decided to ditch the app entirely in its current form.
Continue reading...The health secretary has insisted the government 'backed both horses' in Covid-19 contact-tracing trials, after it abandoned development of its NHSX app. After the trial on the Isle of Wright revealed the app was highly inaccurate on iPhones, focus will turn instead to technology from Google and Apple
Linking to Game of Thrones disregards Colin Kaepernick’s protest and what it inspired
The foreign secretary Dominic Raab’s assertion that the act of taking a knee appears to be “a symbol of subjugation and subordination” that originates from the TV show Game of Thrones showed a startling level of ignorance of the genesis of the protest adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement.
When the then NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the US national anthem before a game on 1 September 2016 to highlight racism, it began a protest that would reverberate around the world.
Continue reading...The French president visits No 10 for talks on Thursday during trip to commemorate WWII alliance
The French president Emmanuel Macron is expected to call on the UK to revisit its decision of imposing a 14-day quarantine period on visitors from abroad during his trip to the UK on Thursday.
Macron, on his first visit abroad since the coronavirus outbreak, is in London to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Gen Charles de Gaulle’s broadcast announcing an alliance with Winston Churchill, “the leader of the British empire”, and the launching of the French resistance.
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