The question is how does this end? By any standards the live TV broadcast by Boris Johnson tonight was with without precedent in peacetime given how it takes away a huge amount of the freedom and discretion enjoyed by the individuals with the aim of impeding the impact of the coronavirus. Looking back we were being prepared for this over the past few days and in many ways it is less rigid than perhaps some of us had feared. I…
So what happens in the SNP now? There have been huge divisions in the SNP over Alex Salmond. They are now likely to play out in public. The ramifications could be huge. — Nick Eardley (@nickeardleybbc) March 23, 2020
The pages from this morning’s papers could not be clearer about out what’s likely to happen next as the government tries to dampen the impact of the coronavirus epidemic. To confine large numbers of people in the homes is a big step but it might be the only way that it can be controlled at this stage. In fact if you watched the briefing yesterday afternoon this was only a minor part to come out but it is clearly the…
Within the last hour I got an email from someone whose judgement on US politics that I trust raising the possibility of Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, being the Democratic nominee. He wrote: “Lots of money going on Cuomo for Democrat nominee today. Lots of chatter on Twitter lots of blog posts… people believe the senile Biden will be swapped out at the DNC in some kind of brokered convention or voluntary stand-aside, for Cuomo, the current media star…
In the world of politics perceptions occasionally matter more than reality, as the below tweet shows Dominic Cummings totally misunderstood things. Why this is crucial is that it will feed a narrative that the Conservatives are callous and anyone who feels a close family member of friend was sacrificed because of the strategic blunders by Dominic Cummings has the potential to reap an electoral whirlwind for the Conservative Party that they may never recover from. This also confirms the hunch…
This market from Ladbrokes about who will succeed John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor is an intriguing market. I’m working on the assumption that Sir Keir Starmer wins the Labour leadership quite comfortably which gives him plenty of latitude in who to choose. I’m ruling out anyone who is in the Deputy Leader race as I think they’ll end up focussing on that role exclusively. I’m ruling out Rebecca Long Bailey because I have a hunch that Starmer wants to move…
What if the policy response to Covid-19 doesn’t protect society but shatters it? Rishi Sunak’s radical and immense pledges to try to secure a viable post-Covid-19 economy by directly subsidising the great majority of the cost of temporarily redundant staff with the aim of keeping them from unemployment and keeping the businesses from bankruptcy was extraordinary. For one thing, probably the biggest single spending pledge by any British government since the 1940s was made not to parliament but in a…
The economic damage from Covid-19 will likely be worse than the 2008 Financial Crisis This is Year Zero. We are at the cusp of the Before and the After. Covid-19, and the policy responses to it, are changing the world in a way that will affect it for decades and to put it bluntly, it doesn’t look good. Economies are delicate things. Analysts and commentators get excited about changes in growth figures or unemployment rates of 0.1% – one part…