Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, has said Labour would give councils new powers to take over empty shops. In a speech she said:
Where there are persistently empty shops, blighting local areas and not being filled, we should give local councils the power to step in – just as they can with persistently empty homes already.
40% of small businesses say that making vacant units available for rent is one of the biggest changes that should be made to help their high street. Where these are not coming back into use via the market, we would create an ‘Empty Shop Order’, giving local councils the power to take them over, bring them back into use and offer them to local businesses or other enterprises.
Once this is successful, and council has recouped its costs, the landlord should begin receiving rent again from the property. The government should look to use the newly expanded dormant assets fund to provide loans to councils for this purpose.
In a Q&A after the speech, Dodds restated the party’s opposition to corporation tax rising now. This is from the Times’ Eleni Courea.
Anneliese Dodds says Labour will oppose any "immediate" changes to corporation tax
In her Q&A after speaking to UCL @glo_pro she said:
"If government is saying that they will be immediately imposing tax changes on the UK I do think that's the wrong decision"
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which produces its own estimates for R, the reproduction number, thinks it is starting to nudge up. It estimates that R for the UK is now between 0.9 and 1, up from between 0.8 and 0.9.
🚨 OUT NOW: our new weekly #NIESRCovidTracker suggests that the R number is starting to move up to 0.9 – 1.0 from a range of 0.8 – 0.9 where it had been since mid-Jan, with Scotland, Northern Ireland and Yorkshire & the Humber above 1.0
The Cabinet Office has dismissed a complaint about the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, by arguing that her abusive public response on Twitter to a HuffPost journalist who emailed her office with a press query was issued from a “personal” Twitter account. In a scathing response, Jess Brammar, the HuffPost UK editor-in-chief, wonders when it became the case that ministers’ Twitter accounts were no longer covered by the ministerial code.
Covid fines surge in England and Wales as police adopt hardline approach
About 40% of all fines handed out by police for breaches of Covid-19 laws since the start of the pandemic in England and Wales were issued in the most recent four-week period as police adopted a more hardline approach and “fatigue” with the rules set in, my colleagues Jamie Grierson and Tobi Thomas report.
No 10 rejects Hammond's claim government is 'populist'
Without meaning to be rude to colleagues, or the No 10 press team, it is probably fair to say that Downing Street lobby briefings are not the best places to go for highbrow political discourse. It’s more question/line to take, followed by new version of the question/same line to take all over again. But at one point in the briefing today we did start to open up a discussion about the nature of populism.
It was prompted by the Philip Hammond interview with the BBC released this morning. (See 9.15am.) In it the former chancellor said he thought the government would have to abandon some of its manifesto spending promises. No 10 has not said yet that it accepts this (they dodged the question today), but the claim is not particularly provocative.
But Hammond went further. He said Boris Johnson would find it hard to implement cuts because he was leading a “populist” government. This is a claim often made by Johnson’s critics, but one very rarely repeated by Conservative politicians because, in the mind of establishment opinion, populism is generally seen as dishonest, disreputable, and menacing
When asked about Hammond’s comment, Allegra Stratton, the PM’s press secretary, said she did not accept his claim that Johnson was not willing to take unpopular decisions. She said:
The prime minister has spoken about the tough choices ahead. There have been difficult choices he has had to make in responding to the pandemic and indeed over the months and years ahead there will be more of them. So, I don’t recognise the picture the former chancellor makes.
Stratton was then pressed on whether Hammond was right to describe the government as “populist”. She replied:
We can have a debate about populist and popular and the technical terms, but certainly this is a prime minister that over the last few months has already started to lay out policy decisions that have been difficult. You can see that in the difficult decision, for instance, on foreign aid, the decision we had to take this year to reduce it from 0.7 [0.7% of national income]. So this is a prime minister that is prepared to take difficult decisions, and is weighing up hard choices at the moment.
This was a surprising answer because, although cutting the foreign aid budget may have been a “difficult” decision for Guardian readers, it is also one of the most popular decisions ever taken by Johnson’s government. Adam Bienkov from Business Insider dug out the polling.
Boris Johnson's Press Secretary Allegra Stratton denies the PM is incapable of taking difficult and unpopular decisions, by pointing to his decision to cut foreign aid... which has overwhelming public support. pic.twitter.com/TdECRESVbm
Of course, being popular is not the same as being “populist”. Populism is a concept with various definitions, but the one most widely accepted now is (in the words of Cas Mudde, who is credited with coming up with it) “an ideology that considers society to be separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people”. Johnson is clearly associated with this because of the way he has championed Brexit as an anti-elitist crusade.
Cutting the aid budget was not part of the Brexit offer, but for years it was the signature economic policy of Ukip, who were classic rightwing populists and who in many respects wrote the script for Johnson’s Vote Leave movement.
When it was put to Stratton that cutting the aid budget did not prove Johnson was not a populist, she repeated the point about it being a difficult decision. And she said that in implementing lockdown Johnson had obviously had to take other difficult decisions. “This is why this populist label, I don’t find it very helpful,” she added.
UK records 9,985 more cases and 323 further deaths
The latest Covid figures for the UK have now been uploaded onto the government’s dashboard. Here are the key statistics.
The UK has recorded 323 further deaths. A week ago today the equivalent figure was 454. And the total number of deaths for the last seven days is down 30.4% on the total for the previous week.
The UK has recorded 9,985 more cases. That is a tiny rise on the total for yesterday (9,938) but it is still only the fourth day this year the reported total has been below 10,000. Week on week, new cases are down 15.7%.
There were 448,962 first doses of vaccine administered yesterday. That is the highest daily total for almost a week, and well above the current seven-day average.
First doses of vaccine administered Photograph: Gov.UK
Sky has released a picture of Sir Kenneth Branagh playing Boris Johnson in This Sceptred Isle, a drama about the coronavirus pandemic due to be broadcast next year. My colleague Caroline Davies has the story here.
Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson in the Sky Original drama This Sceptred Isle, which will air in autumn 2022 on Sky Atlantic and Now TV. Photograph: Sky UK/PA
UK Covid alert level reduced from 5 to 4 as threat of NHS being overwhelmed lifts
The Covid alert level is being moved down from level 5, the most serious level, to level 4, the four UK chief medical officers have decided. They have just issued this statement:
Following advice from the Joint Biosecurity Centre and in the light of the most recent data, the four UK chief medical officers and NHS England national medical director agree that the UK alert level should move from level 5 to level 4 in all four nations.
The health services across the four nations remain under significant pressure with a high number of patients in hospital, however thanks to the efforts of public we are now seeing numbers consistently declining, and the threat of the NHS and other health services being overwhelmed within 21 days has receded.
We should be under no illusions – transmission rates, hospital pressures and deaths are still very high. In time, the vaccines will have a major impact and we encourage everyone to get vaccinated when they receive the offer. However for the time being it is really important that we all – vaccinated or not - remain vigilant and continue to follow the guidelines.
We know how difficult the situation has been and remains to be for healthcare workers, we thank them for their immense effort, skill and professionalism throughout the pandemic.
The four chief medical officers are: Prof Chris Whitty (England), Dr Michael McBride (Northern Ireland), Dr Gregor Smith (Scotland) and Dr Frank Atherton (Wales). Prof Stephen Powis, the NHS England national medical director, has also signed the statement now.
Given what has been happening to Covid case numbers are deaths in recent weeks, this decision is not surprising. The Covid alert system was set up in May last year and at that point the UK was at level 4, meaning “a Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially”. It went down to level 3 in June, back up to level 4 in September and only went up to level 5 in January, as England entered its third lockdown. Level 5 means the virus is in general circulation, transmission is high or rising and “there is a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed”.
When the alert system was set up, it was envisaged that the lifting of lockdown measures would be linked to the UK’s progress down the alert scale. But in practice there has been little linkage, and the roadmap for lifting lockdown measures in England published on Monday contains no mention of alert levels, and only one mention of the JBC.
No 10 says it rejects former French ambassador's claim PM 'an inveterate liar'
Here are the main lines from the No 10 lobby briefing.
Downing Street has said that votes on the budget will be treated as a confidence matter, meaning that if Conservative MPs rebel, they will lose the whip. Asked if budget votes would be a confidence matter, Allegra Stratton, the PM’s press secretary, said yes.
No 10 has ruled out prioritising prisoners in the next wave of the vaccination programme. According to a report in today’s Times, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is advising that, in the next phase, people under 50 should be vaccinated by age bands, with no attempt to prioritise key workers. But it is also saying officials should have the option of vaccinating a whole prison in one go. The Times says:
[The JCVI] has accepted that local areas should not be stopped from mass vaccination in institutional settings such as prisons, after complaints that it is impractical to separate out prisoners by age.
Although there will not be any formal exemption from the age-based list for prisons, local vaccination teams will be given “more flexibility” to depart from strict priority order to avoid wastage and tackle inequalities of race or class.
But Downing Street said prisoners would not get prioritised, and they would be vaccinated in line with the JCVI recommendations for the whole population (ie by age). “Prisoners won’t be prioritised for vaccines,” the PM’s spokesman said.
We completely reject that characterisation. As you heard the PM say when we signed the agreement with the EU, we’ve delivered on what we promised the British people in both the 2019 election and previously during the referendum in terms of returning sovereignty.
(The day Johnson agreed the trade deal with the EU was the day when he also claimed it involved “no non-tariff barriers” to trade. This was completely untrue.)
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, has announced further sanctions against members of the Myanmar military for their part in the coup that has deposed the democratic leadership. Six more military figures of the state administration council face sanctions for serious human rights violations, on top of the 19 previously listed by the UK, the Foreign Office said.
Louise Haigh, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, has criticised the Conservative European Research Group for calling for the Northern Ireland protocol to be abandoned. (See 11.32am.) She said:
The ERG – and this cannot be stressed enough – voted for this.
This was the deal they demanded, for the Brexit they chose.
Now they would rather tear things down, and provoke further instability, than show even a hint of responsibility.
I think in an ideal world you would not have taken kids out of school because of the pandemic, we wouldn’t have been forced to do this and in an ideal world we’d be continuing with exams as you normally have them, and the best place for kids is in the classroom and the best way to check on kids’ progress is with normal exams.
But I think this is as good a compromise as we can come to.
I think it will be fair, I think it will be durable and it’s the right way forward.
He also insisted he had confidence in the much-criticised education secretary, Gavin Williamson. Asked if he did, he replied: “Of course, and I think that what we are doing is the right thing to get all our students, our pupils, back on March 8.
Boris Johnson meeting pupils in the canteen during a visit to Accrington academy in Lancashire. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AP
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