Cabinet government has become a very degraded thing. Last time I checked, 45 minutes ago, cabinet ministers had still not been told whether the PM’s plan to announce tomorrow two breaches of his 2019 election manifesto would even be on the formal agenda for discussion at the…
8.30am cabinet meeting. BUT as of now, @BorisJohnson is going ahead with 1) a manifesto-breaking 1.25% national insurance rise to raise circa £10bn and fill a circa £15bn hole in health and social care provision; b) a new cap-and-floor system, based on Dilnot, to limit to circa…
£80k the amount an individual would have to contribute to their own care (the cap), and to protect approx £100k of their savings from any care costs (the floor); c) a temporary waiver, which will require legislation, of the manifesto-guaranteed “triple lock” on…
increments to the state old-age pension, because this year’s earnings index would mean pensions going up by an exceptional 8% or so. All of this is MASSIVE politics. But there has been zero cabinet discussion of it to date. It has all been stitched up by @BorisJohnson and…
@RishiSunak and @sajidjavid. The cabinet ministers of the 80s, 90s and even the early years of this century would not have stood for being treated as cardboard cut outs, Potemkin ministers, in this manner. Do you think any of them will say boo tomorrow?

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More from @Peston

11 Sep
As someone who has just got through Covid-19, I wondered how rare I am to have contracted it as a double vaxxed person. According to new data from the government’s Vaccine Surveillance Report, in the age group 40 to 79, the overwhelming majority of those infected have…
been double vaxxed (see attached). I was surprised by what looks like high prevalence among the double vaxxed. And according to leading scientists at least part of the explanation is that “vaccine efficacy is not as good as we would like for the Delta variant”. Now it …
is important to remember that severe disease is considerably less common among the vaccinated infected than among the unvaxxed. But I am surprised these statistics have received so little attention and have occasioned so little debate. If the return to school leads to…
Read 4 tweets
25 Jul
In case you didn’t know - and I didn’t till a senior government official told me - the daily tally of infections seriously understates the actual number of infections, because if you are sick with Covid19 today but had it any time in the past (even last spring) your new bout…
is not included in the daily dashboard figures. We know people are being reinfected. And if the pandemic were to be spreading - which it might be - from first infected school children to second infected adults, we would not see that change in real time. This is profoundly…
troubling. And although it probably remains true, as I said on Friday, that we are past the peak of the pre 19 July surge, the inadequacy of the daily measurement data undermines confidence. As I understand it, there is deep disquiet among officials that the dashboard stats…
Read 5 tweets
17 Jul
While @chedwardes was interviewing the el-Kurd twins in East Jerusalem, I filmed this outside their house. It gives you a flavour of the stress of their lives as settlers’ use the courts to seize possession of homes their families were given in 1956 as compensation for being…
evicted from West Jerusalem. Under Israeli law they have no equivalent right to evict those who now occupy their ancestral homes in West Jerusalem. The property rights are asymmetric. And here you can see the police compelling a Palestinian to bring down a Palestinian flag…
attached to a kite. Imagine the police doing that in London to someone flying the England or Scotland flag. This is not like living in any old middle class road, though it is certainly middle class, because all the Palestinians I met in Sheikh Jarrah were highly educated,…
Read 5 tweets
15 Jul
Attached is the seven-day rolling rate on a log scale of hospital admissions by age group. As expected, hospitalisations remain lowest among children and teenagers. But what is striking, and concerning, is that hospitalisations in the categories 0-5 and 6-17 are back at…
at their peak levels and are still rising. Remember these hospitalisations lag by at least a week, and probably a bit longer, surging infections (the PM’s prediction there would be 50k daily infections on « freedom » day 19 July almost came true today). As I say, this is…
a log scale so in a visual sense it overstates the hospitalisations of and risks to children. But it is a reminder that Covid-19 can be serious even for the youngest.
Read 4 tweets
12 Jul
Amidst the anger at racist football supporters and the anxieties caused by ending all Covid19 restrictions, a big story has been widely ignored. Namely that the overseas aid budget won’t be restored to 0.7% of GDP till the government’s day-to-day spending is covered…
by tax revenues on a “sustainable” basis and public sector debt in “underlying” terms is falling as a share of national income or GDP. On the basis of the latest official forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, this won’t happen for at least five years, so…
not this side of the election. And perhaps the most important - and some would argue the most pernicious - implication of imposing these necessary and sufficient conditions for restoring the aid budget is that they in effect troll those MPs who lament the aid cut by saying…
Read 5 tweets
6 Jul
The projection from @sajidjavid that infections could surge to a record 100,000 a day in a few weeks, as all social distancing and mask-wearing regulations are removed, is especially terrifying for those whose immune systems are impaired or are clinically vulnerable in…
other ways. There are millions of these frail people. For those whose immune systems are compromised or suppressed, the efficacy of vaccines is much reduced. For others among the frail, any residual risk of becoming infected is too great, because for…
them it is literally a matter of life or death. So when you hear politicians and others talking about the important freedom to choose NOT to wear a mask and NOT to keep a respectful distance from others, note that their freedom is felt as oppression by those who…
Read 6 tweets

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