The title of what Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced yesterday, ‘Job Support Scheme’, flatters to deceive. The key thing to be aware of is that employers are being asked to pay one-third of the topping up of a worker’s wage who has been moved from full-time to part-time hours, which many of them are not going […]
UK Government
Are you a ‘Kurzarbeit’ or a ‘chômage partiel’ person? UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak will make an important statement to the House of Commons this afternoon about what will replace the furlough scheme at the end of October, with debate rife about whether German or French models will be preferred, or something completely different altogether. The Kurzarbeit […]
Beyond furlough
“Scotland is now fighting Covid with precisely as much testing capacity as the UK will permit us… What it means is more than that Scotland isn’t taking a distinctive approach – it means it can’t.”
Analysis: Scotland is now locked into a Four Nations Covid strategy
“We’re taking one step forward, five steps back,” Devi Sridhar, professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and on the Scottish Government’s covid-19 advisory group, wrote yesterday, in summing up her exasperation about the covid-19 situation in the UK. She’s not wrong. Lockdown was a big social sacrifice, one where the vulnerable suffered […]
‘One step forward, five steps back’
“Those few interesting questions which might have emerged from the controversy have been almost entirely overlooked. The first is not whether Nicola Sturgeon has used her briefings for political purposes, but rather: should we care?”
Sean Bell: Everything is political, and it is futile to pretend otherwise
“The Johnson/Cummings/Gove team represents a political approach with which older Scots were more familiar in the 1980s. It is crude, ruthless and risk-taking. It is probably rather worse than Thatcher”
Isobel Lindsay: After the Internal Market battle, we need to face the new reality
There is a constitutional curiosity in the UK Government’s Internal Market Bill which professor Michael Keatings, Centre for Constitutional Change director, has identified, and is worth reflecting on. Until now the UK Government operated a system of powers which was fundamentally different from that of the EU. Some powers are reserved and some are devolved, but […]
Britain’s new unitary state
Brexit’s back. Of course, it never went away. But for three years it dominated UK political debate, before the decisive December 2019 General Election finally set Britain on a definitive course for leaving. The pandemic then knocked it out of the headlines. We are three-quarters of the way through a transition year until the UK […]
The stakes are raised in Brexit poker
“At the outset of the Covid crisis, it was generally accepted that workers should not have to risk death in order to remain employed. Since then, bosses, governments and those forces aligned with them have tried to chip away at this hasty social contract.”
Sean Bell: Ignore ‘back to work’ rhetoric – focus on workers’ rights
With the Programme for Government due tomorrow in Scotland, it’s a good time to take a look at the state of politics. A poll over the weekend showed Labour are now neck and neck with the Tories, with the Conservatives managing to squander a 26 point lead in the space of five months. When Johnson […]