In an official statement, Buckingham Palace said: “It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. Further announcements will be made in due course. The Royal Family join with people around the world in mourning his loss.”

Prince Philip had been ill for some time, having left King Edward VII’s hospital on 16 March after a two-month stay. During that time he underwent a successful procedure at St Bartholomew’s for a pre-existing heart condition.

The Queen and Prince Philip married in 1947 and had been together for over seven decades.

In accordance with tradition and his wishes, Prince Philip’s body will rest at Windsor Castle and the funeral will take place at St George’s Chapel. In light of the pandemic it has been “regretfully requested that members of the public do not attempt to attend/participate in any of the events that make up the funeral”.

Political parties have also announced that they will be suspending their political campaigning for the local elections and the elections of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments.

Reacting to news if the death Boris Johnson said: “It was with great sadness that a short time ago I received word from Buckingham Palace that His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh has passed away at the age of 99. Prince Philip earned the affection of generations here in the United Kingdom, across the Commonwealth and around the world.”

Johnson paid tribute to Prince Philip’s record as a war hero, an environmentalist, a generous patron of charities, and a steadfast companion to Queen Elizabeth.

Sir Keir Starmer also paid tribute: “The United Kingdom has lost an extraordinary public servant. Prince Philip dedicated his life to our country – from a distinguished career in the Royal Navy during the Second World War to his decades of service as the Duke of Edinburgh.”

He praised the Duke’s long marriage saying that he would be remembered for his “extraordinary commitment and devotion to The Queen.”

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, expressed “my deepest sympathy to Her Majesty The Queen and the rest of the Royal Family” on behalf of the people of Scotland. Sturgeon highlighted Prince Philip’s longstanding ties with Scotland where he attended school at Gordonstoun, holidayed at Balmoral, and was Chancellor of Edinburgh University.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed his condolences as well as paying tribute to Prince Philip’s public service and environmental activism.

Leaders overseas have also joined in paying tribute and expressing their condolences.

Joe Biden, President of United States, expressed his “deepest condolences to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the entire Royal Family, and all the people of the United Kingdom” and praised his public service in the armed forces and as husband to the Queen.

Former president Obama also paid tribute recalling that when he and his wife had visited Buckingham palace – “two Americans unaccustomed to palaces and pomp” – the duke had been “kind and warm, with a sharp wit and unfailing good humour.”

Micheál Martin, Taoiseach of Ireland, tweeted out: “Saddened to hear of the death of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Our thoughts and prayers are with Queen Elizabeth and the people of the United Kingdom at this time.”

Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India praised Philip’s “distinguished career in the military” and community service saying “May his soul rest in peace.”

Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister of Australia, said that the duke “embodied a generation that we will never see again”.

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, also took to Twitter to describe Philip as “A man of great purpose and conviction, who was motivated by a sense of duty to others”.

Meanwhile, the British public has been paying tributes of its own many placing flowers and letters of condolence outside the palace.

The European Medicines Agency has reached the same conclusion, but merely recommended that healthcare professionals be made aware of the potential side-effect and that anyone experiencing symptoms that indicate clotting seek medical attention. However, France and Germany have already limited the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine to people over the age of 55 and 60 respectively.

The verdicts follow from evidence that young people, especially women, might be at greater risk of this rare side-effect. The fact that coronavirus poses less danger to youngsters shifts the potential balance of risks from getting the vaccine. Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, said that during periods of low prevalence of COVID “the risk benefit is relatively finely balanced” for people in their twenties, but “becomes very overwhelming in favour of vaccines as you go up the ages”.

The EMA stated that while it had not been able to confirm that age, gender, or prior medical history affected the risk of side-effects, some evidence suggests that the young and women may face a higher risk of clotting side-effects.

The exact cause of these side-effects still remains unclear. However, one German study suggests that the blood clots caused by the vaccine might be similar to a rare side-effect caused by the blood-thinner heparin – heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. Patients displaying the clotting side-effect also had low platelet counts – which is unusual as platelets play a key role in clotting. In cases of HIT, heparin sometimes induces an immune response setting off an out-of-control clotting reaction, while reducing platelet levels. The EMA and MHRA said that more research was needed to confirm this hypothesis.

In the meantime, both agencies have been keen to stress that the benefits of the vaccine still vastly outweigh its risks. So far, out of the 20 million AstraZeneca vaccines administered, the UK has recorded only 79 cases of this rare side-effect and 19 deaths.

These concerns are watched closely in the developing world where the AstraZenaca vaccine is perhaps their best hope – it being the only vaccine to be sold at cost. Cameroon and Congo have already suspended their distribution of AstraZenaca due to the worries raised about blood clots. Politicians in Nigeria have backed out of prior commitments to be vaccinated on TV. After this, convincing fearful publics to take the vaccine once it has been approved will only be harder.

The potential death toll that hesitancy could extract is horrifying – an extra 236 deaths per million of the population over a two year period, according to a study released by the  Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. Difficulty supressing the virus also means more and longer lockdowns.

In seeking to overcome this challenge the government would do well to look at how vaccine hesitancy has been dealt with by the global polio vaccination campaign. Started in 1988 and lead by the World Health organisation it is one of the biggest global health initiatives ever undertaken. Today wild polio is thought only to exist in Afghanistan and Pakistan were eradicating the final redoubts of the disease has been complicated by widespread conspiracy theories about the vaccine.

To get a sense of how doctors working in these regions operate, Reaction contacted Dr Hamid Jafari, the WHO’s Director of Polio Eradication Programme in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, to discuss his work.

Joseph Rachman: One of the difficulties the polio eradication programme has had to work to overcome is vaccine hesitancy and even strong anti-vaccination sentiment. In your experience what are the factors that drive people to be suspicious of and refuse vaccines?

Dr Hamid Jafari:  The polio programme “has overcome” vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine sentiment in many communities around the world, but we know we have some way to go in certain communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Region, as in much of the world, anti-vaccine sentiment presents a significant and ongoing challenge to immunization programmes. There are a variety of drivers: sometimes it’s fear of the unknown, but more often there’s some element of misinformation at play, whether that is falsehoods circulating about vaccines on social media, presenting fallacious ‘evidence’ connecting any number of ills to vaccination, or the anti-West rhetoric that connects these vaccines to non-existent but sinister political aims. Some people believe vaccines are not halal – for that we rely on a robust network of trusted community leaders and imams and religious scholars to talk to them and try to convert those refusals. This network is supported by the statements and guidance of the most senior Islamic scholars who have been brought together in the Region as members of the Islamic Advisory Group.

I think the most challenging opposition, though, are refusals based not on any real issue with the vaccine, but with the local or state or national authorities. In this case, a parent or community in a deprived or insecure area refuses the vaccine until other services are delivered – for example, until a well is dug or a road is fixed. In a sense, you can understand this: they are living in areas that are deprived of basic services, with little to no health and civic infrastructure. But health workers are continually engaging them in the polio vaccination campaigns. This is their last move: holding polio, and their children’s health, to ransom in order to negotiate more services. But as a pediatrician, it makes me wring my hands. If it weren’t for this vaccine, we would still be dealing with hundreds of thousands of paralyzed children around the world every year. Yes, tackling anti-vaccine sentiment is exhausting and expensive, but this is the cost we have to incur to vaccinate all children. If we don’t do this, the costs will be unimaginable for the programme but even more so for the poorest communities in the world.

JR: When attempting to persuade people who are reluctant to be administered the polio vaccinated what methods seem to be effective in getting them to change their minds? What lessons might governments seeking to convince people to be vaccinated against coronavirus learn from this experience?

Jafari: The most effective approach is to listen. It takes time, but parents and communities need to be heard – you can’t work with them to find a way forward without hearing their side. This is what builds trust, and without trust, parents will not open the door and allow vaccinators to put drops in their children’s mouths. The polio programme is a door-knocking programme. And knocking on doors gives you a chance to meet parents and find out what they fear and what they need. We’ve tried a lot of approaches that stem from the idea that vaccine-hesitant parents need to have their concerns heard: we set up social listening initiatives, parent engagement groups, we engage and partner with religious leaders and enlist them in reaching out to parents. For example, National Islamic leaders in Pakistan have issued at least 28 fatwas (religious decrees) promoting the safety of the polio vaccine and the importance of vaccinating children. Local religious scholars in Pakistan also give support and protection to frontline polio workers at the Union Council and community levels.

 An important element of trust is rooted in who is knocking on the door and offering the vaccine.  Ensuring frontline workers are trusted members of the local community is important, but the most important success factor is local female vaccinators and supervisors who serve as the most effective bridge for the programme and are crucial agents for building trust with the communities.  

Countering propaganda online is difficult. A partnership with Facebook in Pakistan has been very productive, but when someone believes anything from WHO or the CDC or their national ministry of health is ‘conspiracy’, it’s tough to counter that. One effort I am very optimistic about is a programme in some of the most intractable pockets of refusal to offer goods and services beyond polio as a way to build bridges with these communities. The polio programme’s experience in this area can be useful to all vaccines and immunization – COVID-19 vaccines included.

JR: One of the key drivers of vaccine hesitancy seems to be misinformation – such as the video which went viral in Pakistan in 2019 claiming children had fallen sick after being administer the polio vaccine and current conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccines. Are there ways that governments might seek to combat misinformation either countering it effectively or impeding its spread?

HJ: Frankly, we are deeply concerned about how quickly false information can spread on social media and we are committed to countering inaccuracies with fact-based information about polio vaccines. The Peshawar incident is a harrowing example of how quickly misinformation can spread, and the impact that can have on demand for vaccination – nearly two years on, we are still feeling the impact of that in Peshawar.

An important shift in the government’s approach is a strict avoidance of any coercive measures by local administrators to force vaccination on families that refuse the vaccine.  

To build trust in vaccines among parents and caregivers and combat misinformation, the polio programme is engaging with local politicians and influencers, religious leaders, educators, health care institutions and providers, tribal elders and the media. These community-tailored approaches are playing a critical role in increasing confidence in the polio vaccine and in immunization broadly. I mentioned previously that the programme is also collaborating with social media platforms like Facebook, especially in Pakistan, to curtail the spread of false and misleading information online and communicate positive messaging around vaccines. Furthermore, the government of Pakistan has launched an initiative dedicated to combating polio misinformation and increasing vaccine acceptance, including a WhatsApp hotline where people can call with questions and concerns regarding the polio vaccine and the national programme.

At the time of writing,  Deliveroo’s share price has fallen nearly 30% to 281.93, down from the initial asking price of 390p a share. This shellacking by the markets is a bitter pill to swallow not just for the company but also for Rishi Sunak and the Treasury. Deliveroo’s IPO was supposed to act as proof that the City could do tech IPOs too – at a time when British start-ups like the online used car dealership like Cazoo have been heading to New York to be listed on the stock market. The UK had even tweaked its financial regulations to try and make itself more attractive – reducing the amount of stock that had to be listed, changing prospectus requirements, and introducing dual class share structures that give company founders more power.

All this, however, has been to no avail, and may have made things worse. Deliveroo adopting a dual-class share structure was one of the reasons so many of London’s top fund managers stayed away from the float. The decision also meant Deliveroo couldn’t be listed on the FTSE 100 depriving the company of investment by index-tracking funds that buy shares in every company on the index. Several of the UK’s fund managers have stayed away from the float because of suspicions over Deliveroo’s long-term earnings potential prompted by concerns over workers’ rights and the low level of pay being paid to its riders. Some fear that Deliveroo may face legal challenges like Uber and have to shell out higher wages to its workforce. 

Other factors also played a role in its early flop. Rising bond yields have generally decreased some of the appetite for stocks and shares, particularly in flashy tech companies. Deliveroo itself is likely going to see its revenues dip in the near future as the lockdown starts to lift.

However, most fundamentally Deliveroo’s business model already looks dysfunctional. Deliveroo not only has yet to turn a profit some research suggests it actually makes a loss on every delivery it makes. Indeed, even as its reach has expanded its losses seem to have only deepened.

For some much vaunted tech companies not turning a profit isn’t a problem – it’s almost a status symbol. After all, Tesla made its first profit last year 18 years after it was founded and Uber has yet to make one. Perhaps American investors are generally more willing to take this gamble be it due to cultural reasons, the mythology of Silicon Valley, or the fact that a decade of loose money has left lots of cash washing around.

Still, in both cases they have been able to promise investors that they had something special – incredible new electric vehicle tech and enormous global reach – that they claim will deliver immense profits down the line. In the absence of actual technological innovation – apparently no longer necessary to be called a tech company – all Deliveroo could offer was relative ubiquity. However, as said such ubiquity seems to only increase its losses.
Indeed, even in American markets some of the sillier IPOs can crash and burn. WeWork, a company which listed not just huge losses but an apparently insane founder, had to cancel its IPO due to market sentiment. With Deliveroo perhaps London investors maybe simply made the calculation that a company which sets fire to an ever increasing piles of money the bigger it gets wasn’t a great bet.

In a letter to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Labour Party asked it to investigate the role David Cameron played in lobbying on behalf of the financial services firm after he left office.

In response, the Committee’s Chair, Lord Evans, said that it “does not have a remit to investigate individual cases.”

Cameron lobbied on behalf of the company not long before it declared bankruptcy and it is alleged that he gave Greensill privileged access to Whitehall departments. 

A former chair of the standards committee, Sir Alistair Graham, has called for a full inquiry calling the revelations a “genuine scandal”. But on Tuesday, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng argued that Cameron “did nothing wrong” and resisted calls for an inquiry saying people “should just move on”.

It comes as calls grow to tighten up the UK’s lobbying rules in the wake of the furore.

Eric Pickles, former Conservative minister and chair of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) which reviews former ministers taking jobs in the private sector, has called for a review of lobbying following the revelations about Cameron.

The scandal shines a light on the weakness of current British laws and regulations governing lobbying and business appointments for former government figures. Cameron is, after all, far from alone in picking up lucrative positions in high-profile financial institutions. All three former chancellors – George Osborne, Philip Hammond, and Sajid Javid – have taken work from a variety of City firms. Javid even works as senior adviser to JP Morgan while still a backbencher.

Under current rules all former ministers have to submit any business appointments they plan on accepting to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments for review for two years after leaving office and are banned from lobbying the government for two years. Senior civil servants face similar rules.

This relatively short period means that there was no examination of Cameron’s appointment to Greensill Capital – which appears to have taken place just after the required disclosure period expired.

The only law that deals directly with lobbying itself is the 2014 Transparency of Lobby Act – passed by Cameron’s own government – which forces lobbyists to register and provide basic information about themselves and their clients.

However, loopholes in the law mean that many who work as lobbyists don’t have to register – including Cameron himself, as he worked as an in-house lobbyist for Greensill, not an independent lobbyist. An amendment to the 2014 law which would have closed this loophole was defeated in the Lords. The lobbying law is already under review following criticism by the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) of which the UK is a member.

If the UK is serious about toughening up lobbying laws, Ireland and the US are instructive examples. The former introduced tough new transparency requirements in 2015, largely in reaction to a slew of scandals that followed the 2008 financial crash. Irish laws not only set up a register for lobbyists but also require disclosure of any lobbying activity undertaken. Lobbying and lobbying activities are both defined very broadly, which helps to avoid loopholes. Failures to register or provide proper information can result in up to two years in prison. The reforms have since been hailed as a gold standard for lobbying regulations.

The US, meanwhile, also sets the bar very high when it comes to regulating the affairs of former government officials. Under US laws many former officials are required to keep a register of business interests for their entire lives, not just for two years after leaving office. They can also face lifetime bans on lobbying the government on policy issues that they have worked on directly.

Introducing similar laws in the UK would go a long way to cleaning things up lobbying practice in Westminster. The question is whether the government has the will to do so.

At the heart of the crisis lies a financial instrument known as ‘total return swaps’ or ‘contracts-for-difference’. In essence, these swaps let investors bet on whether the price of certain assets will go up or down without having to own the asset itself. If the bet is right the investor makes money – if its wrong the investor pays money to the bank that owns the asset they were betting on. It’s the sort risky, highly-leveraged trading that gets finance wizards salivating about high returns – but has also rung alarm bells with critics who argue that companies use lax disclosure rules to hide how big the risks they are taking really are.

This seems to be the story of what happened with Hwang and Archegos. After Hwang’s court case he set up a new fund – Archegos – just 12 months later, but banks initially stayed away. Over time, however, the calculus changed. Hwang may have blown up spectacularly once, but he retained a reputation as a moneymaking genius. According to FT reporting, prime brokers at investment banks – the division responsible for the risky business of loaning cash and securities to hedge funds – lobbied to be allowed to make deals with Hwang, slowly overcoming the objections within the banks they worked for. The banks lent their assets to Archegos, allowing it make bigger and bigger bets. The fund flourished, its assets growing from just $200 million in 2012 almost $10 billion this year.

Yet as the fund grew it wasn’t clear that the bankers doing business with Archegos knew about the size of its deals with their competitors, and so underestimated the risks they were running. The dam broke on Friday when markets saw a sudden, unexpected sell-off of billions of US and Chinese stocks by a then-unknown entity – Archegos.

What had happened is that Archegos had failed a margin call. In non-finance speak, Archegos owned large quantities of stock in the US media group ViacomCBS. When the price of this stock declined financial brokers who lent Archegos money based on the value of the assets it owned asked for funds to put up more capital to cover the risk. This is known as a margin call. The problem was that Archegos – which already had huge amounts of cash tied up in complex financial bets – simply couldn’t pay.

The fire sale of stocks on Friday was an attempt to raise cash by Archegos to meet the collateral requirements. However, a selling spree on that scale had the predictable result of cratering the price of the stocks. Banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that helped arrange the sales early on managed to salvage some of their losses from Archegos’ collapse. Others like Credit Suisse and Nomura which failed to act have been left holding the bag.

So, what does this mean for the wider economy? This tale of swaps gone wrong and private funds blowing up has raised memories of the 2008 financial crisis and the fall of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 which helped spark a minor recession. Thankfully, however, things don’t look as dire this time around partly thanks to post-2008 rules which require banks to keep more cash in reserve as a safety buffer. Still, this spectacular bust is a shot across the bows about the risks present in a financial system which has seen an incredible bull run – and may well spur regulators to take action.

The ACDU branded the changes “a day late and a dollar short” – accusing Uber of not fully complying with the court’s ruling when it came to the conditions under which it would pay its drivers a wage.

Khan agreed, saying: “This announcement by Uber is certainly a step in the right direction. However, it’s not enough – Uber must ensure it fulfils its legal obligation to give drivers full workers’ rights. Uber drivers have been let down and that needs to change.”

In 2019 Khan backed Transport for London’s move to briefly revoke Uber’s license to operate in part due to the company’s failure to report criminal offences by its drivers. His statement will doubtless have set some nerves jangling in Uber’s offices given that London is Uber’s biggest UK market.

At the heart of the dispute is an argument over whether Uber drivers will be guaranteed a minimum wage when they are logged on to the app – as the ACDU wants – or only based on “active time” when they are picking up or dropping off passengers which is Uber’s current plan.

In a public statement the ACDU not only argued that hat paying only based on active time will leave Uber drivers “shortchanged to the tune of 40 to 50 per cent.” The union further claimed that the move was in violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling that pay should “accrue on working time from log on to log off whereas Uber is committing only to these entitlements to accrue from time of trip acceptance to drop off.

Uber, however, has contested that the Supreme Court ruling found that “working time” for drivers should start from the moment drivers log on and are available to take a trip. Yet Uber will likely argue that the Court ruled that this finding might change if Uber was to face meaningful competition from other ride-hailing apps. Uber is already claiming that this is the case, citing the rise of Bolt, Ola, Lyft, and others. Another fight is sure to follow.

The importance of the fight over which hours will count as work should not be underestimated. Unions argue that Uber deliberately floods the roads with drivers leading to short wait times for customers but longer ones for drivers between trips. Notably, a study in California finding that Uber drivers spent one third of their time waiting for bookings.

Uber, however, has argued that paying drivers while they were waiting would render its current business model unfeasible. Uber has claimed that forcing it to pay drivers the minimum wage for the entire period they spend online would mean it would have to either set rigid shifts or sharply reduce the number of drivers it allows on the app in order for the business to remain viable.

Meanwhile, what Uber has conceded following the Supreme Court ruling that its drivers were workers not self-employed is already set to shake up the gig economy.

Under the new arrangement the company has vowed that the 70,000 Uber drivers in the UK will retain the freedom to choose if and when they drive but will now be paid the National Living Wage for over-25s after expenses, irrespective of a driver’s age. Writing in the Evening Standard, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi emphasised that these payments would work as “a floor, not a ceiling, meaning they will be able to earn more, as they do today”. He also promised that fares would not rise – though sceptics point out that a similar law in California was followed by fare increases.

Drivers will also be given paid holiday time based on 12.07 per cent of their earnings and automatically enrolled in a pension scheme which both they and Uber will contribute to. The free insurance payments in case of sickness and injury – as well as parental payments already offered to UK drivers by Uber – will remain in place.

Even as things stand the current ruling could also have major effects on the wider gig economy. While the Supreme Court decision only applies to Uber drivers – even drivers for its food delivery service, UberEats, are unaffected by it – the case sets a powerful precedent which could provide a basis for legal challenges to other businesses which use similar models such as Deliveroo, Ocado, and Pimlico Plumbers.

More generally, it will pile pressure onto the government to set minimum basic standards across the gig economy. The UK has some 4.7 million gig-workers. The implications for the labour market could be seismic.

Yet vaccine hesitancy – defined as being very or fairly unlikely to accept being vaccinated or having already declined a vaccine – is noticeably higher among some groups, such as people aged 16 to 29 (17 per cent), parents of young children (16 per cent), and inhabitants of deprived areas (16 per cent).

Ethnic minorities are also more likely to be vaccine-hesitant. Only 8 per cent of white adults were classed as vaccine-hesitant, compared to 44 per cent of black and black British respondents. Other minority ethnic groups also reported higher levels of hesitancy of around 16 per cent.

What drives vaccine hesitancy and how can it be overcome?

Professor Helen Bedford, Professor of Children’s Health at UCL, who has been researching attitudes towards vaccines for 30 years, says: “The key is a sense of safety. People make mental calculations balancing the perceived risk of the vaccine vs the perceived risk of the disease. As a result you get some people who are perfectly happy to get other vaccines but are hesitant about this new one. The speed of its development has left some people worrying it has been rushed.”

Indeed, ONS polls found that across all demographic groups the main reasons for hesitancy cited were worries about side effects, long-term effects, and vaccine efficacy.

On the question of why these fears are more prevalent among ethnic minorities, Professor Bedford said:  “Early talk about trialling the vaccine in Africa made a lot of people uncomfortable – black people worry they’re being used as guinea pigs. Some of these communities also face problems of deprivation – poor education and poverty makes people less trusting of vaccination.”

She added: “Another key factor is institutional racism. People are less likely to get the vaccine if they feel that they have broadly been treated poorly by the system.”

There has been little research conducted on the specifics of these experiences.The Tuskegee medical experiments, where black men suffering from syphilis were deliberately left untreated in order to study the disease’s progression, have been cited as one of the abusive legacies fuelling distrust. However, studies in America found little evidence that knowledge of the Tuskegee experiments was contributing to distrust of the coronavirus vaccine.

Further complicating the picture is that statistics on uptake of other vaccines show that some ethnic minority groups are in fact more likely to get vaccinated, according to Dr Alice Forster, a UCL Research Fellow specialising in vaccine uptake.

“Hesitancy is also more complicated that it seems; vaccine hesitancy can be a confusing term. It includes anyone who has concerns about the vaccine even if they then decide to get it anyway.

“In broad terms you can subdivide people with concerns about vaccines into those who have doubts but get the vaccine anyway, those who don’t get the vaccine but who are not against the idea of vaccination per se, and a small number who will never get vaccinated. The second group is an important group to focus on, though the first group can also do with a little reassurance. The views of the third group are often developed as part of a worldview that is bigger than vaccination, and unlikely to change or be changed.”

Thankfully, Dr Forster says that the third group tends to be a small minority – people deeply tied to a conspiratorial outlook. The number of people who have refused or are thinking of refusing the vaccine but are amenable to persuasion is much bigger.

When it comes to persuading people to take the vaccine both Prof Bedford and Dr Forster offer the same advice: talk to people, understand their reasons, and have trusted figures provide reassurance about the vaccine’s safety. Health professionals are still widely trusted – even if someone isn’t sure about the vaccine- and a family doctor’s recommendation is the best method to convince people to get the vaccine.

Dr Forster’s main concern is not hesitancy but access. “While vaccine hesitancy influences uptake, vaccine access is critical. The UK is pretty good but some people can fall through the gaps. For example, if they’re paid hourly or work unusual shift hours.”

The problems of access and hesitancy appear to be linked. Those sceptical of the Tuskegee explanation for hesitancy argue that current distrust is fuelled by current failures – all too contemporary problems of poverty and unequal treatment that limit access as well as fuelling distrust. Stories of bad treatment spread.

Conversely, stories of good experiences help increase vaccine uptake – perhaps explaining the noticeable decrease in vaccine hesitancy since December. Hope has been expressed that seeing older people get the vaccine with no ill-effect will increase trust amongst younger people.

Efforts can also be made to improve access. Sadly the most effective method – mass vaccination of people when they are gathered together (children at school, for instance) – is hindered by lockdown, but others are available. Dr Forster believes that simple steps to remind people to get vaccinated can be of great help. “The best thing to do is keep good vaccination records and have good reminder systems for chasing up people who remain unvaccinated.”

British exports to the EU plummeted 40.7 per cent (£5.6 billion) and imports from the bloc also fell sharply 28.8 per cent (£6.6 billion). These sharp drops in trade with the UK’s biggest trading partner have had a big impact on the UK’s overall trade figures with total exports dropping by 19.3 per cent (£5.3 billion) and imports falling by 21.6 per cent (£8.9 billion).

The government has been quick to insist that things are better than they seem. Lord Frost, the Cabinet minister in charge of Brexit, pointed out that the ONS itself expressed caution about extrapolating too much from these figures and that drops in trade volume were likely caused not just by post-Brexit friction but also by renewed lockdowns and the effects of pre-Brexit stockpiling. Another mitigating factor is that trade volumes often drop in January as consumption undergoes a post-Christmas lull. Frost also claimed that the latest figures showed trade volumes had since rebounded back to normal.

Others, however, have painted a different picture. According to Paul Mummery, a spokesperson for the Road Haulage Association: “What we’ve seen – whatever the government says – is a significant drop in trade and there is no denying the presence of a Brexit effect.”

Mummery was also sceptical of claims of a quick bounce back. “Yes, the picture is improving. Firms are starting to get their heads around the mountains of new paperwork and red tape but it’s a slow process. This isn’t just teething problems – we’re in for the long haul.”

Digging into the figures it seems hard to deny Brexit is responsible for a large portion of the drop in trade.

Crucially, trade with non-EU countries did not see comparable decreases. Imports from non-EU countries did fall by 12.7 per cent – but this is less than half the drop with the EU. Meanwhile, exports to non-EU countries actually rose slightly, by 1.7 per cent – perhaps buoyed by the signing of a free trade agreement with Singapore.

However, at least some of the decline in trade does seem attributable to the pandemic and stockpiling. Cars and pharmaceuticals were the two sectors that saw the sharpest decline in both exports and imports. Car sales plummeted in both the EU – the UK’s biggest automobile export market – and in the UK itself in January, driven in large part by renewed lockdown restrictions.

Meanwhile, pharmaceuticals were stockpiled in large quantities pre-Brexit for fear of ‘No Deal’ disruption reducing the need for imports in the short-term. Yet this doesn’t explain why exports of pharmaceuticals and other medical products to the EU would drop – especially mid-pandemic.

It is also worth noting while these sectors account for the biggest hits in terms of value, others have been hit even harder. Export of food and live animals to the EU has dropped by 63.6 per cent. This tallies with reports since January of angry fishermen struggling to export their catch and tens of thousands of pigs stuck on British farms.

Overall, the Centre for European Reform estimates that Brexit led to total UK goods trade falling by 22 per cent.

Are the drops in trade attributable to Brexit simply teething problems that will be ironed out as businesses get used to moving goods across borders, as Frost suggests? Or are they here to stay?

The evidence is mixed. Statistics on the number of ships visiting UK ports – usually a good indicator of trade trends – show that while numbers are still much lower than this time last year they have rebounded noticeably from their January lows. The number of businesses saying that they are unable to import or export has also dropped since January, according to the ONS Business Insights survey.

Yet the same survey also found that the majority of businesses still say that they are still experiencing challenges with importing and exporting.

Mummery says that improving matters will be tricky: “Currently we estimate the UK has about about 10,000 customs agents” – employees at private firms who process the necessary paperwork for customs checks – “and we need about 50,000.” Training the missing 40,000 fully could take years.

If anything the situation could worsen, according to Mummery. While exports to the EU are currently subject to customs checks, the UK has unilaterally waived checks on imports from the EU in a bid to give hauliers time to adapt. Plans to slowly introduce import checks in stages between 1 April and 1 June were pushed back yesterday, with most now not coming until 1 January 2022.

“When those come in, all I can say is ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet!'” says Mummery. “Hopefully a long grace period will give businesses time to prepare but it’ll alleviate headaches, not resolve them. Businesses will find a way – they always do – but the fact is we have long had frictionless trade with the EU. Getting solutions for this means the UK and the EU Commission both need to pull their fingers out.”

Liberty is now on the hunt for new backers and is holding crisis talks with the business ministry against the backdrop of a vast and complex financial scandal – with the fate of the company and its employees potentially hanging in the balance.

The Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy refused to comment on the talks, simply saying: “The Government has put together a far-reaching package of support to help businesses and workers through the coronavirus pandemic. We continue to regularly engage with businesses across all sectors, including those in the steel industry.”

Liberty Steel is one of many companies owned by Sanjeev Gupta as part of his sprawling GFG Alliance which spans metals to banking. In recent years Gupta, who first started trading commodities from his bedroom while a student at Cambridge, has led Liberty on a spree of aggressive deal-making, snapping up steelworks across the UK, Europe, the US, Australia, and India.

For many Liberty Steel seemed like a godsend – stepping in to keep swathes of the UK’s battered steel sector running which steel giants like Tata were pulling out of. However, the GFG Alliance – while not accused of wrongdoing – has also faced criticism over its opaque finances – most notably in an investigation published by the Financial Times in February last year.

One of its key financial backers was Greensill Capital owned by Australian entrepreneur Lex Greensill, a close friend of Gupta who was one of Greensill’s best clients. In 2017, roughly $70 million of Greensill’s $102 million in revenue came from Gupta’s companies. Much of their business also involved a Swiss investment firm, GAM, in a series of complex and opaque financial arrangements. The relationship was rocked by – but survived – a scandal in 2019 and the discovery of a $74 million payment to a non-existent company in 2020.

Greensill has also come under scrutiny for various reasons. In 2016, the firm was on the brink having lost $54 million – more than its entire revenue for that year. Its main business model – supply chain financing – was also looked on suspiciously by some as a way for companies to keep large debts off their books.

Nonetheless, Greensill cultivated a successful profile over the past decade based on this business model, and helped by his formidable skills as a salesman. He forged close links with the British establishment. David Cameron recruited him in 2014 to help cut down on government waste and, after resigning as PM, found a job as an advisor at Greensill. Lex Greensill himself would be awarded a CBE for “services to the economy” in 2017.

When Covid hit, Greensill expanded his business ties with Gupta. Greensill Bank, a subsidiary of Greensill Capital based in Germany, was given permission by the government to administer coronavirus business interruption loans – which the government guaranteed up to 80 per cent – rolling them out to companies hit by lockdowns and the pandemic. Two loans worth tens of millions went to two companies linked to Gupta.

Meanwhile, despite pandemic disruptions, things seemed to be looking up at Liberty. Steel prices – having faced a long slump – were reviving, fuelled by increasing demand from China.

The problems for both companies came on 1 March when Credit Suisse froze $10 billion dollars’ worth of Greensill Capital funds. The move was prompted by a growing number of insurers refusing to extend Greensill’s credit insurance on its loans – partly due to nervousness about its exposure to the GFG Alliance, according to reports in the FT. On the same day the British Business Bank informed Greensill that it was removing the guarantee it had provided for the CBIL loans it made to Gupta’s companies.

The next day, on 2 March, Germany’s financial watchdog, BaFin, made its move, taking over day-to-day operations at Greensill Bank having previously warned the bank about its exposure to GFG. BaFin filed a criminal complaint against the bank’s management the next day. On Monday, Greensill filed for insolvency in the UK.

These developments have left GFG, and its subsidiary, Liberty, scrambling for new sources of credit. Liberty has also been meeting with the UK government and unions to discuss how to protect jobs in its steel plants across the country.

In a statement released yesterday GFG Alliance said, “As part of the prudent steps we are taking to manage cash, we are discussing new opportunities with customers and suppliers to improve cash flow and looking to secure additional working capital facilities to support the business. We also continue to use the furlough scheme to support employees affected by the weakness in the aerospace market. We will continue to work closely with the unions and our employees to identify the most effective ways of supporting the business and preserving jobs.”

It added, “GFG Alliance as a whole is operationally strong and we are benefiting from a thirteen-year high in steel prices as well as strong markets in aluminium and iron ore. While Greensill’s difficulties have created a challenging situation, we have adequate funding for our current needs.”

The company’s actions, however, seemed to indicate serious concern. On 4 March the company simply stopped paying Greensill, according to the FT – having already skipped one payment due on 1 March. Yesterday, Gupta’s metal businesses skipped their UK tax payments.

Further adding to Gupta’s headaches last week, the Bank of England forced Wyeland’s Bank, which he owns, to return millions of pounds in retail deposits after an FT investigation found that Wyeland’s was routing millions to its owners’ businesses via shell companies.

In talks with unions, Gupta apparently admitted that some of Liberty Steel’s UK operations were loss-making and this needed to be addressed. There are also concerns about an aluminium smelter in Fort William whose purchase by another Gupta company, Alvance Aluminium, was supported by the SNP government – which could leave the Scottish government liable for hundreds of millions.

Liberty Steel’s crisis talks with the government continue.

So, what are freeports and what might the government be hoping to achieve with their introduction?

In their simplest form, freeports are areas exempt from usual tariffs, a bit like an airport duty-free zone. Goods can enter without being taxed and are only taxed on exit if they enter the host country. Tariff exemptions are often combined with other measures designed to attract businesses. In the UK’s case the Treasury has stated it is planning further tax relief and measures to speed up the planning process for freeports.

Freeport enthusiasts argue these measures will not only help kickstart growth, but also rebalance the economy geographically. Sunak’s report suggested that they could create up to 86,000 jobs – mainly in manufacturing. A report published by Mace was even more enthusiastic, claiming that the introduction of “Supercharged Freeports” could add £9 billion to the UK economy annually and create 150,000 jobs in the North.

Some proponents also like to think of freeports as a Brexit dividend, and that they were not possible while the UK was in the EU.

The problem, critics say, is that these claims just don’t hold up to scrutiny. According to Professor Catherine Barnard, Professor of European Union and Employment Law: “Current evidence suggests that what we see in freeports is not so much job creation as job relocation. For those areas that have got freeports it’s clearly good news, but on a macro level you’re just shuffling business around. Felixstowe might do well out of this, but potentially at the cost of Great Yarmouth.”

As for a Brexit dividend, “The idea we couldn’t establish freeports under the EU is simply nonsense – there are dozens of freeports in the EU.” Indeed, the UK itself had seven freeports until David Cameron’s government let them fade from existence in 2012. Barnard also added: “The UK’s new state aid regime also very closely mirrors the EU’s so we won’t be able to just shovel money into these places.”

Certainly, some of the advantages of freeports cited by their proponents seem somewhat dubious – most notably tariff inversion.

Widely taken advantage of by US freeports, tariff inversion involves getting around the fact that tariffs on intermediate goods such as car engines and pharmaceutical chemicals are often higher than the tariffs on the finished goods, i.e. cars and medicines. This creates an incentive to import the finished goods – rather than import the components and manufacture them domestically. Getting rid of the tariffs incentivises local manufacture. Notably, Sunak’s 2016 report not only proposed US freeports as a paradigm but also based its 86,000 new jobs estimate on UK freeports being equally successful.

Yet experts point out there is very little scope for tariff inversion in the UK. A report by the UK Trade Policy Observatory found that the only category of goods which might benefit from tariff inversion in the UK was products used in the manufacture of dairy, starch and animal feeds which account for approximately one per cent of the UK’s total imports in 2019.

Free port advocates appear more enthused by other reforms of the sort seen in generic special economic zones. According to Eamonn Ives, a Senior Researcher at the Centre of Policy Studies: “What I really hope is that the government takes advantage of these areas to experiment with tax reform – cuts to commercial property tax, business rates, full expensing. Reforms to planning would also be great.”

Long-term, Ives hopes these measures could be rolled out across the country after being trialled in freeports. The Treasury seems to have something similar in mind, talking of “regulatory sandboxes” which could “facilitate the trialling and testing of new technology and processes”.

A final factor to consider is that the government might be trying to make a virtue of simply shuffling things around. Regional inequality is a major issue in the UK and the government has promised to address it. Doing so might help the Conservatives hold on to the seats in the North and the Midlands poached from Labour in the 2019 election. It’s been pointed out that two freeports – Teesside and the East Midlands Airport – are located in areas where the Conservatives hold a clutch of new seats and two Tory metro mayors are facing elections in May.

Still, this would fall short of what free port advocates hope for. “If freeports simply cause economic activity to shift from one part of the country to another, one could question their efficacy as a way of getting growth going again – especially if they draw economic activity away from already struggling regions,” says Ives.

From a regional inequality perspective, the programme could also benefit from better targeting. Some genuinely deprived areas like Teesside and Liverpool stand to benefit but others like Blackpool have been left off the list in favour of the relatively affluent Solent.

Shifting growth regionally might also end up being in tension with the idea of using these areas as regulatory sandboxes; if the changes made to attract businesses to these areas are eventually rolled out across the country the comparative advantage disappears.

Whether freeports are a success or a failure will depend a great deal on what the government actually wants to achieve.

Sunak split his Budget into three major parts.

The first focused on extending, and even expanding, a great deal of the support offered during the pandemic even after 21 June, when the government plans to lift remaining lockdown restrictions. Sunak’s biggest move here was committing to extend the furlough until the end of September – with the only change being businesses being asked to contribute 10 per cent more from July and 20 per cent more from August.

In terms of help for businesses, the support for the self-employed is also being extended until the end of September and the newly self-employed who filed their first tax returns in 2019/20 can now also claim the benefits. Yet many will likely be disappointed that owners who mainly pay themselves via dividends are still being left out.

Still, there are other sweeteners focused on helping businesses reopen and get back on their feet following the lockdown. The most eye-catching proposal was grants to help reopening – £6,000 for essential businesses and £18,000 for non-essential businesses which will only be allowed to reopen later. Recovery loans worth up to £10 million were also announced with the government guaranteeing 80 per cent of their value. The battered culture sector will receive special assistance from a £300 million recovery fund. The hospitality and leisure sector is looking at an extension to business rates reduction and a further cut to VAT.

Sunak also announced that the £20 increase to Universal Credit is being extended for another six months and a one-off £500 payment to Working Tax Credit claimants.

Also of note was a bung for the housing sector with stamp duty holiday being extended and a new mortgage support scheme.

Having promised a splurge Sunak turned to the second part – taxes – talking solemnly of how it would be “irresponsible” to let public debt rise further. Corporation tax is set to rise to 25 per cent, but only in April 2023 which lets him avoid the risk of choking off the post-pandemic recovery. The only other real increase was done stealthily by freezing income tax thresholds so they no longer rise with inflation. But the freeze only happens after the previously promised increases take effect. In total, the new taxes should bring in an extra £17 billion and £8 billion each a year by 2025/26. Meanwhile, many other taxes – National Insurance, VAT, duties on fuel and alcohol, and inheritance tax – are all being frozen.

Sunak also proposed a startlingly ambitious tax break, a 130 per cent “super -deduction” for businesses making investments in improving productivity. In effect, the government will be paying them to invest in this area.

At first glance the tax increases seem remarkably modest. However, according the OBR the cumulative effect will be that by 2025/26 the tax burden will rise to 35 per cent – the highest since Labour Chancellor Roy Jenkins in the late 1960s. Indeed, the Confederation of British Industry warned that the proposed corporation tax increase “sends a worrying signal to those planning to invest in the UK” and would prompt “a sharp intake of breath” among employers.

The third and final part focused on the government’s commitment to “Build Back Better”. The three most striking proposals here were the promise to set up a new “Treasury North” campus in Darlington near Teeside, establishing freeports in eight locations across the country including Teeside, and finally committing £12 billion for a new infrastructure bank based in Leeds. A new £4.8 billion “Levelling-up Fund” and various chunks of funding for towns in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were trailed.

Some more cynical observers might notice how the spending appears to complement Tory political priorities. Teeside is after all home to a crop of new Tory MPs and Conservative Mayor Ben Houchen who is campaigning for re-election in May. Meanwhile, the generous funds for Scotland come as the government tries to quell calls for independence.

Keir Starmer struggled to respond to the Budget as powerfully as Labour would have hoped. Responding to such a vast and technical document on the fly is always tricky. The fact that Sunak had parked so many tanks if not on Labour lawns made it even harder. Criticism of Sunak for failing to announce new measures to help social care and the NHS – both battered by the pandemic – was his strongest attack line. Calls to increase sick leave will also probably be popular. Finally, calling on the government to make the £20 increase to Universal Credit permanent is red meat for the party.

Yet the rest of his attacks mainly focused on the government not going far enough – and blaming the severity of the pandemic’s toll on the austerity of the Cameron-Osborne years. But the debate has moved on – with Boris banning Tories from so much as mentioning the “A” word – and Starmer reduced in large part to simply calling on the government to do more shows he is struggling to articulate his own new vision.

SPACs, also known as blank cheque companies, are companies with no commercial operations that list themselves on the stock market for the sole purpose of raising money that they then use to acquire an existing private company bringing it onto the stock exchange without the usual IPO process. Often the SPAC is created with no specific target in mind – though it is usually expected some sort of deal will be made within two years.

Now, in a report commissioned by the UK government, Lord Hill, the former EU finance commissioner, is proposing to make it more attractive to list SPACs in the UK. Currently, UK rules force SPACs to suspend their trading in shares when they announce a merger unless they can provide a full prospectus. The new report recommends that the UK adopt US rules and scrap this requirement while adopting shareholder protections such as the right to vote on the acquisition and to redeem shares before the merger if shareholders wish to exit. Another recommendation is explicitly allowing companies to provide “forward-looking information”, i.e. financial forecasts estimating future revenue when listing – a key part of SPACs’ appeal in the US. Finally, the report recommends making listing more flexible generally by lowering the free float requirement, the portion of a company’s issued share capital that is in the hands of public investors, to 15 per cent.

The move comes as the government seeks to capitalise on Brexit to shake up City regulations and ensure that London remains a leading global financial centre. However, the moves are also fuelled by worries that New York and European financial firms are moving to poach business post-Brexit. The report flatly states: “The bottom line from a competitive point of view is, however, clear: there is a real danger that the perception that the UK is not a viable location to list a SPAC is leading UK companies, notably fast-growing tech companies, to seek a US – or indeed EU – de-SPAC route for financing”.

Indeed, Amsterdam, which recently overtook London as Europe’s biggest trading centre in European equities, is now moving to promote SPAC trading. Meanwhile, New York has seen roughly 180 SPACs listed to London’s one, and promising UK tech start-ups such as online used car dealership Cazoo and the health app Babylon are said to be in talks with US SPACs.

There are, however, good reasons to be sceptical of the current SPAC craze.

Until recently SPACs had something of a bad odour about them as they allow private companies to circumvent the usual disclosure requirements needed to be listed on stock exchanges. The sense was that a company doing this probably had something they preferred to keep quiet.

While the current craze shows this stigma has evaporated, recent developments suggest perhaps it should come back. One prominent business to list itself using a SPAC was Nikola Motor Company – which deployed slick visual designs to promise electric trucks of the future. Then came the report by the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research that accused the company of being nothing more than an “intricate fraud”. One of the most striking, and hilarious, revelations was that a video which supposedly showed a Nikola truck smoothly cruising down the road in fact showed the truck rolling down a hill – with camera angle then altered to conceal this fact… Had the company listed itself on the stock market via a normal IPO disclosure requirements would have made concealing these inconvenient facts harder.

It’s also worth noting that Wirecard – another tech company now at the centre of a massive fraud scandal – also circumvented normal IPO requirements, though it did so by taking over a defunct call centre company which was already listed on the stock exchange.

Even in cases where the companies being acquired aren’t engaged in massive fraud – most of them, one would hope – lack of disclosure can be a problem.

The majority of companies that SPACs are looking at are tech start-ups – no wonder considering the how tech stocks have soared in the past year. Yet even many non-fraudulent tech start-ups have a tendency to provide *ahem* optimistic assessments of their own prospects trading on anticipated future success. After all, Tesla made its first profit last year 18 years after it was founded and Uber has yet to make one, but this hasn’t prevented them from having sky-high valuations. Why should it stop them? This is of course the reason that the right to release financial forecasts of projected revenue is so key to the current SPAC-mania in the US.

Still, even with plenty of – possibly irrational – exuberance going around, IPO disclosure could prick some of the more absurd bubbles. In 2019 the office-sharing company WeWork saw its anticipated sky-high IPO abandoned after the required disclosures revealed massive losses. Subsequent scrutiny revealed other troubling features such as a frat house-style corporate culture that ignored sexual harassment complaints and the wildly eccentric behaviour of its founder Adam Neumann – who  trademarked the word We and then sold it to his own company for $6 million.

But now WeWork, whose finances have been pummelled by the pandemic shutting down office across the world, is apparently trying to go public again – via a SPAC…

Fizzing tech markets pull in investors at least partly based on the anticipation that the SPAC stocks will increase in value once the acquisition is announced. Many are worrying that SPACs themselves are becoming an asset bubble. The case of Churchill Capital Corp IV and Lucid Motors – another electric vehicle company, though not of the fraudulent variety – is a cautionary tale.

Reports that Churchill and Lucid were in talks drove up share prices by an astounding 472 per cent as visions of Tesla danced before investors’ eyes, even as Lucid responsibly downplayed the comparison. Yet when the deal was finally announced 22 February reality set in and the shares are now trading at roughly half the price that they were.

This is not to say there are no SPAC success stories out there. The deal between the SPAC Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp and the online gambling operator DraftKings looks to be paying off handsomely. And given the current craze perhaps the rule changes are necessary to keep London attractive for investors. However, with so many SPACs being founded left, right and centre by unconventional players – like former basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and Philip Krim, the CEO of an unprofitable mattress company – one can’t avoid the feeling that something has to give.

Looking at the speaker’s list, absolute loyalty to Trump seems to be the only necessary, and acceptable, qualification. Top of the bill is Trump himself while notable in his absence is Vice-President Mike Pence, who just year was listed in the number two slot – before he committed apostasy and followed his constitutional duty in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election. Mitt Romney, who just eight years ago was the party’s presidential nominee, is nowhere in sight – nor is any other Republican who voted to impeach Trump.

Casting about for the party’s old guard the closest one comes is to Ted Cruz, elected in 2013 on the back of the Tea Party wave – back when that seemed the craziest the Republicans had to offer – and who is now a close Trump ally and who played a leading role in objecting to the certification of Biden’s victory.

There are a few conservative rising stars on display but they are something to behold. Josh Hawley the Senator from Missouri elected in 2018 who – along with Cruz – lead the charge to overturn the election in the Senate is prominently billed. We also have Lauren Boebert. Only elected in 2020 the congresswoman has already managed to distinguish herself for voicing support for the QAnon conspiracy… The idea that top Democrats are part of an international satanic paedophile ring may sound a bit out there but as Trump himself said “I’ve heard these are people that love our country, so I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”

Yet, beyond Trump what unites these people? What is the Republican agenda?

Most Republicans will claim they are the party of the working class. It’s a view that has been around ever since Trump narrowly won the Rust Belt in 2016 off the back of white blue-collar voters defecting from their usual Democrat allegiances. After Trump made sizeable inroads among Latino voters, and perhaps a few small ones among African-American voters, in 2020 the tag line had been hastily expanded to read the new party of the multi-racial working class.

But what does this really mean? There are two interpretations. For Greg Swenson, a spokesperson for Republicans Overseas, the shift seems mainly ones of style. “When Trump came to power we were worried he wouldn’t govern like a conservative but he did. On the tax cut in 2018 sure other Republicans would have done that but would they have been as aggressive? Same goes for slashing regulation, he went in like a bull in a china shop. What I think Trump managed – by tapping into that anger at establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle – was showing working people that these things help them by creating jobs.”

In terms of concrete policy shifts, Swenson did suggest Trump had changed calculations about China and trade. However, when it comes to winning the 2024 election – where polls suggest Trump will once again be the Republican nominee – Swenson thinks the key lies with once again tapping into anger at the perceived liberal establishment. “The next election could be woke vs unwoke. And we could win that.”

Still, this approach doesn’t necessarily stack-up. Certainly, anti-establishment sentiment is a big part of Trump’s appeal. However, his victory in the 2016 election also came in the large part off winning independents by unceremoniously ditching long-standing, but unpopular, Republican priorities of making large cuts to popular programmes like Medicare and Medicaid. Swing voters saw him as a moderate.

Later when Trump endorsed more traditional conservative policies attempting to repeal Obamacare and passing his tax cut – while promised infrastructure spending failed to materialise – Republicans lost the 2018 midterm elections in a landslide. Even his shattering of liberal pieties seems to have tipped from asset to liability as college-educated suburban voters fled the party in the last election.

This has lead some conservative thinkers to another interpretation of Trumpism – that it means conservatives getting more comfortable with big government. In the Senate figures like Hawley, Romney, and Marco Rubio are dipping their toes into ideas like industrial strategy, minimum wage hikes, and increased child support.

However, there are problems with this approach as well. As Geoffrey Kabaservice, Director of Political Studies at the Niskansen Centre, bluntly puts it: “Some people are trying to put flesh on the bones of some sort of populist agenda  that Trump maybe sketched out. But the party as a whole is too much in the hands of lunatics at the state level. It’s also going to have a real problem breaking with its donor class who don’t want it at all to stand for a populist agenda and do want to go back to the good old Reaganite themes.”

The complete breakdown in partisan relations that occurred under Trump also complicates the issue. Hawley’s ideas of blue-collar conservatism has seen him cooperate with Democrats on Big Tech regulation. Now, following his objections to certifying Biden’s victory and the storming of Capitol Hill, Democrats won’t even give him the time of day.

Meanwhile, what once was the Republican centre that could theoretically have backed parts of a populist agenda has almost completely disappeared – and what survives is alienated from Trump. Indeed, the boldest piece of Republican populism floated of far was Romney’s plans to sharply increase child benefits on conservative pro-family grounds. However, Romney is alienated from the Trumpian mainstream that controls the party. Furthermore, while the plan attracted praise from the left, almost all Republicans – even figures like Hawley and Rubio – trotted out their usual criticisms of welfare provisions.

Amidst all these tensions it seems that only Trump can provide unity. His appeal to the party base is founded on a personalised loyalty to him letting him elide these policy tensions. Yet, as 2020 proved this personal appeal was not enough to win a majority outside his own party. And so long as Trump is present, the GOP’s continued focus on a man who seems to have no values beyond his own self-interest is undermining its own ability to articulate a new vision of what it stands for.

The Conservative and Labour parties are now demanding an explanation for this extraordinary move. Douglas Ross MP, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said the Scottish parliament was facing a “crisis of credibility” and demanded the Crown Office explains its actions.

Ross further alleged the dual role played by James Wolffe QC – who serves both as Lord Advocate at the Crown Office and as the Scottish government’s chief legal adviser – might represent a conflict of interest. This echoes allegations made in the documents Salmond submitted to the inquiry, that the Crown Office is unfit for purpose and too close to the current Scottish government.

Ruth Davidson, the former Scottish Conservative leader, back standing in at Holyrood while Ross seeks a seat in May’s elections, has demanded an independent judge-led inquiry into why the Scottish government was blocking the inquiry committee’s access to key information. She added: “This has now got to the structure of democracy in Scotland, and whether our institutions are robust or whether they have been corrupted.”

Scottish Labour has echoed these calls. Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s interim leader who is also serving on the inquiry committee, said: “The Crown Office’s unprecedented intervention yesterday demands explanation – we cannot have this parliament cowed into submission by the will of the Crown Office.” She also demanded that Wolffe appear before the inquiry committee to explain the Crown Office’s decision claiming that the “credibility” of the Scottish parliament was at stake.

In response to the redaction, Salmond has refused to appear before the committee today as he was scheduled to. He has said he will appear on Friday instead. In a public statement the former First Minister not only called for an explanation but also said that he had “instructed his lawyers to request specifically that the Crown “preserve and retain all material and communications with all or any third parties which led to their decision to intervene at the very last minute just as he was set to give his evidence.” Having won one legal battle when he was cleared of 13 sexual assault charges last year, it seems he is preparing for another.

Today, two years later, Biden strode onto the conference stage and declared, “I’m a man of my word, America is back. The trans-Atlantic alliance is back.” He went on to praise the importance of the European-American partnership, declare his commitment to America’s alliances, and propose cooperation on the key challenges of the day from the pandemic to climate change. For Europeans bruised by four years of Donald Trump threatening to withdraw from NATO, sinking the Iran deal and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement – Biden’s words were reassuring.

The President’s promise to commit $4 billion to Covax – the World Health Organisation’s global vaccination programme mainly aimed at developing countries – will be welcome. Just yesterday Emmanuel Macron said more had to be done to help poorer countries vaccinate and proposed that Europe send five per cent of its vaccines to these nations. Calls for a new summit on climate change to push top emitters to further reduce their carbon footprint was also exactly the sort of thing the European Union likes to hear. And Biden’s promise to re-engage with Iran and seek a new nuclear deal will have gone down well.

Yet tensions lurk under the surface.

The crux of Biden’s speech was that today’s world, and the one to come, was one defined by a growing competition between democracy and autocracy. As he put it: “We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world. We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that given all the challenges we face […] autocracy is the best way forward, and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting these challenges.”

The autocracies in question were China – which was, according to Biden, undermining US and European prosperity with unfair economic competition and attempts to shape future technology to authoritarian ends – and Russia – which was spreading fake news, trying to undermine NATO and the European Union, and engaging in reckless hacking.

While firmly declaring that this wasn’t the start of a new Cold War, and that cooperation with these powers would be necessary to combat the pandemic and climate change, Biden was also firm in his aims. “I believe with every ounce of my being democracy will and must prevail… I hope our fellow democracies are going to join us in this vital work,” he said.

The only problem is that most European democracies don’t seem very keen on the idea.

In December the EU signed a trade deal with China – making it all too clear that it had no interest in joining the Sino-American trade war that the Biden administration seems set to continue pursuing. The move was a pointed declaration of the EU’s independence from America on this point. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel continues to push through the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline that would leave Germany heavily dependent on Russia for its energy supplies.

Indeed, when it comes to pushing back against Russia and China, Biden will find a closer ally in Britain, regardless of the general antipathy towards Brexit found in the US security establishment. The idea of a new alignment of democracies aimed at containing China – involving the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, and India – is a distinct possibility.

As Biden closed his speech he spoke of the Perseverance Rover – its successful touchdown a joint product of American and European effort – as proof of what the partnership between the US and Europe could achieve. Yet the project – inspiring as it is – is hardly a joint projection of hard power. When it comes to standing shoulder to shoulder on earthbound matters Biden may find that many countries in Europe – and the EU in particular – aren’t quite so keen.

The site is also blocking Australian publishers from being seen by all Facebook users regardless of their location.

Stephen Scheeler said: “I’m a proud ex-Facebooker, but over the years I get more and more exasperated. For Facebook and Mark it’s too much about the money, and the power, and not about the good.” In particular, he was worried that banning established news outlets would make the spread of fake news on the site even worse.

Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, issued a statement – ironically via Facebook post – calling Facebook’s actions “as arrogant as they are disappointing”. Morrison added: “These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behaviour of BigTech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them. They may be changing the world, but that doesn’t mean they run it.”

Facebook’s share price has fallen by around 2 per cent from its closing price on Wednesday.

Facebook’s dramatic and unprecedented decision comes following a prolonged argument with the Australian government over a proposed law to force big tech companies to pay for news they display on their sites. Under the proposed new law big tech companies would be forced to go through binding arbitration procedures with news providers to determine how much they would have to pay for articles shared on their networks.

Other provisions include a non-discrimination clause to ensure all publishers are treated equally and a requirement that publishers are notified in advance about algorithm changes that could affect search engine rankings or data collection. The law is expected to pass either this week or the next.

Facebook, which has long argued that the law would place an unfair burden on it, has now responded with this dramatic ban. In a statement issued yesterday William Easton, Managing Director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, said: “The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

Easton argues that news publishers in fact already benefited more from Facebook than Facebook did from them. “Last year Facebook generated approximately 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated AU$407 million. For Facebook, the business gain from news is minimal. News makes up less than 4 per cent of the content people see in their News Feed.”

Still, neither the arguments nor the sudden move to block Australian news seems to have moved Australian politicians – and if anything may have strengthened their resolve.

Anger at Facebook has been further intensified by the vast number of non-news organisations caught up in the ban including a government site providing information about the pandemic, trade unions, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.

Meanwhile, Google, which also stands to be affected by the law, has begun to take a more conciliatory approach. Having previously threatened to completely leave Australia, Google now seems to be hurrying to strike deals to pay for content on its own terms.

Most notably, Google yesterday announced it was striking a global deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to pay for its content, settling a long-running dispute which dates back to 2009. Google has also struck deals with other publishers in roughly a dozen countries. However, this is the first global deal – and the money being coughed up is said to be orders of magnitude larger.

The deal also seems to herald cooperation between News Corp and Google in other areas as well. In a statement on the deal News Corp said the agreements also included the development of a subscription platform, sharing revenue from Google’s ad technology services, and investments into videojournalism by YouTube. Indeed, some critics of the deal have expressed worries that it will provide News Corp with an unfair advantage over other media organisations.

Meanwhile, these events are being watched closely in both Europe and America where politicians are also contemplating similar laws to curb Big Tech’s power and support news publishers. After years of burgeoning Big Tech profits and declining margins in the traditional media the balance may be about to shift.

The planned speech will let Starmer stake out his economic vision for the country ahead of Rishi Sunak’s budget, due on 4 March, which by custom he, not Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds, will reply to.  Starmer has so far positioned himself as being broadly supportive of government measures – merely criticising it for being too slow and ineffectual. Now he has an opportunity to build his own brand beyond an image of sensible – some would say “dull” – competence.

In this vein, the speech is probably also an attempt to quiet grumblings in his party that Starmer has not done enough to hold the government to account and build up an alternative vision for the country even as he waged war on the left. An article in The Guardian by Tom Kibasi, a former ally who helped run Starmer’s leadership campaign, which declared “The country cannot afford for Starmer to waste another year being hard on Labour and soft on the Tories” was a telling sign of how deep the discontent runs.

So, with these two aims in mind we can expect something bold tomorrow but precisely what is unclear.

Big ticket spending is the go-to announcement for a Labour leader. The enormous spending and infrastructure plans designed to speed up post-pandemic economic recovery currently being floated in the US might provide some inspiration. Starmer’s team makes no secret of its admiration for Biden whose winning back of the Midwest partly by promising good jobs in green industries is seen as a potential model for the quest to rebuild the “Red Wall”.

The only problem is that Boris Johnson’s government has already promised exactly this. His slogan, “Build back better”, is identical to the one adopted by the Biden administration and talk of a “Green Industrial Revolution” is not a million miles from ideas of “Green New Deal”. The key for Starmer will be to come up with a proposal which sounds distinctive – not just promising more of what the government says it is already planning to do.

Still, if the Tories are parking tanks on Labour’s lawn Starmer has the opportunity to return the favour. Sir Keir has reportedly been taking strategy tips from Peter Mandelson, New Labour’s eminence grise who famously proclaimed himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”.

A leaked email last week from Starmer’s director of policy declared that Labour had to become “unashamedly pro-business” in order to regain the trust of working people. As such, in addition to potential catchy new ideas Starmer could use the opportunity to bring renewed attention to Dodds’ call to make the terms on emergency loans given to businesses during the pandemic easier – e.g. by letting them defer payment until profits return – which could well be popular among many Tory leaning small business owners.

Tax is another potential line of attack. Just last week Starmer said the government should not strangle the recovery by raising taxes. The speech could be a good opportunity to expand on this theme – and pile pressure on the deficit-conscious Rishi Sunak who is apparently planning a £6 billion raid on personal tax allowances in an attempt to reduce the deficit.

Boris’ embrace of higher spending also presents an opportunity for Starmer because it has shifted the terms of the debate. Not so long ago, calling for more spending without taking the political risk of pairing this with planned tax rises would have seen Labour savaged as fiscally irresponsible. However, Boris’ pointed abandonment of austerity has taken the wind out of debates about the deficit – even if Sunak remains personally hawkish.

Meanwhile, the consensus among economists has also shifted dramatically. A sense of crisis plus ultra-low interest rates mean that Ken Rogoff of all people – whose work convinced George Osborne of the need for austerity – now finds himself agreeing with arch-Keynesian Paul Krugman about the government’s need to spend freely without worrying too much about debt.

The speech is a tight-rope for Starmer. The need for eye-catching policies to calm his party needs to be balanced against the risks of making too many big promises to seem credible which undermined Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto. However, with the usual concerns about debt and spending limits more muted than they have been in a decade and governments across the world taking a more active role in the economy than at any point since World War Two, he also has a real opportunity to make a bold case. The trick will be striking the balance between boldness and credibility.

The crux of Trump’s lawyers’ case was context and freedom of speech. After condemning the trial as an “unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance”, Michael Van der Veen argued that no reasonable person could think the speech that Trump gave to his crowd of supporters shortly before some of them stormed Congress “was in any way an incitement to violence or insurrection”.

As supposed proof that Trump was merely engaging in the fiery rhetoric all sorts of politicians indulge in, Van der Veen referred to various prominent Democrats urging their supporters to “fight” for this or that. He then accused Democrats of “manipulating evidence” by playing longer versions of the videos of Trump’s speech that Democrats played – arguing that seen at greater length Trump’s non-violent meaning and intention was clear.

It is difficult to see in what world such context helps Trump – in terms of the verdict of history. The context is Trump spent three months denying he lost the election, gave a speech urging supporters to go to Capitol Hill to “stop the steal” and told them normal rules don’t apply. They then stormed the place while his appointees delayed deploying the National Guard. When Democrats urged supporters to fight, these supporters didn’t then invade a building in Washington – some of them brandishing baseball bats and wearing body armour – and assault the police.

The freedom of speech argument also holds little water. Even in the US, which rightly takes this freedom very seriously, I would not be safe from legal consequences if I didn’t assault someone but merely told someone else to do it. True, Trump did not directly instruct his supporters to invade the Capitol but it is fairly well-established in the court that we can reasonably infer intent from circumstances and subsequent actions. If a loan shark turned up with thugs in tow and said it would be terrible if something were to happen to you, and a few hours later one of those leg-breakers were to smash up your house, the courts would come to a fairly swift and clear judgment.

Even if you think Trump’s statement and the context doesn’t meet the standard of criminal liability, impeachment isn’t a criminal procedure. It is a political judgement about whether someone has abused their office or is otherwise unfit for it due to their actions. It seems fairly clear Trump qualifies on both counts.

On this point it might also be worth noting that some of Trump’s other behaviour since the election could well merit impeachment. In particular, he looks set to face a criminal investigation over the call in which he tried to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” some votes that would hand him victory in the state.

Of course, in America’s hyper-partisan environment this matters little. Trump will soon be acquitted because there are not the votes in the Senate to convict him.

Yet, this begs the question, if this isn’t impeachable, what is?

Writing to students, the university’s principal and vice-chancellor, Sally Mapstone, said the decision had been made based on the expectation that the Scottish government will continue to enforce significant restrictions on travel and other activities in coming months. Under such circumstances Mapstone said the university would not be able to bring back large numbers of students or provide adequate in-person teaching.

She said:

“I know that this will be a big disappointment to many students, and staff, who had hoped to return to St Andrews and our classrooms in this academic year. This is especially true for many of our final year students who will be unable to conclude their studies in St Andrews in the way we had all hoped.

We are acting now, however, to provide you with as much certainty as early as we can, having listened carefully to student leaders and our staff, and considered all the evidence available to us on the predicted course of the pandemic.

I am so sorry that our University and the town will be missing so many of you in the remaining weeks of teaching, and that your university experience continues to be disrupted by the pandemic and its attendant restrictions on all our lives.

We are taking this step, however, in the certainty that we can fulfil all students’ learning outcomes, and continue to provide our hallmark high quality learning, contact, and support online.”

Universities Minister Michelle Donelan said:

“We know this is a difficult time for students and we have prioritised their education and wellbeing from the start of the pandemic.

“Measures are currently in place to reduce transmission and the majority of students should not return to university, and should study from their current residence where possible until at least 8 March.

“We will have a clearer picture of the data and pressures on the NHS by mid-February, at which point we can set out further details on our approach to the wider reopening of education settings, including universities, as part of our plan for leaving lockdown.”

This decision by St Andrews raises the prospect of similar decisions by other universities in Scotland and the rest of the UK. One ray of hope for students who want their universities to reopen might be that some institutions might simply cancel the current term in hope that things may reopen for the final part of the academic year in early summer, if all is going well with vaccines. Still, even in this best case scenario millions of students face spending an entire academic year without setting foot in the universities they are paying thousands of pounds a year to attend. Universities relying on student rents to make ends meet are looking at a deepening hole in their already perilous finances.