Health News at Your Fingertips

In separate statements issued on Friday afternoon both sides confirmed the lack of progress on the key issues but said there had been progress on co-operation in law enforcement, something that had deeply concerned police forces in Britain and Northern Ireland who had warned of the loss of access to real time passenger information and the European Arrest Warrant system.

On the main issues though the outlook continued to be bleak.
David Frost, the UK negotiator said there had been “limited progress” on state aid and governance warning “the EU need to move further before an understanding can be reached”.

He also warned of an unbridgeable gulf potentially on fishing rights.
“On fisheries the gap between us is unfortunately very lage and, without further realism and flexibility from the EU, risks being possible to bridge,” he said.

Michel Barnier has just released a statement on the last round of Brexit talks between Boris Johnson and the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.

He reiterated the lack of progress on the three stumbling blocks – state aid, fisheries and governance.

He said:

To reach an agreement, these divergences must necessarily be overcome over the next weeks.

We will continue to maintain a calm and respectful attitude, and we will remain united and determined until the end of these negotiations.

But he added good progress had been made in other areas, including the question of cooperation on justice and policing.

Lack of a deal on policing and justice had worried police forces in Great Britain in Northern Ireland, who had warned it would mean the loss of access to real-time data exchange and delays in extradition.

Barnier said:

[There were] positive new developments on some topics, such as aviation safety, social security coordination, and the respect of fundamental rights and individual freedoms, which are a pre-condition for our future police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.

But there was a lack of progress on some important topics, like the protection of personal data, climate change commitments or carbon pricing; as well as persistent serious divergences on matters of major importance for the European Union.

Council leaders in England were given five minutes’ notice of local lockdown rules being confirmed in their areas, according to emails seen by the Guardian.

Amid growing calls for local authorities to have more control over restrictions, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is urging ministers to put councils “in the driver’s seat”.

Hartlepool and Middlesbrough councils were only informed of the confirmed detail of the proposed restrictions when they received a draft press release from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) at 10.25am on Thursday, five minutes before the measures were announced by Matt Hancock, the leaked emails suggest.

In Merseyside, where new rules were also announced on Thursday, it is understood that council bosses were briefed on the measures 30 minutes before the health secretary’s statement. One senior source said they were surprised and concerned that the rules had been “watered down” from what had been discussed with a minister only 12 hours earlier.

The restrictions are a significant extension to nationwide measures and make it illegal for households in the areas to mix in any indoor setting, including pubs, bars, restaurants and cinemas. The legislation will apply to nearly 5 million people across Merseyside, Warrington and most of north-east England from Saturday. The DHSC said discussions had taken place with local leaders over a number of days.

According to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the latest R value – the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to, on average – is 1.3-1.6 for the UK, with the number of cases growing by 5% to 9% per day.

The figures are a slight rise on last week, where R was between 1.2 and 1.5 and the growth rate between 4% and 8% for the UK. In England the R value has been estimated to be 1.2-1.6, and increase from 1.2-1.5 last week, with R at or above 1 in all regions of the country.

If R is above 1, cases have the potential to rise exponentially.

However it is important to remember that there is a time lag in some of the data used to calculate R, meaning the R figure released each week gives a picture of how the disease was spreading in the preceding two or three weeks. That is one potential reason why the latest R figures are less optimistic that more recent data from a team at Imperial College London that suggested that while cases are rising, the speed of this rise might have slowed.

The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has continued to urge Boris Johnson to bring in laws stopping people from travelling from English Covid hotspots to areas of Wales with low levels of infection.

Residents of areas under local lockdown in Wales are unable to cross county boundaries without good reason but that does not stop people from Wales travelling across the border for leisure.

Drakeford said: “I’ve asked the prime minister to impose in England the same rules as we have here in Wales. I think that would be fair and I look forward to hearing from him.”

The first minister said Wales could bring in rules to stop people travelling from England but he thought it right for the prime minister to take responsibility.

Drakeford put the R number at around 1.3.

The Trump administration is sending the same message as the US Democrats in warning that a US-UK free trade deal could be blocked if the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement is undermined by Brexit, Mick Mulvaney, US special envoy for Northern Ireland said on Friday.

Speaking at an event hosted by Policy Exchange, he said:

(he was) “using different tones but probably at the end of the day the same message. We do not want to see things going back to the way they were before the Good Friday Agreement”.

He also urged the UK to recognise that the Democratic chair of Ways and Means in Congress Richard O’Neill has almost complete power to determine how any UK-US free trade agreement is handled, adding the whole of Congress will study Brexit to ensure it takes into account the preservation of the Good Friday Agreement.

He insisted the Trump administration was delivering essentially the same message as the Democrats, but in a different tone.

He said:

The administration believes just as much in the Good Friday Agreement as Richy O’Neill. There are only two things left in Washington that are truly bipartisan – one is mistrust of China and the other is seeing a peaceful island of Ireland.

On a much delayed visit to Belfast, London and Dublin, Mulvaney was treading a delicate line between his administration’s support for Brexit in principle and the strong Irish vote in America. He pointed out the Catholic vote, not just the Irish Catholic vote, could end up as the swing vote in the battleground states in US Presidential elections.

He repeatedly insisted he was not commenting on the Withdrawal Agreement, but only on how it impacted on the Good Friday Agreement. He said the US was confident that there would be an agreement between the UK and EU by the end of the year, but needed to protect the Good Friday Agreement.

At her daily briefing, Nicola Sturgeon said that Margaret Ferrier’s actions were “reckless, dangerous and completely indefensible and I feel very angry on behalf of all of you”.

Sturgeon said that there could be a variety of reasons why people find it hard to follow rules, they are complicated but “I am struggling to put what Margaret did into any of these categories”.

She is blunt: Ferrier’s was a “flagrant” breach and although “she accepts without reservation that she has made a very serious error of judgment … Can she give me a cogent explanation why she did it? No.”

Travelling by train with a positive test result for Covid was “possibly the worst breach imaginable”, says Sturgeon. “I can’t excuse this, nor am I going to try.”

Sturgeon then goes on to offer a comprehensive timeline for what happened this week.

She says that on Monday, Ferrier told the party in Westminster that she was returning home because a family member was unwell. On Wednesday, she told them about her positive test, which they assumed had happened after her return to Scotland. The truth of the situation became clear through “information from the Commons test-and-trace system” on Thursday morning.

The first time Sturgeon herself knew was Thursday afternoon, shortly after first minister’s questions. The SNP was told the Commons wanted to put out a statement first. Sturgeon wanted Ferrier to issue a statement immediately afterwards, but Ian Blackford, the party’s Westminster leader, was on a plane to Inverness and needed to speak to Ferrier when he landed. Then the situation with the Commons statement changed, and Ferrier put out her statement, followed by the SNP suspending her.

She added:

I think the SNP has acted quickly and appropriately and we have not tried to protect a colleague.

People full of self-righteous criticism of the SNP are folk who completely lost their tongue over a certain special adviser.

Sturgeon insists that there is not “one rule for us politicians and one for everyone else”. She said:

The most important relationship I have right now is with the Scottish public and I can’t ask you to make sacrifices if I am standing here trying to explain away Margaret Ferrier.