Health News at Your Fingertips

Here is the full text of Michel Barnier’s opening statement when he gave his press briefing earlier after the end of the latest round of UK-EU trade talks.

Face coverings will be compulsory in takeaways, banks and post offices as well as shops, supermarkets and stations in England from tomorrow, new government guidelines have confirmed. My colleague Sarah Butler has the details.

Secondary school children from the most advantaged families will take six months to catch up following the Covid-19 closure of schools while those from disadvantaged backgrounds could take up to a year, according to a study. As PA Media reports, researchers from the University of Southampton also found that primary age children from advantaged families would be approximately a year behind while those from disadvantaged backgrounds would be even further behind.

Dr Nic Pensiero, who led the study, said:

Parents who work in professional and management occupations, which are suitable for home working, are better able to assist their children’s home learning.

When you also consider that such parents are better able to provide children with their own computers and other learning resources as well as a suitable learning space, this puts their children in a significantly better situation than those from non-professional, non-managerial families.

Here is my colleague Peter Walker’s story about the stalemate at the end of the latest round of UK-EU trade talks.

But my colleagues Daniel Boffey and Lisa O’Carroll argue that “a deal still remains the most likely option.” They explain why in an analysis here.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, argued something similar in a long and interesting Twitter thread last night. It starts here.

And here are some of his conclusions.

Here are the main points from Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish government coronavirus briefing.

• Sturgeon criticised Boris Johnson for using the coronavirus crisis to make a political point about the importance of the union. “Celebrating” the pandemic to make a political argument was wrong, she said. Asked about the arguments made by Johnson about the union ahead of this visit to Scotland, she said:

I don’t think any of us, and I include myself in this, should be trying to use Covid and the pandemic and the crisis situation we continue to face as some kind of political campaigning tool. This is a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 50,000 people across the UK. We have all tried to do our best, but I don’t think any of us have got any grounds to crow or to feel satisfied about this … Every leader has a real duty to focus on doing everything we can to tackle this, and not use it as some kind of political weapon.

Sturgeon made the same point in slightly stronger terms when asked again about Johnson. She said:

I don’t think any of us should be championing or celebrating a pandemic that has taken thousands of lives as some example of the pre-existing political case we want to make. This has been a heart-breaking crisis that we’re not out of yet. Too many people died. And all of us have a really, really solemn responsibility to focus on [it] and to get our countries through.

None of us should be crowing about this pandemic in a political sense.

• Sturgeon rejected Johnson’s claim that an independent Scotland would not have had the financial muscle to stop coronavirus causing an economic “disaster”. (See 10.40am.) She said that her briefing was focused on coronavirus and that she did not want to get into a full argument about independence. But, when asked about Johnson’s comments, she did agree to respond to his argument in so far as it related to Covid-19. She said:

[Financial support from the UK government] has been very welcome. But let’s be clear. This is borrowed money. And the reason it is coming from to the Scottish government from the UK government is the UK government has the borrowing powers that Scotland’s doesn’t. Scottish taxpayers will pay the cost of that borrowing just in the same way as taxpayers across the UK will. So it’s not some kind of favour that’s being done for Scotland.

And if the Scottish government had those borrowing powers, we would be able to provide that support correctly, and perhaps we would be able to have greater flexibility in how we design these schemes, just as where we do have autonomous decision making – for example in the decisions we are making to come out of lockdown – we are designing those decisions in a way that best meets Scotland’s need.

She also said some of what Johnson had been saying about the might of the UK Treasury was really “just a feature of where power lies”. She went: “If Scotland was an independent country, like Ireland, we would be doing these thing ourselves.”

• Sturgeon said people in Scotland who are shielding due to being classed as at higher risk from coronavirus will no longer need to from 1 August. The details are here (pdf).

At her Edinburgh briefing a journalist ask Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, if she expects economic growth in Scotland to be lower than in the rest of the UK because the Scottish government is not advising people to go back to the office, whereas Boris Johnson is advising people to do that in England.

Sturgeon says she wants to see economic growth in Scotland. But her priority is to tackle coronavirus, she says.

Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish government’s cabinet secretary for economy, fair work and culture, who is attending the briefing alongside Sturgeon, says that differences between growth in Scotland and in the rest of the UK are mainly explained by sectoral differences (like the size of Scotland’s oil industry), not by differences in the timing of the easing of lockdown.

The briefing is now over. I will post the key points shortly.

At her briefing in Edinburgh a journalist asks Sturgeon about her comment about how an independent Scotland would be able to borrow, and asks what would happen if it did not have its own currency. Sturgeon says she is not willing to get into the details of an independent Scotland’s currency policy now. This is a coronavirus briefing, she says. She says she would be happy to address those questions on another occasion.

Sturgeon says she would have been willing to meet with Boris Johnson if he had asked for a meeting.

She says she thinks she last spoke to him on the day of the knife attack in Glasgow (on 26 June).

She says in some ways she will look forward being able to get back to political sparring. She enjoys that, she says. But she says she does not think it is appropriate at this time.