You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘The Spectator’ tag.
There are two more increasingly popular Spectator TV videos to view, brilliantly presented by Andrew Neil.
Each of the episodes below is one hour long, but it is unlikely that those seeking real news and analysis will be bored.
As a supporter of President Trump, I was somewhat less impressed with Episode 3, from September 17, which downplayed his chances for re-election as well as his foreign policy, as many of us consider it a peacetime triumph:
Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was the first to be interviewed about his nation’s handling of coronavirus. As we know, they had no lockdown.
Tegnell regretted not having controlled the many deaths in care homes — similar to those in other Western nations. There were also other lives that could not be saved because of co-morbidities. He said that a lockdown would not have saved them.
The problem in the care homes related to their separation from a national health care system, again, not dissimilar to the tragic result seen in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
He indicated that Sweden wanted to ensure that care home fatalities were resolved going forward as well as those among minority populations. He said that an EU commission was looking into those challenges.
Neil asked why Sweden was one of the few countries that ignored the projections from Imperial College London earlier this year. Tegnell replied that Imperial’s models were ‘quite extreme’ and ‘doubtful’. He added that models are not made ‘for prognosis’ because ‘you don’t really know’ what is going to happen.
He said, ‘This is not a competition’ and expressed his desire for more international collaboration and discussion to find a common pathway towards fighting the a second wave of the pandemic as well as agreement on testing.
He said that Sweden had been conducting 80,000 tests a week with no recent deaths.
Good for Sweden. They did well considering they bucked all the odds.
In case the interview is difficult to listen to because Tegnell is on a train, here is another transmission:
Episode 4 of Spectator TV, from Thursday, September 24, covered a multitude of health, economic and political topics:
Kate Andrews talked about the broadcast that Dr Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance made about coronavirus last week. Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave a statement last week on a winter economic programme. It focussed on a change from furlough, which expires in October, to a jobs subsidy for viable employment. She said that there is no doubt that unemployment will rise in the UK in the coming months.
James Forsyth echoed that and said that Rishi Sunak’s plan is to retain as many current jobs as possible but also to create many more.
On that note, Katy Balls said that there is some tension between 10 and 11 Downing Street. Boris errs on the side of health and personal safety. Rishi is more focussed on the economic numbers in order to keep Britain afloat.
With regard to coronavirus, Dr Flavio Toxvaerd, an economic epidemiologist from Cambridge University, said that epidemiologists do not have a good estimation of human behaviour. He did not believe that we were likely to see the latest coronavirus predictions from Whitty and Vallance’s graphs come true. That said, there is a delicate balance to be struck between health and the economy in dealing with COVID-19. Both are critical at this time. Neither can be viewed in isolation.
With regard to his eponymous amendment anticipated to be brought before the House of Commons, Sir Graham Brady said he felt confident that any future coronavirus-related statutory instruments would have to be brought before the House of Commons for debate and a vote prior to implementation.
Questions have been raised as to Boris Johnson’s future as Prime Minister. Katy Balls and James Forsyth both thought that he would not be gone by the end of the year, as many have predicted over the past several days. Leaving the EU, they predicted, will put fuel in the tank for 2021, so to speak.
Turning to the upcoming US elections, Dominic Green said that a Biden administration would favour the EU more than the United Kingdom emerging from Brexit. Again, this assumes that Joe Biden will win the election. Green rightly warned that polls are unreliable. (We saw the same situation four years ago with the polls and the ‘Trump can’t win’ theme. We are seeing it again now.)
Thousands of us are grateful to the NatWest Group for sponsoring these useful broadcasts.
Last Monday, I wrote about the debut of Spectator TV, from The Spectator‘s editors and writers, presented by Andrew Neil.
A lot of viewers loved it:
It’s now on YouTube:
If you missed the first episode …
Episode 2 came out on Thursday, September 10:
Enjoy:
The most interesting parts were with Dr Elisabetta Groppelli, a virologist from the University of London, who has been participating in a coronavirus vaccine trial and explains the complications with said trials.
She said that the UK has pre-ordered the Astra Zeneca vaccine, depending on its success. She added that the UK also has interests in other vaccines that are being tested. She said that she thought that it will be unlikely that any of the successful vaccines will be mandatory but that there will be ‘discussions’ to persuade people to have them.
Katy Balls expressed the Government’s concern about university students socialising and possibly spreading coronavirus with partying, even with the ‘rule of six’ people to any one gathering.
Freddy Gray was as pessimistic as he was in 2016 about a Trump win. He was wrong then. Will he be wrong now? We shall see. He thinks the election result, as the Democrats said at their party conference, will be delayed.
With regard to Brexit, James Forsyth says that the biggest problem we will face is around fish. The French will not want to see a drop in their catch. He also thinks that Angela Merkel will step in at a time that suits her interests.
The questions in the second episode were mostly fronted by Andrew Neil, with a large degree of anonymity.
I enjoyed the first Spectator TV episode more than the first, however, viewers will find much to digest in both.
Once again, well done.
Last Thursday, September 3, 2020, Spectator TV made its debut.
Anyone missing Andrew Neil’s piercing interviews on the BBC should definitely watch it:
You cannot ask for a better hour of interviews and analysis about the events of the past week: simply excellent.
It’s free to view.
Professor Carl Heneghan from Oxford was the guest. He described how the current cases of COVID-19 in the UK differ from the ones we had six months ago: less hospitalisation and very few deaths. He also said that the chances of contracting the virus in Britain now are very low overall.
The possibility of a second Scottish independence referendum was the next topic of discussion. James Forsyth (political editor of The Spectator) and Fraser Nelson (the magazine’s editor) laid out the complexity of the issue as it relates to the United Kingdom as a whole. The Scottish people view independence as a heartfelt emotional issue, hence the rise in the polls for an independent Scotland. Yet, the economic realities point to potential hardship should the nation become independent; the oil price is still very low and Scotland has the most debt of any Western nation. Therefore, it is hard to see how they would get by on their own.
James Forsyth said that the UK government should call Nicola Sturgeon’s bluff and start discussions with her on independence. There would be many issues to resolve: currency, trade, cross-border movement, to name but a few. Once the realities become clearer to the Scottish people, they might vote against it, as they did in their first referendum (2014) which was supposed to settle the question once and for all. Fraser Nelson took a different tack. He said that Unionists (those who want to preserve the United Kingdom) need to make a better — and positive — argument for the Union. Because they have never had to do that, it requires thinking differently and presenting a convincing case to Scots who favour independence.
Katy Balls, The Spectator‘s deputy political editor, described the mood on the Conservative benches in Parliament. One would think that with a majority of 79 (it was 80, until the party whip was withdrawn from Dr Julian Lewis), Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have an easy time of things. However, many MPs had a rough summer defending government policy on COVID-19 to their constituents. They also do not feel as if No. 10 wants them involved in anything useful. Some MPs told Balls that they think Boris is being ‘held prisoner’ in No. 10 and that his principal adviser Dominic Cummings is actually running the show. Furthermore, Boris’s appearances at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) have been a disaster since the House of Commons implemented social distancing. Boris performs much better with a large audience, and it will be some time before he gets one. On a deeper level, however, Conservative backbenchers do not think Boris prepares himself enough for PMQs, which they find insulting to their constituents.
The growing tension between No. 10 and Conservative backbenchers means that Boris has to be careful about what policy positions he puts up for a vote in Parliament. Some, e.g. planning laws, he will delay until local elections are held next year; they are too controversial to vote on now, as he could lose.
The programme ended with a 12-minute Q&A from those who registered to watch the programme live on Zoom. There were a few hiccups with the mute button, but some viewers did get to participate. We did not see their faces, just a black screen with their names to accompany the audio. The questions were intelligently expressed.
If the BBC made programmes like this, no one would be carping about the licence fee.
Roll on Spectator TV. I’m looking forward to the next instalment.
