Day: December 14, 2020

Police and council bosses have blasted proposals to impose Tier 3 coronavirus restrictions on some areas of London while leaving the rest in Tier 2.

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The city has been in the mid tier since lockdown ended in November, but soaring infection rates have prompted Health Secretary Matt Hancock to consider introducing tougher measures in the capital’s worst-hit boroughs when nationwide restrictions are reviewed on Wednesday.

The plan “would mean restaurants and other hospitality businesses in London’s West End could stay open, while those in suburban areas would close”, The Mail on Sunday reports. But the Met Police and local councils are warning that monitoring movements between areas in different tiers would be impossible and that the split could cause public order issues.

Some Tory MPs have also criticised the plan. Six senior Conservatives have sent a letter to Boris Johnson arguing that imposing blanket Tier 3 measures in parts of the capital would hurt not just Londoners but “people across the nation” who depend on the “wealth and prosperity generated by our great city”.

The leaked letter, organised by Harrow East MP Bob Blackman, also warns that London’s Tory MPs may vote against the government’s Covid response plans at next month’s review if the city is plunged into Tier 3.

The Tory rebels may be fighting a losing battle, however, with London now recording higher infection rates than any other region in the UK.

Health ministers told London MPs last week that the positive test rate in the capital was 7%, compared with an average of 5.9% across the rest of the country. And latest official figures show that the city has been hit with nearly 24,000 Covid cases in a week, with rises in every borough, the London Evening Standard reports.

Five boroughs each reported more than 1,000 new cases in the week to 8 December: Havering (1,222), Redbridge (1,109) Newham (1,084), Enfield (1,017) and Waltham Forest (1,013). But “while northeast London remains the Covid hotspot, the disease appears to be seeping across the city”, the newspaper adds.

Indeed, the infection rate in London is so high that tier changes may be announced before the review scheduled for Wednesday, government sources told Politico‘s London Playbook.

However, the leading epidemiologist behind the Covid Symptom Study app has argued that putting the capital into Tier 3 would be a “big mistake” in the push to curb infections, the British Medical Journal website reports.

Speaking at a Royal Society of Medicine event, Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, said: “This on-off business is a total disaster, and we should avoid it. Drinking and festivities will happen if people think that in two days’ time, ‘that is it for another six weeks’.

“It would be madness to do that.”

The public should be under “no illusion” that initiatives aimed at deradicalising jihadis in prison are getting results, the head of the UK terrorism watchdog has warned.

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According to Jonathan Hall QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, many terrorists are “deceptive” and simply say what they think probation staff and other authorities want to hear.

Hall told The Times that there was no harm in offering programmes such as theological mentoring, but “said that it was essential to run them alongside heavy supervision regimes”. The counterterrorism expert is also backing government plans to make released terrorists undergo lie detector tests.

Hall has spoken out as debate rages over how to deal with Britons seeking to return after joining Isis in Syria and Iraq, such as London schoolgirl Shamima Begum, who has been stripped of her British citizenship.

The UK’s official deradicalisation schemes include the Prevent programme, aimed at preventing individuals from being drawn into extremism, and the Channel programme, which is designed to divert extremists away from terrorism.

A “record number of extremists have been sent on the Channel programme in the past year, driven by surging numbers of far-right sympathisers”, the Daily Mail reports.

The project took on 697 new cases in the year to the end of March 2020 – up from 566 in the previous 12 months, and the highest annual tally since 2015. According to the Home Office, 302 of last year’s cases were “referred due to concerns regarding right-wing radicalisation”.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic has seen the number of suspected terrorists arrested in the UK fall to the lowest level in almost a decade. Official figures published last week show that in the year to October 2020, 215 arrests were made – down by 18% on the previous year.