Brexit

Express
MICHEL Barnier has snubbed a British plan to use political leaders to break the deadlock in the Brexit trade and security talks. The Brussels diplomat told a private meeting he refused an offer for Boris Johnson to begin political bargaining with his EU counterparts in order to find agreements in the rows over future access to Britain’s fishing grounds and common standards. He claimed Downing Street wanted to trigger a “big tug of war” over as many as 30 unresolved issues in the hope of securing a number of concessions from the bloc, EU sources said. The Frenchman insisted the Prime Minister must not be allowed to hold a “mass bargaining session” with the likes of Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen until any future relationship agreement is virtually completed.

City AM
The European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier reportedly told the bloc’s diplomats that the UK has “blocked” progress in key areas of trade deal talks. At a confidential meeting yesterday afternoon, Barnier briefed representatives from the EU’s 27 member states, saying that “fundamental differences” remain between the two sides, Sky News reported. According to minutes of the meeting seen by the broadcaster, Barnier said the most important hurdle was the “level playing field”, which would ensure the UK follows the same rules as the EU on issues such as labour law and state aid.

Express
BREXIT talks are now in the hands of Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he weighs up the EU’s latest demand to get a deal over the line. EU officials have warned they won’t back down on “evolution clauses”, which would ensure UK standards on issues such as the environment, workers’ rights, labour standards, taxation and state aid remain tied to the bloc. But the deadlock remains as UK officials have said they are a “non-starter”. A source said the future of talks was now in the hands of Mr Johnson over the next few “critical days” adding: “More of the same is clearly not going to cut it”.

Sun
BORIS Johnson rejected Brussels taunts that Britain is stalling in Brexit trade talks to see if Donald Trump loses the White House. Downing Street said it was “simply untrue” that fears in London that a Joe Biden administration would take a tougher line on a US/UK trade deal could prompt greater concessions to Brussels by the UK side to get a deal with the EU instead. One source branded the claim from EU officials “wishful thinking” and “desperate stuff”. The latest spat came as Michel Barnier has thrown out British pleas to elevate the Brexit talks to leaders’ level warning they’re now on a “trajectory” for No Deal.

EU

Express
A EUROPEAN Union advisory body has warned the EU it is “playing with fire” during Brexit negotiations in signs panic is spreading across the Continent as the UK gets closer to the momentous moment it unshackles from the bloc. The EU’s advisory body The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) warned the Brussels bloc it faces a “massive rate of unemployment” amid Brexit negotiations with Britain. Giulia Barbucci vice-president of the EESC: “The EU risks a massive rate of unemployment; regarding Brexit, we are playing with fire.  “We need the EU multi-year budget now or there is a risk of mass unemployment.

Express
THE European Union will have new powers to crack down on eurosceptic member states that undermine the bloc’s rules and values, under a deal struck between the EU Parliament and Council. The institutions finally brokered a deal on a tool to tie future budget payments to good behaviour in order to fully mobilise the €1.8 trillion seven-year budget and coronavirus recovery fund. EU negotiators today agreed a breakthrough on the rule-of-law mechanism after years of haggling over a method to crack down on the bloc’s rule-breakers.

Deaths

Telegraph
Official projections which pushed the country into a second lockdown have been quietly revised to no longer suggest deaths could soon overtake those at the peak of the first wave, The Telegraph has learned. Graphs presented at a televised Downing Street press conference on Saturday suggested that the UK would see up to 1,500 Covid deaths a day by early December, far beyond the numbers seen in the first wave. But documents released by Government show that the figures were far too high and have been “amended after an error was found”. The forecast has been revised, reducing the upper end of the scale to around 1,000 deaths a day by December 8 – on a par with the peak of the pandemic in April.

Mail
An official prediction that coronavirus deaths would soon pass those registered in the first wave has been quietly corrected by the government, it emerged last night, because they were too high.  The projections led to the country being hit with a second national lockdown and were shown at a Downing Street press conference last Saturday.  They claimed that England would see up to 1,500 deaths a day by early December, far higher than the peaks of deaths recorded in the first wave.  However, the figures, which caused alarm across the country, have now been amended ‘after an error was found’.  The revised figures now suggest the second peak is likely to be on par with the first with the worst-case scenario at 1,010 deaths a day by December 8 – a similar figure to that seen in April.

Sun
OFFICIAL forecasts used as grounds for a new national lockdown in England have been quietly revised down after the Government admitted they were wrong, reports say. Slides shown at a Downing Street press conference last Saturday suggested that the UK could be seeing 1,500 daily deaths from coronavirus by early December. The rate would have far exceeded the peak of 1,166 deaths seen on April 21, during the first wave of the virus. But slides now published on the Government’s website to accompany the press briefing show a maximum daily death toll of just over 1,000 by December 8.

Independent
Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, has been publicly warned by the official statistics watchdog over the use of data to justify the latest coronavirus lockdown. The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) criticised the failure of the government to release the data and assumptions behind a controversial projection that there could be 4,000 deaths a day unless action was taken. The modelling – which was one of a series of projections highlighted during Saturday’s Downing Street press conference to announce the latest restrictions for England – was widely criticised by Tory MPs as alarmist.

Express
CORONAVIRUS statistics used to justify a second lockdown in England have quietly been amended, drastically lowering the number of anticipated daily deaths. Today the country has gone back into a second national lockdown as cases of the novel virus continue to rise. But official projections have been quietly revised to no longer suggest deaths could soon overtake those in the first wave peak.  On Saturday, graphics revealed during the Downing Street press conference suggested the UK would see up to 1,500 deaths a day by early December. This is far higher than the numbers seen during the first outbreak of the deadly virus back in Spring.

Cases

Mail
Britain’s coronavirus cases remained flat at 24,141 today despite Boris Johnson justifying lockdown by claiming the NHS is under threat from soaring hospitalisations. There was increase of just 4.7 percent on last Thursday’s infections and a drop of 1,063 cases on yesterday’s figure of 25,177. Earlier the Prime Minister and NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens used to a graph of rising Covid-19 inpatients to justify England’s second lockdown. The chart showed there are more than 11,000 people with Covid-19 being treated in hospitals in England now compared to just 500 at the start of September. However, Sir Simon also spelled out the roughly week-long lag between infection and hospitalisation for those who become seriously ill, with death or discharge occurring an average 9 to 19 days later.

Furlough

City AM
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has extended the furlough scheme until the end of March, following days of wrangling over fresh financial support for businesses during the second national lockdown. The furlough scheme, which was due to wind down last Saturday, will be rolled out for the next five months — a year after it was first introduced, Sunak announced in the Commons today. The chancellor said the government will pay up to 80 per cent of wages for staff unable to work during local and national lockdowns across the country. Sunak announced the government will suspend the job retention bonus, which was due to hand employers £1,000 for every furloughed member of staff returned to work.

Vaccine

Express
OXFORD University’s coronavirus vaccine will not be rolled out widely before Christmas due to a lack of capacity, a vaccine expert has suggested. In May this year, Business Secretary Alok Sharma said the university’s vaccine, being produced with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, said 30 million doses would be prepared by September. However, Kate Bingham, head of the Government’s vaccine taskforce, has said AstraZeneca and Oxford will likely only be supplying four million by the end of 2020. The figures were revealed during a Science and Technology Select Committee meeting on Wednesday. Ms Bingham said the estimate of 30 million vaccines being ready by September was “made in good faith,” but that it “assumed absolutely everything would work”.

Sky News
People should be paid to have a COVID-19 jab so the country reaches herd immunity as quickly as possible, a leading ethicist has suggested. Professor Julian Savulescu from the University of Oxford said incentives would help to overcome rising vaccine hesitancy due to perceived safety concerns. People could either be given a financial inducement to have the jab or they could be paid in kind, perhaps foregoing the need to wear a facemask in public, he writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics. “The advantage of payment for risk is that people are choosing voluntarily to take it on,” he says.

Education

Mail
A-level and GCSE grade boundaries should be lowered next year to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, the exams regulator has said. Dame Glenys Stacey, acting chief regulator of Ofqual, said the assessments ought to be made ‘less daunting’ because the coronavirus was making teaching harder. In a letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, Dame Glenys said there was ‘an opportunity to recognise, and to compensate for the baleful impact of the pandemic for all students qualifying in 2021 (and possibly beyond), by setting national performance standards more generously than in normal times.’ Dame Glenys, who took over after Sally Collier stepped down over the summer results fiasco, said: ‘In all years, a student’s prospects and their opportunities to learn are, of course, affected by individual circumstances, but in this exceptional period, almost all students have already had less opportunity to learn in the usual ways, because of the pandemic.’

Times
GCSE and A-level grade boundaries are likely to be lowered next year due to the pandemic, the head of the exams watchdog has said in the first call to make the exams easier. Dame Glenys Stacey, the Ofqual chief executive, wrote to Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, yesterday to say that grading needed to compensate for the “baleful” influence of the pandemic. This means that pupils with lower marks could be allowed to achieve a certain grade. Dame Glenys told Mr Williamson that exams should proceed next year and welcomed the aim to keep schools and colleges open during lockdown.

Sniffer dogs

Express
AIRPORT sniffer dogs could help to improve detection of coronavirus at airports according to a new trial. How would the idea work? A trial conducted at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, in Finland, has reported that sniffer dogs can detect coronavirus  almost as accurately as PCR tests. In its preliminary trials, the research has seen around 100 passengers per day tested using the dogs. Arriving passengers are asked to line up for the test, and wipe their skin with a cloth. The cloth is then placed in a can for the dogs to sniff. Sniffer dogs are trained to avoid negative samples but attract to positive ones. Dogs are trained to point out a positive test by yelping, pawing or lying down.

Testing

Mail
Trials of a rapid coronavirus test which had been due to be used in Liverpool found it missed more than 50 per cent of positive cases. The test, which gives results in 20 minutes, was planned to form part of an ‘Operation Moonshot’ mass-testing programme in the city. But earlier trials in Salford were scaled back after just six weeks, in part due to concerns about the accuracy of the OptiGene Lamp test, according to The Guardian. Greater Manchester’s Mass Testing Expert Group raised concerns about the accuracy of the test, which is favoured in hospitals because of its quick turnaround of results. The scientists reported a ‘sensitivity’ of just 46.7 per cent and found that ‘a high proportion of samples collected from infected individuals in a ‘real world’ setting would not be detected’.

Times
Mass testing could end the need for two weeks of self-isolation, Boris Johnson said yesterday as he exhorted an “anxious, weary and fed-up” nation to follow lockdown rules. The prime minister limited his room for manoeuvre to extend restrictions beyond four weeks on the first day of the England-wide lockdown, saying he had “no doubt” that “we will get things open again before Christmas”. Holding out the prospect of rapid mass testing being piloted in Liverpool as a “real way forward through the crisis”, Mr Johnson said in Downing Street: “People will have as normal a Christmas as possible.”

Protests

Mail
Anti-lockdown and Million Mask March protestors have clashed with police in London over the new coronavirus restrictions. Officers were called to Trafalgar Square, London, earlier this evening during a protest against the second national lockdown  as well as the law around wearing masks.  Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers, 73, stood among the crowds with a megaphone despite being fined £10,000 for his part in a previous rally.  Officers policing demonstrations in the capital on Thursday made 104 arrests with the majority of arrests were for breaches of the Covid-19 regulations.  Police vans lined the Strand as both the City of London and Metropolitan Police forces urged protesters to go home with one officer shouting at a group: ‘You are breaking the law.’

Express
LONDON has descended into chaos as police clash with people out on the streets protesting a second national lockdown. London police have been forced to intervene with large crowds on the capital’s streets on Thursday night. Clashes broke out between the police and people protesting the second coronavirus lockdown. Footage is circulating on social media of police detaining individuals for their behaviour during the protests.  In one video, an individual can be seen being tackled to the ground before being apprehended by two other officers. More police quickly rushed in to surround the police officers apprehending the individuals as a public crowd starts to form.

Remembrance

Sun
PEOPLE must keep moving during Remembrance Sunday’s two-minute silence — or fill out test and trace forms. A war hero has blasted the rule which will apply at services and parades attended by dignitaries and veterans. The public are urged to stay away amid the pandemic. And anyone who stops to spectate at events can expect to be asked for their personal details by organisers under guidance issued by the Ministry of Communities. Falklands veteran Maj Gen Julian Thompson said: “It’s government control freakery. This can only be invented by some guy in an office who doesn’t have anything to do with the public.”  The Royal British Legion urged its members to support services that follow the guidelines, and only where social distancing measures can be adhered to.

Air travel

Mail
British Airways will suspend all flights from Gatwick airport and furlough ‘many more’ staff as the new Covid lockdown bites. In a letter to staff seen by Sky News, the airline warned that it will mean ‘moving many more colleagues, from both operational and support function areas onto the government’s extended Job Retention Scheme.’ BA, whose owner suffered a £5.1 billion loss in the first nine months of 2020, called it a ‘blow to our hopes for the winter season.’ It is the second time the airline has grounded all flights at Gatwick, the previous suspension coming shortly after the first national lockdown in March.

City AM
British Airways has reportedly scaled back its operations for November, including the suspension of all flights from Gatwick airport, due to the new lockdown in England. Already struggling with a hit to demand from the pandemic, the airline has also taken the decision to furlough more staff as it braces for a difficult winter. In a letter to staff seen by Sky News, BA management said: “We have made the difficult decision to further reduce our operation for the rest of November.” “This means far fewer flights than we hoped for in November and means grounding more of our aircraft, including pausing all flights from Gatwick until December.”

TV licence

Telegraph
TV licensing inspectors have been quietly put back to work over the summer and the BBC plans to continue to send them to people’s homes during the new lockdown. In March the broadcaster’s licence fee collectors announced an amnesty on enforcement visits, stating at the time that they wanted to do all they could “to help support customers suffering financial difficulties”. But Telegraph Money has learnt that from as early as July TV Licensing had resumed sending letters to households that had missed payments, as well as to addresses without a licence. From August it began to resume what it calls “field activity” – meaning sending enforcement officers to people’s homes to check for unlicensed televisions.

Sun
THE BBC will continue to send licence fee debt collectors to vulnerable Brits’ homes during lockdown. Pensioners, the poor and people struggling without work face having their doors knocked on by agents demanding money. Outsourcing firm Capita, which chases debts for the Beeb, has instructed field staff to carry on. A letter from bosses told them: “This lockdown dictates businesses will have to close, but this does not include those that deliver essential services. “It is our current intention to continue to operate as we have been.” Concerned Capita staff have admitted they feel “uneasy” at the prospect. One said: “It doesn’t feel right — it’s not right.

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