My turn:

Illegal immigrants

Mail
French President Emmanuel Macron has blamed Britain for every migrant who drowns in the English Channel and accused UK politicians of hypocrisy.
Macron, who is about to launch his campaign for re-election, said he will ‘step up’ the pressure on Boris Johnson to establish a legal route to Britain for asylum seekers.
He accused the Prime Minister of putting lives in danger because of his migration policy, with record numbers making the perilous journey across the Channel in dinghies.
‘The responsibility for those who die at sea does not fall upon France but upon this British refusal,’ Macron told French newspaper La Voix du Nord.
The French president said current rules encourage illegal migration and do not allow for asylum seekers to seek lawful ways into the country, pushing migrants to attempt the treacherous crossing instead.
‘The British continue to have a system from the 1980s, which manages economic immigration through hypocrisy. There is no legal immigration route,’ the French leader said.
He added: ‘The British must articulate their needs in terms of the economy and reopen a path to legal asylum requests. We are going to step up the pressure.’
The row between France and Britain has rumbled on since the tragic sinking of a dinghy in November last year which led to the deaths of 27 migrants, with both countries placing the blame on the other.

Express
EMMANUEL MACRON has pinned down the responsibility for Channel migrant drowning on Britain’s immigration system, a news report has claimed.
The 44-year-old French leader who is gearing up for the upcoming French polls accused politicians in London of hypocrisy. Mr. Macron is pushing the proposal as a way to break the deadlock over the Channel migrant crisis.
As part of any deal, Britain would want France and other EU countries to accept back Channel migrants rejected by Britain because they should have claimed asylum in “safe” EU states.
Speaking to a regional newspaper in northern France, Mr Macron said: “The responsibility for those who die at sea does not fall upon France but upon this British refusal.”

Times
Britain bears responsibility for every migrant who drowns in the Channel, President Macron has said, accusing politicians in London of hypocrisy.
The French leader told a regional newspaper in northern France that he intended to step up pressure on Boris Johnson to establish a legal route to Britain for asylum seekers. “The responsibility for those who die at sea does not fall upon France but upon this British refusal,” Macron said.
After 27 migrants drowned in November, Johnson urged Macron to take back those who had entered Britain illegally, saying it would dissuade migrants from risking their lives in dinghies. Macron refused and is pushing for an agreement between the EU and the UK.

‘Levelling up’

Mail
The average adult will be able to enjoy five more years of healthy life under government plans to ‘level up’ Britain, Michael Gove said last night.
Mr Gove will today unveil the long-awaited levelling up white paper, which aims to make a reality of the Prime Minister’s election-winning promise to improve life in left-behind areas of the North and Midlands.
Boris Johnson yesterday pledged that the plan amounted to an eight-year ‘moral mission’ to spread opportunity across the country by 2030.
The 400-page strategy covers almost every aspect of life from literacy levels and life expectancy to jobs, bus services and street cleaning, with detailed pledges and targets in each area.
It sets out 12 ‘missions to level up the UK’, including striking pledges to make the country happier and healthier.
The dossier includes a commitment to narrow the yawning gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest areas – and an eye-catching pledge to raise average ‘healthy life expectancy’ by five years by 2035.
Healthy life expectancy, which measures the years before ill health starts to take its toll, stands at an average 62.9 years for men and 63.4 years for women.

BBC News
Long-awaited plans to close the gap between rich and poor parts of the country have been announced by the government.
The strategy, unveiled by Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, will take until 2030 and aims to improve services such as education, broadband and transport.
Boris Johnson put “levelling up” at the heart of the Conservatives’ election-winning manifesto in 2019.
But Labour said the plans contained no new money and little fresh thinking.
The launch of the strategy sees the government try to return to its key policy agenda after weeks of pressure on the prime minister over reports of parties held at Downing Street during lockdown restrictions.

ITV News
There will be a complete “system change” of how government works to ensure levelling up is implemented, a long-awaited White Paper has set out.
The document plans to “transform the UK by spreading opportunity and prosperity to all parts of it”, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove claims.
It will include the “biggest shift of power from Whitehall to local leaders”, and will offer regions the chance to get ‘London style’ powers, and a mayor, if they want.
It comes as research reveals that only £36 per person, allocated through the government’s levelling up fund, has gone to the parts of England most in need of it, despite the divide between places growing.
The New Economic Foundation says, since December 2019, real incomes have risen by less than £20 per year in the north-east, £80 per year in north-west and £90 in Yorkshire and the Humber.

Guardian
Some of the wealthiest parts of England, including areas represented by government ministers, have so far been allocated 10 times more money per capita than the poorest under Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda, Guardian analysis has found.
Michael Gove, the communities secretary, will announce on Wednesday new measures designed to end what the prime minister has called the “outrage” of regional inequalities.
But analysis of the £4.7bn allocated under the levelling up agenda to date shows how some of England’s most deprived areas are receiving far less support than some of the richest boroughs. A further £1.8bn is still to be announced.
Sajid Javid’s constituency, Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, will receive nearly £15m – £148 a head – despite being one of the wealthiest areas in England.

iNews
Regions across England are to be offered elected mayors and London-style devolution under the Government’s sweeping “levelling up” plan to revamp local democracy.
Power will be shifted from Westminster to communities in what ministers described as “the largest devolution of power in modern times” – with the creation of more locally elected officials.
The Levelling Up White Paper, published on Wednesday, triggered negotiations for mayoral deals in York and North Yorkshire and new devolution plans in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester.

Social care

Mail
Care bosses have today urged the Government to apologise to thousands of staff who lost their job after Sajid Javid confirmed he intends to scrap the controversial vaccine mandate.
The Health Secretary last night performed a U-turn on the ‘no jab, no job’ rule after warnings that it would lead to crippling staff shortages, with roughly 80,000 NHS employees facing the sack.
He told MPs it was ‘no longer proportionate’ to require staff to be vaccinated as a condition of employment.
But the mandate, which led to 40,000 unvaccinated care workers being fired when it was enforced in social care settings in November, will only be ditched pending a consultation over the next few weeks.
Vic Rayner, the chief executive of the National Care Forum, has today called for the Government to apologise.
She said carers were the ‘unwitting guinea pigs’ of the policy and the impact on both providers and staff ‘must not be swept under the carpet’. Care homes were already short of 100,000 workers before the pandemic, and there are concerns many sacked workers will never return.

Guardian
Ministers spent almost £9bn on personal protective equipment that was either substandard, defective, past its use-by date or dramatically overpriced, according to figures released on Monday.
The Department of Health and Social Care paid £12bn while emergency-buying PPE for England in the year to 31 March 2021, its annual accounts show. Tonnes of items bought for £2.6bn were never usable by the NHS – this figure is now £2.7bn – and a further £670m worth of PPE was not usable at all in any healthcare setting.
This was mostly because it was defective, the annual report stated, and items costing £750m passed their safe date before they could be used.
By far the biggest figure , however, is the £4.7bn amounting to the difference between the dramatically inflated prices the DHSC paid for PPE to fill England’s tiny stockpile, and the value of that equipment now.

Covid

Mail
Daily Covid cases rose by a fifth in a week today in what is believed to be partly due to the Government counting reinfections — but deaths fell significantly.
There were 112,458 cases logged in the past 24 hours, according to Government dashboard data, marking a 19.2 per cent rise on the 94,326 last week. It is the biggest week-on-week rise since January 4 but it is unclear exactly how many are reinfections, given that last week’s tally didn’t include any.
The rise comes after weeks of plateauing infection rates and a day after the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) began adding reinfections to the daily tally.
An extra 580,000 backdated cases were added to Britain’s cumulative total when the adjustment was made on Monday. The antibody-resistant Omicron variant has pushed reinfection rates up since its emergence late last year.
Meanwhile, there were 219 more coronavirus deaths registered in the UK today, down by 50 per cent compared to the figure last week. The sharp drop comes despite a long-term trend of higher death counts on Tuesdays due to weekend recording delays.

Telegraph
Some £8.7 billion of taxpayers’ money spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) has been written off, according to annual accounts detailing the losses accrued by the pandemic.
Government documents reveal vast sums spent on goods that were never used, or were not fit for purpose, with warnings from auditors that even now, effective control of spending has not been established.
According to the 2020-21 Department of Health and Social Care accounts, some £673 million worth of PPE equipment was found to be unusable, and £750 million was spent on items that were not used before their expiry date.
Nearly £2.6 billion was spent on “items not suitable for use in the NHS”, which the department now hopes to sell or give to charity.
In total, the Government spent £12.1 billion on PPE in 2020-21, the accounts state. But £8.7 billion of this was wasted, including around £4.7 billion accounted for by falling market prices.

Times
About £10 billion of spending on PPE has been written off by the government, as auditors rebuke the health department for its management of taxpayers’ cash during the pandemic.
Hundreds of millions were wasted on unusable equipment and supplies that have passed their expiry date, while taxpayers had to pay billions over the odds in the scramble for masks and gowns at the start of the pandemic.
Officials are also unsure of the location of a further £3.6 billion in supplies, the National Audit Office (NAO) said, offering only qualified approval to the Department of Health and Social Care accounts.

BBC News
The government has written off £8.7bn it spent on protective equipment bought during the pandemic, accounts show.
The Department for Health and Social Care documents show items costing £673m were unusable, while £750m of equipment was not used before its expiry date.
The largest write-off – £4.7bn – was because the government paid more for it than it is currently worth, now that global supplies have recovered.
No 10 said the purchases were justified – with 97% of items suitable for use.
A further £2.6bn of equipment was judged to be unsuitable for use in the NHS, the 2020/21 accounts show, but the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) believes it could still be sold or given to charities.

iNews
The Government has refused to rule out cancelling the daily publication of Covid deaths  after a senior Whitehall source told i that Boris Johnson wants to end the update by Easter “at the latest”.
Downing Street, the Department of Health and Social Care and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) all refused to comment on proposals to bring an end to the daily Covid figures that have become part of the daily routine of the pandemic.
However, a senior Whitehall source familiar with the plans told i: “The Prime Minister has pencilled in Easter as the latest date by which the daily Covid statistics will be published in their current form. In an ideal situation he will bring an end to them sooner if the current downward trend in deaths continues.”

Breitbart
A Johns Hopkins University literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of lockdowns on mortality stemming from the Chinese coronavirus found that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects,” and have “imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the authors of the Johns Hopkins University review wrote.
“In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument,” they added.

iNews
Cancer patients and others at highest risk of dying from Covid-19 will have quicker access to life-saving antibody and antiviral treatments on the NHS after the Government quietly altered the rules over PCR tests.
It comes after i revealed thousands of cancer and other patients with severely compromised immune systems fear they will die from the virus because delays and bureaucratic chaos is stopping them from getting fast-acting drugs in time for them to work.
Around 1.3 million people the Government has classified as most at risk from Covid should have received a rapid PCR test and eligibility letter about the targeted NHS treatment programme by January 10, but charity helplines have been flooded with people complaining they have been left out.
Officials have now altered the rules so that a positive lateral flow test (LFT) result online will be enough to qualify for the treatments – but the change does not come into effect until 10 February.

Police

Mirror
Police officers exchanged highly offensive racist, sexist and homophobic messages with claims that it was “banter” becoming a cover for bullying and harassment, a watchdog has found.
Details of messages from WhatsApp groups and a Facebook chat group referring to rape including “I would happily rape you” and “if I was single I would happily chloroform you” were detailed in a shocking report from the Independent Office for Police Conduct into now-disbanded Metropolitan Police teams.
The report, which did not name the officers, states how homophobic language was also used and a number of racist messages including references to African children, Somali people and Auschwitz that are too offensive to print.
The messages were uncovered as part of nine linked investigations into officers based in Westminster, mostly at Charing Cross police station, that began in March 2018 after allegations that an officer had sex with a drunk person at a police station.

ITV News
The police watchdog has uncovered evidence of “disgraceful” bullying, racism, misogyny and “inappropriate behaviour” within the Metropolitan Police in a damning new report.
Details of messages from WhatsApp and Facebook groups including multiple references to rape, violence against women, racist and homophobic abuse were unveiled by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) on Tuesday.
Officers used what they called “banter” as a cover for bullying, the IOPC found.
It called for an overhaul of the force after nine linked investigations found bullying, discrimination, racism, misogyny, harassment and the exchange of offensive social media messages by officers.
It made 15 recommendations, including tackling “underlying cultural issues”.

Education

iNews
Eton College could help set up and run new “elite” state sixth forms under the Government’s plans to “level up” education in the North and Midlands.
On Tuesday, the Department for Education announced that 55 areas with the weakest educational results in England will be prioritised for “new elite sixth forms”. Ninety-five per cent of the areas are outside London and the South East.
The policy forms part of the education component of the Government’s Levelling Up White Paper, which is expected to be published in full on Wednesday.
The 55 areas – which have been designated “Education Investment Areas” – will be “prioritised as the location for new specialist sixth form free schools where there is limited provision to ensure talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds have access to the highest standard of education this country offers,” the DfE said.

Rugby royal

Express
THE Queen has passed on to Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, two of the royal patronages Prince Harry had to relinquish after stepping down as senior royal, it has been announced.
Kate has become the new royal patron of the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and the Rugby Football League (RFL). Her office, Kensington Palace, said these new appointments “closely align with Her Royal Highness’ long-standing passion for sport and the lifelong benefits it can provide”.
This announcement confirmed previous reports the Duchess, seen as a safe pair of hands within the Royal Family, would take on some of the roles Prince Harry officially renounced in February last year, after he and his wife Meghan Markle communicated to the Queen they would not resume their duties as full-time working royals, from which they had stepped down at the end of March 2020.
At the time, the Duke of Sussex also relinquished his role of patron of the London Marathon Charitable Trust and of president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust.
He also had to give up his three honorary military titles as Captain-General of the Royal Marines, Honorary Air Force Commandant of the Royal Air Force Base Honington and Honorary Commodore-in-Chief of the Royal Naval Commands’ Small Ships and Diving.

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