Brexit

Independent
The UK may accept the “price” of tariffs on goods to strike a trade deal with the EU, Michael Gove says – as he again insisted there would be no extension to the Brexit  transition period beyond 31 December. The charges would be “a missed opportunity”, the cabinet office minister said, but added: “If that is the price that we have to pay, then there we go.” Giving up on the demand for a “zero-tariff, zero-quota” deal could be acceptable to secure the prize of breaking free of EU rules, he told a parliamentary inquiry. The comments come after government sources insisted the EU would have to give way to rescue a deal, attacking Brussels for refusing to accept the UK’s “sovereignty”.

Huffington Post
The UK is prepared to accept potentially huge extra costs for businesses exporting to the EU as a price worth paying for taking full control of laws from Brussels, Michael Gove has said. The Cabinet Office minister suggested the UK could “show leg” and drop its demand for a zero tariff, zero quota trade deal as a concession to unblock Brexit negotiations. The talks so far are foundering because the government is refusing to accept EU demands for a so-called “level playing field” which would see the UK align standards with Brussels in areas including workers’ rights and the environment.

Independent
The SNP has urged Labour and other opposition parties to back an extension to the Brexit transition period until the end of 2022, due to the coronavirus emergency. In a letter to party leaders calling for a “united stance”, the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford said the deadline for a trade agreement with the EU needed to be pushed two years beyond its scheduled date of 31 December. It comes as health secretary Matt Hancock said there was “absolutely no need” to extend the transition period.

EU

Telegraph
The central pillar of the EU’s Brexit strategy is crumbling. Brussels can no longer plausibly pretend that Europe’s state aid and competition regime is sacrosanct. The last six weeks have seen massive distortion and degradation of the single market. Or to borrow from Thucydides, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”. Michel Barnier cannot repeat with a straight face that European commerce is uniquely governed by level playing field principles and that Britain must therefore submit to the EU’s legal structure under the writ of the European Court.

Telegraph
Germany’s top court has fired a cannon shot across the bows of the European Central Bank and accused the European Court of breaching EU treaty law, marking an epic clash of rival judicial supremacy. In an explosive judgement, the German constitutional court ruled that the ECB had exceeded its legal mandate and “manifestly” breached the principle of proportionality with mass bond purchases, now topping €2.2 trillion and set to rise dramatically. The bank had strayed from the monetary realm into broad economic policy-making.

Trade deals

Express
Striking a trade deal with the United States will help both economies “bounce back” from the coronavirus crisis, the government said. Britain and the US agreed they want to sign off an “ambitious” new arrangement as the first round of negotiations opened by video link. Prime Minister Boris Johnson believes a free trade deal will be a major boost to the UK after Brexit transition arrangements end later this year. International Trade Secretary Liz Truss and Robert Lighthizer, US trade representative, led the start of the talks today.

Sky News
The UK and US have begun negotiations on an “ambitious” post-Brexit free trade deal. International Trade Secretary Liz Truss formally opened the talks on Tuesday during a video conference call with US trade representative Robert Lighthizer. The first round of discussions will get under way on Wednesday and continue for around two weeks. There will be some 100 negotiators on each side taking part. Further rounds of talks will happen every six weeks and will be conducted remotely until it is safe to travel again.

Breitbart
After Theresa May’s Brexit delays and the coronavirus lockdown, the long-awaited UK-U.S. trade talks began on Tuesday. U.S. President Donald Trump supported the UK’s vote to leave the EU and from early on in his presidency, pushing for a “massive new trade deal” between his country and the United Kingdom. While Britons voted to leave the EU on June 23rd, 2016, then-Prime Minister Theresa May did not trigger Article 50 — the legal mechanism for leaving the EU — until March 2017 and then delayed the country’s exit twice.

BBC News
Progress “has not been good” in negotiations to reach a post-Brexit trade deal, the Tánaiste (Irish deputy PM) has said. The transition period, due to end on 31 December, was intended to allow the UK and EU to negotiate a trade deal. Downing Street has previously said it will refuse an extension, even if the EU requested it. “Time is short and there’s an awful lot to do,” said Simon Coveney. It will be very serious for the Republic of Ireland as it works to rebuild its economy in a post Covid-19 world, added the minister.  Speaking on RTÉ Radio One, the tánaiste said he was concerned that unless significant progress was made soon, the UK and EU would reach “another crisis point” in the negotiations.

Lockdown lift

Mail
A traffic light system could be used to explain to the public the new rules when lockdown is eased, according to government advisers. Behavioural experts floated a simple system to classify activities as they warned people could struggle to grasp complicated new arrangements. The proposal emerged in a paper prepared for the government’s SAGE group, which has been released on its website along with a tranche of other documents. The report from the sub-committee on behaviour, produced last month, said the ‘stay at home’ guidance had been effective up to now because it was so simple.

iNews
Selectively lifting lockdown measures could lead to resentment and anger among the population which has otherwise shown solidarity, an expert on the group set up to rival the Government’s scientific advisory board has said. Susan Michie, professor of health psychology and Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London, said there was a risk of the measures causing division if, as expected, different sections of the population need to adhere to different measures. Officials are considering how coronavirus restrictions could be lifted, and later this week Boris Johnson is expected to set out a road map out of the lockdown.

Mail
Ministers have been warned by their expert scientific advisers that lifting the coronavirus  lockdown and then reimposing restrictions later would be seen by the public as a ‘serious failure of policy’.  Newly-released secret documents show the government’s scientists have argued in favour of only a very slow easing of measures.  They said if lockdown was ‘abruptly’ lifted people would expect the risk of infection to have ‘ceased or significantly reduced’.  If there was then a spike in cases and the government had to reimpose lockdown the nation would lose trust in expert advice and would be a lot less likely to stick to the rules.

Ferguson

Telegraph
The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday night as The Telegraph can reveal he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover. Professor Neil Ferguson  allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing in order to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house. The epidemiologist leads the team at Imperial College London that produced the computer-modelled research that led to the national lockdown, which claimed that more than 500,000 Britons would die without the measures.

Times
The scientist whose coronavirus research prompted the lockdown was forced to resign his role advising the government last night after breaking social-distancing rules to meet his married lover. Neil Ferguson said he had made an “error of judgment” in allowing Antonia Staats to visit him at his home in London on at least two occasions since the restrictions were put in place. Professor Ferguson, an academic at Imperial College London, was a key member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which has been informing the government’s response to the pandemic.

Second wave

Times
Reopening all schools at once would create a risk of the virus infection rate rising and causing a second wave, Dominic Raab has said. The foreign secretary said that ministers would be guided by scientific advice from Sage, its group of experts, about when it was safe to open schools. Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, has said that when schools fully reopen, not all pupils will return at once. Children in years 6, 10 and 12 are expected to be among the first to return.

Sun
BRITAIN is set to avoid a second deadly wave of coronavirus after lockdown, says the nation’s top scientist. Though the UK has now passed Italy to record the highest death toll in Europe, Sir Patrick Vallance told MPs he was “optimistic”.  The chief scientific adviser explained: “I think if we do test, track and tracing well, and we keep the social distancing measures at the right level, we should be able to avoid a second wave.” PM Boris Johnson is to reveal this weekend how restrictions will be eased.

Telegraph
There was no sign of a second wave of coronavirus infections in Germany as the first reliable data on the effects of lifting the lockdown emerged on Tuesday. Two weeks after shops were allowed to reopen, the rate of new infections continues to fall, the government-funded Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced. The reproduction number, or R — the number of people each person with the virus infects — is close to its lowest recorded level, at 0.71. “The rate of transmitted infections continues to fall. This is very good news,” Prof Lothar Wieler, the head of the RKI said.

Yahoo News
Italy could be set for a “second peak” of deaths after easing its lockdown measures, researchers tracking the coronavirus outbreak have predicted. According to analysis carried out by Imperial College London, the country could be set for a large increase in deaths within three weeks of partially lifting its social-distancing restrictions. Currently, Italy has the second highest-death rate in Europe, with 29,315 deaths, behind 29,502 in the UK. But researchers from Imperial have forecast a second spike will take place if the country returns to just 20 percent of its pre-lockdown mobility levels – a measure of how much people leave the home.

Tracking app

Mail
The NHS track-and-trace app considered vital to getting the UK out of coronavirus  lockdown could be illegal and may not work abroad, experts warned today.   The software will be tested on the Isle of Wight from this morning onwards – but there are growing concerns about its privacy settings and why the Government shunned a Google–Apple alternative adopted by other countries. Health Secretary Matt Hancock  has decided the first public tests on their contact tracing software would begin on the self-contained island of 140,000 people, with NHS and council staff the first to be given access –  and has insisted they would enjoy ‘high privacy’.

ITV News
Test, track, and trace has become a key message in the fight against coronavirus. Contact tracing is seen as one of several possible remedies to help the UK out of lockdown and an app trial is now ready to go, ahead of a full roll-out across the country. What is contact tracing? A contact tracing app is one of the government’s next big areas of focus, part of a wider contact tracing effort, as it tries to find ways to end lockdown while preventing a possible second wave of the virus.

Borders

Guardian
The Home Office is facing further questions about the lack of interventions at the border before the coronavirus lockdown after the government’s chief scientific adviser revealed the UK received a “big influx of cases” from Europe that “seeded right the way across the country”. Sir Patrick Vallance was giving evidence to the health and social care committee after figures revealed that just 273 out of the 18.1 million people who entered the UK in the three months prior to the coronavirus lockdown were formally quarantined.

Telegraph
At least 20,000 people infected with coronavirus entered the UK before lockdown, but fewer than 300 were quarantined, official figures reveal. These arrivals would have infected some 50,000 more people given the World Health Organisation’s assessment of an average transmission rate at the start of March of between 2 and 2.5. Figures provided to the home affairs committee by the Home Office show that between January 1 and the end of March 18.1 million people entered the UK without any health checks including from coronavirus hotspot countries. Of these, just 273 were quarantined. Even by conservative estimates of prevalence, this would have meant 20,000 being infected.

Times
Fewer than 300 people arriving into the UK were quarantined in the run-up to coronavirus lockdown, figures show, as it emerged that an influx of travellers from Italy  and Spain over the spring half-term probably contributed to the outbreak. New data released yesterday showed that 273 of about 18.1 million arrivals had to spend time in isolation in the first three months of the year, as the virus was spreading across the world. Those put in isolation included three plane-loads of passengers from Wuhan, China, the source of the outbreak, and one that was carrying passengers who had been on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan.

Breitbart
The government’s Home Office formally quarantined just 273 people out of the 18.1 million arrivals by air, land, and sea to the UK in the three months leading up to March’s coronavirus lockdown. The figures show that between January 1st and March 22nd, 2020, a combined 241 people on three evacuation flights from Wuhan — understood to be the origin of the Chinese virus — and 32 individuals flown from Tokyo, after being transferred from the infected Diamond Princess cruise ship, were sent to various quarantining facilities across the country.

Sewerage

Mail
The Government is considering testing sewage to track the size of the coronavirus  outbreak in Britain, it has been revealed.   Defra confirmed it is conferring with scientists about whether wastewater can help trace the spread of the deadly infection. It could become part of the government’s next phase of the COVID-19 battle plan to test, track and trace the virus as Britain eases lockdown.  Researchers in other European countries have already resorted to looking at sewage to monitor the spread of the virus, called SARS-CoV-2.

Business

Times
Rishi Sunak is preparing to “wean” businesses and workers off the government’s furloughing scheme by cutting wage subsidies amid concerns that the nation has become “addicted”. The chancellor will announce plans next week to wind down the scheme from July as part of an attempt to get people back to work as the lockdown is eased. He met officials yesterday to discuss the options, which include cutting the 80 per cent wage subsidy and lowering the £2,500 cap on monthly payments. The Treasury is also considering plans to bar self-employed workers with trading profits of more than £30,000 from claiming government grants.

Independent
Chancellor Rishi Sunak is reportedly set to announce plans to taper off the government’s furlough scheme, which is supporting workers staying at home during the coronavirus  outbreak. There are some concerns over the cost of the programme, with the latest government figures showing 6.3 million people are having up to 80 per cent of their salaries paid by the Treasury at a cost of £8bn.

Sun
RISHI Sunak has begun detailed planning on how to “wind down” the Government’s subsidised furlough scheme without causing a “cliff edge”. One of the options being considered by the Chancellor is cutting the wage subsidy down to 60 per cent – as much as £625 a month – to encourage people to look for new jobs. The scheme could then be reduced even further over coming months, according to the Evening Standard. Another option being looked at is to allow some furloughed staff to work, but with a smaller subsidy from the public purse.

Cyber attacks

Mirror
Criminal gangs backed by hostile states are launching cyber attacks on British health, drug and medical research centres fighting coronavirus, the Government has revealed. Cybersecurity agencies in the UK and US issued a joint warning to expert staff, urging them to improve password security as they battle Covid-19. Russia, China and Iran were suspected of being behind the attacks – and targeting Britain during the pandemic was “particularly dangerous and venal”, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. Speaking at the No10 press briefing, he blamed “sophisticated networks of hackers” for hitting UK facilities.

BBC News
The UK and US have issued a joint warning cyber-spies are targeting the health sector. Hackers linked to foreign states have been hunting for information, including Covid-19 data and vaccine research, they say. UK sources say they have seen extensive activity but do not believe there has been any data theft so far. Those behind the activity are not named in the alert but are thought to include China, Russia and Iran. The three countries have all seen major outbreaks of the virus but have denied previous claims of involvement in such activity. The joint advisory says the UK and US are currently investigating a number of incidents in which other states are targeting pharmaceutical companies, medical-research organisations, and universities, looking for intelligence and sensitive data, including research on the virus.

Sport

Sky News
The return of Premier League football would “lift the spirits of the nation”, the foreign secretary has said. Speaking at the government’s daily COVID-19 briefing, Dominic Raab said ministers were looking at sports being played behind closed doors in the second phase of its coronavirus response. Asked about football’s top flight coming back in mid-June, the current timeframe the footballing authorities are working towards, Mr Raab said: “I think it would lift the spirits of the nation. “I think people would like to see us get back, not just to work and… to a stage where children can safely return to school, but also enjoy some of those pastimes, sporting in particular.

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