Latest updates: pressure rises on Starmer to shelve vote on proposals at party conference, with major unions also not yet backing leadership rule changes
- Keir Starmer essay sets Labour on course for centre ground
- Coronavirus – latest global updates
- See all our coronavirus coverage
Prof Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said today that he expects coronavirus to eventually end up being more like a common cold.
Asked if he agreed with Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford scientist who led the team that created the AstraZeneca vaccine, who yesterday said coronavirus would become less virulent until it eventually spread like a seasonal cold, Bell told Times Radio today:
If you look at the trajectory we’re on, we’re a lot better off than we were six months ago.
So the pressure on the NHS is largely abated. If you look at the deaths from Covid, they tend to be very elderly people, and it’s not entirely clear it was Covid that caused all those deaths. So I think we’re over the worst of it now.
Paul Scully, the small business minister, told Sky News this morning that if the government were to cancel plans to cut universal credit by £20 a week from next month (by ending the temporary Covid uplift), the Treasury would have to raise taxes by £6bn to pay for it. He explained:
If you were to reverse the universal credit as it is, you would have to put up income tax by the equivalent of a penny and 3p on fuel. You have to find £6bn from somewhere.
