#News #Politics #Covid-19  

Boris Johnson's Conservative  government managed to pass a raft of new Covid-19 restrictions governing masks, mandatory vaccines for care workers, and vaccine passports.  But he had to rely on the Labour Party to get the measures through, having suffered a rebellion of no fewer than 99 Tory MPs that comfortably wiped out his governing majority. 

It also amounts to nearly a third of the entire parliamentary Conservative Party.  The rebel MPs were (rightly) concerned that the new restrictions were unjustified, that the science didn't support them, that they would do more harm than good, and that what we know of the Omicron variant does not justify knee-jerk reactions and further curbs on civil liberties.  

Naturally, this led totally impartial BBC presenter Evan Davis to call them "extreme libertarians".  It has left us in a bizarre world where Labour shadow cabinet members like Wes Streeting  were giving sterling speeches in defence of the government, and attacking Tory MPs for not backing government policy. This, again, is from the OFFICIAL OPPOSITION.   

Boris Johnson's authority has been shot to pieces, and it looks likely that a leadership challenge will be launched in the next few months unless he finds a way to reverse course.   But the greater problem is this: Covid-19 has broken British politics. The official opposition agrees with the government on the most important issue facing the country, and the only actual opposition is coming from the government's own back benches.  We can't go on like this.