UK Covid: masks likely to remain compulsory in Scotland in shops and on public transport after measures lift — as it happened | Politics

• Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has signalled that face masks are likely to remain compulsory on public transport and in shops in Scotland after other restrictions are lifted in August. (See 1.14pm.) At a news conference she said:

It’s important I think to remind all of us that a move to level zero does not mean the immediate end of all restrictions.

Many of the baseline measures like face coverings, physical distancing, hand hygiene and advising on ventilation, these are going to continue to be important mitigations to protect us and others from the virus for some time yet.

• Paul Givan, Northern Ireland’s first minister, has signalled that all Covid restrictions in his region are likely to end in August. These are from Jayne McCormack and Enda McClafferty from the BBC.

That’s all from me for today. But our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.

Sir Keir Starmer has been meeting political leaders in Belfast today.

After their meeting, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, said he told Starmer the Northern Ireland protocol undermined the Good Friday agreement. Donaldson said in a statement:

It was Labour prime ministers who oversaw the signing of both the Belfast and St Andrews agreements. Both the principle of consent as well as the interlocking and interdependent nature of the three-stranded approach on which those agreements are based have been fundamentally damaged by the Northern Ireland protocol.

The protocol undermines those foundational agreements and the consensus so necessary for progress. I underscored my commitment to making Northern Ireland work and urged Sir Keir and his team to work with us as we seek to deal with the flawed withdrawal agreement and restore Northern Ireland fully within the UK internal market.

But Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin deputy first minister, told Starmer the UK government had to implement what it agreed in the protocol.

Ministers have confirmed that MPs will be asked to scrap the “English votes for English laws” (Evel) procedure for passing bills in the Commons introduced by David Cameron’s government.

Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, told MPs this morning that the government had decided to get rid of the procedure, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, subsequently confirmed that the vote will be hold on Tuesday next week.

Under the Evel procedure, if parts of a bill only apply to England, those parts have to be approved in a vote in which only English MPs can take part before they can become law. But the bill also goes through all its other, normal parliamentary stages, with all MPs voting.

David Cameron announced his plan to bring in Evel in 2014, immediately after the result of the Scottish independence referendum was announced, and the new rules came into effect in January 2016.

Explaining the decision to abandon Evel, Gove told MPs:

The procedure has been suspended since April 2020 and, having reflected on the procedure, the government believes it has not served our parliament well and that removing it would simplify the legislative process.

It’s a fundamental principle that all constituent parts of the United Kingdom should be equally represented in parliament.

The move is part of an attempt to minimise opposition to the union in Scotland. Cameron’s surprise post-referendum announcement infuriated many Scots because it implied that their MPs would no longer be full members of parliament, and some argued that they had been asked to vote to remain in the UK in a false premise.

In the Commons Pete Wishart, the SNP’s spokesman on Commons matters, told Gove this was a “massive defeat” for the Tories who were now having to bury “this appalling, time-wasting mess”.

But later the SNP put out a statement implying this was not a meaningful concession. Stewart Hosie, the party’s Cabinet Office spokesperson, said:

No amount of tinkering around the edges will change the fundamental flaws with the broken Westminster system or protect Scotland from the damaging policies of Tory governments we reject.

The only way to keep Scotland safe from the long-term damage of Tory austerity cuts, Brexit and Westminster power grabs is for Scotland to become an independent country, with the full powers needed to build a strong, fair and equal recovery.

The UK has recorded 33,551 new coronavirus cases, according to the latest update to the government’s Covid dashboard. A week ago today the equivalent figure was 27,989. And the total number of new cases over the past week is up 34.9% on the total for the previous seven days.

And there have been 35 more deaths. Week on week, deaths are up 52.6%.

The UN’s refugee agency has likened planned UK asylum reforms to an “almost neo-colonial approach” to “shift burden” rather than “share responsibilities” on providing support to refugees.

As PA Media reports, Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner for protection at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told a Chatham House briefing today of the organisation’s “deep concern” at some of the proposals.

Triggs was particularly critical of Priti Patel’s plan to remove asylum seekers offshore while their applications are processed. She said the UNHCR was “absolutely dismayed that some of our strongest supporters historically are now playing with this idea of externalising their responsibilities”. She added:

What we are finding is that western, developed and wealthy countries are now not sharing responsibilities but shifting burdens to these poor countries.

Describing Australian policies as having “disastrous consequences”, she said:

To see Denmark and now the United Kingdom looking at the same ideas is a matter of deep concern to UNHCR because we see it as almost a neo-colonial approach.

You pass it off to … African countries and you wash your hands with it. You might pay a lot of money … but nonetheless to shift the burden in that way without the safeguards is a problem.

Ruth Davidson, the former Conservative leader in Scotland, has used a column in the Telegraph (paywall) to launch a withering attack on the government’s plans to privatise Channel 4. Here’s an extract

As a Tory, I am lost as to why ministers would want to raffle off an entity that is the living embodiment of so much of the government’s agenda. From Global Britain through levelling up and into Building Back Better, the Channel 4 rules and remit seem tailor-made to deliver on every one of Boris Johnson’s favourite buzzphrases …

When it comes to value for money, supporting private firms, levelling up, and projecting Britain to the world, I back Margaret Thatcher’s model of a Channel 4 that is owned by the nation and delivers for it, without costing the taxpayer a penny. And so should any Tory government.

About one in eight people transferred to the test-and-trace system after testing positive for Covid were not reached in the latest week, PA Media reports. PA says:

It is the largest proportion not reached since the end of last year, and comes as the number of people testing positive rose to its highest total for nearly five months.

Some 12.0% of people transferred to test and trace in England in the week ending 30 June were not reached, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.

The figure has not been this high since the week ending 30 December, during the peak of the second wave of coronavirus, when it stood at 12.6%.

Covid cases may be rising partly because of men mixing at Euro 2020 events, researchers say.

The latest React study, which is run by Imperial College London and Ipsos Mori and involves surveying thousands of people to monitor Covid infection levels, found that Covid rates increased fourfold in June. It says:

Based on home swab tests taken by over 47,000 people between 24 June and 5 July, around 1 in 170 people had the virus during this period, or 0.59% of the population. This is four times higher than the study’s previous report when 0.15% of people were infected, or 1 in 670, as of 7 June.

But researchers involved in the study also found, for the first time, a notable difference between the number of men and the number of women testing positive. And they have said Euro 2020 may be a factor.

Prof Paul Elliott, director of the React programme from Imperial’s School of Public Health, told Sky News:

We saw the same in Scotland around the Euros and visits to Wembley and matches in Glasgow. Clearly it’s not just going to the match but it’s going to the pub, being in close proximity …

We have noticed in the current round that the prevalence is higher in men than women – around 0.7% in men and 0.5% in women.

And women have therefore something like a 30% reduced odds of testing positive in our study, once we’ve adjusted for other variables.

Prof Steven Riley, professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial, said:

The degree to which men and women are socialising is likely to be responsible. And then because of the timing of that, then it could be that watching football is resulting in men having more social activity than usual.

The report also said infections were highest in London. It said:

Across the country London had the highest rate of infections at 1.08%, up from 0.13%, followed by Yorkshire and the Humber at 0.78%, up from 0.17%. The south-east and south-west had the lowest rates at 0.34% and 0.35% respectively.

Ministers are playing with fire if they remove Covid restrictions in England without providing adequate sick pay to help anyone who tests positive for Covid to self-isolate, the Royal Society of Arts thinktank has said. My colleague Kevin Rawlinson has the story here.