Brexit news – live: ‘More trade disruptions to come,’ economists warn as export issues harm Scottish whisky

Boots staff who volunteered to take on potentially dangerous roles at government coronavirus testing sites for the high-street giant have lost their jobs.

The pharmacy’s employees have been helping to operate official drive-in centres across the UK since March.

Boots said it would have been wrong to give those who had signed up to work in the government’s testing scheme special treatment in its redundancy process.

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin has more:

The government’s hotel quarantine policy is not ready to launch with less than 48 hours to go, Britain’s largest airport has warned.

Ministers have promised hotel quarantine will start on Monday, but in a statement issued on Saturday morning Heathrow airport said “significant gaps still remain”.

MPs have warned of chaotic scenes at airports, while the union representing border force workers says staff are going on shift for the weekend unaware of what rules they will be enforcing come Monday.

My colleagues Jon Stone and Simon Calder report:

Boris Johnson has said he is “optimistic” he will be able to set out plans for a “cautious” easing of coronavirus lockdown restrictions in England later this month.

The PM said that while the overall number of cases remained high, the infection rate was starting to fall while the rollout of the vaccination programme has made “huge progress”.

“I’m optimistic, I won’t hide if from you. I’m optimistic but we have to be cautious,” he told reporters during a visit to a vaccine manufacturing facility in Teesside.

His comments came as scientists continued to urge caution over the easing of the current controls when Mr Johnson sets out his “roadmap” out of lockdown for England on 22 February – though there has been confusion over this date after No 10 claimed it would come out “in the week of the 22nd”.

One scientist advising the government said ministers risked a third wave of the pandemic as big as the current one if they moved too quickly while senior NHS figures said the health service remained under huge pressure.

Ministers however are confident the vaccination programme is on track to meet the target of getting an offer of a jab to everyone in the top four priority groups - including the over-70s - by the deadline of Monday.

The PM said his main priority remained the opening of schools in England on 8 March, to be followed by other sectors as conditions allowed.

“Our children’s education is our number one priority, but then working forward, getting non-essential retail open as well and then, in due course, as and when we can prudently and cautiously, of course we want to be opening hospitality as well,” he said.

“I will be trying to set out as much as I possibly can, in as much detail as I can, always understanding that we have to be wary of the pattern of disease. We don’t want to be forced into any kind of retreat or reverse ferret.”

Additional reporting by PA

Some members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) have threatened to bring down the province’s government if Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal is not quashed.

Assembly member Jonathan Buckley said collapsing the Stormont power-sharing administration was “on the table” as an option and that the protocol had been an “unmitigated disaster”.

The DUP’s current leader, first minister Arlene Foster, has rejected this route, arguing Mr Johnson should instead trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland agreement, effectively overriding parts of it.

It comes two days after the EU rejected calls from the UK government to redraw the protocol, with European Commission vice president Marcos Sefcovic saying it was the only way to protect the Good Friday Agreement.

Jon Stone has more:

The EU has called on China to reverse its ban on the BBC World News television channel, which was imposed in an apparent retaliation for Britain’s pulling of the licence of state-owned Chinese broadcaster CGTN.

The EU said in a statement that Beijing’s move further restricted “freedom of expression and access to information inside its borders”, and violated both the Chinese constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The statement also said that Hong Kong’s announcement that its public broadcaster would also stop carrying BBC broadcasts added to the “erosion of the rights and freedoms that is ongoing” in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory since the imposition last year of a sweeping new national security law.

“The EU remains strongly committed to safeguarding media freedom and pluralism, as well as protecting the right to freedom of expression online and offline, including freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information without interference of any kind,” the statement said.

While Britain is no longer in the EU, it remains a member of the Council of Europe, which oversees a 1989 agreement linking broadcasting licences. Britain, the US and foreign correspondents based in China have also expressed anger over the ban.

Additional reporting by AP

Our chief political commentator John Rentoul has some thoughts on Sir Keir Starmer’s interview with The Times, published this morning:

Keir Starmer has completed stage one. “We have established ourselves as an effective opposition,” he said in an interview this morning. That is not as easy as it looks, as Neil Kinnock, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband will confirm.

Yet the next stage is even harder, especially when coming back from such a low position as Labour’s in the 2019 election. The most telling part of Starmer’s interview in The Times is this: “Have we got a long way to travel? You bet.” 

Now he is being urged to come up with some policies. Indeed, The Guardian reports that he is planning a “major policy blitz”. The Labour leader is to make a big speech on Thursday that will kick off a transition to a more combative approach, according to Labour sources. I suspect that if Starmer could identify the sources he would tell them that a period of silence on their part would be welcome. He knows that the last thing he needs to do is to set out a lot of policy. 

Read the full article here:

That’s it from us on the politics blog today. Thanks for following along, and be sure to check back tomorrow for all the latest updates from Westminster and beyond.