British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will most likely face a showdown with Conservative MPs over the government’s handling of the coronavirus on Tuesday, when lawmakers are due to return to Parliament, The Observer reports.
The newspaper quoted Charles Walker, vice-chair of the 1922 committee of Conservative backbenchers, as saying on Saturday that a recent raft of government policy reversals had left many of his colleagues in despair.
“Too often it looks like this government licks its finger and sticks it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. This is not a sustainable way to approach the business of governing and government”, Walker emphasised.
He claimed that the government’s U-turns have led to a situation in which it has become “increasingly difficult for backbenchers now to promote and defend government policy as so often that policy is changed or abandoned without notice”.
“Whether this approach is by design or by accident, the climate of uncertainty it creates is unsustainable and erodes morale”, the Conservative lawmaker added.
New Poll Levels Tories, Labour
The remarks came amid the release of a new shock survey by the London-based Opinium pollster, which put the Conservatives and the Labour Party on 40 percent each in terms of respondents’ voting intentions.
Adam Drummond of Opinium said that the poll had marked the first time “Labour have drawn level since July 2019 when both main parties were in freefall and losing votes to the Brexit party and the Liberal Democrats”.
The survey followed a Daily Mail poll revealing that at least 79 percent of respondents believe that the UK government had "badly" handled advanced (A)-level and General Certificate of Secondary Education (GSCE) results this year, something that further added to the Conservative MPs’ criticism of the government.
Over half of the respondents called for Education Secretary Gavin Williamson's resignation over the exam chaos, while 52 percent of them insisted that he is "unfit" to lead efforts aimed at reopening schools in September.
In a separate policy reversal, the UK prime minister abandoned his previous advice that pupils should not wear face masks in English secondary schools, following pressure from head teachers, teaching unions, and medical experts.
Part of the Conservative lawmakers’ criticism pertains to the government’s embattled test and trace system, which was recently slammed in a survey conducted by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT). Almost 70 percent of respondents noted that they do not have confidence in the system, while only seven percent expressed trust in it.
