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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots and Spectators' Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Katie Falls and I'm joined by James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson.

New Year, New Tier.

That's the suggestion if you listen to Matt Hancock's media round this morning.

As the government comes under new pressure or more pressure to put in place a national lockdown

or bring more areas into tier four.

Here's what he had to say about how the current system is or perhaps isn't working.

The new mutation, the new variant of the coronavirus makes life much harder for everybody.

And it makes it harder to control the spread because it passes on so much faster.

It means that the old tier system, which was clearly working, is no longer strong enough.

James, is this a clear sign yet that we are going to have a tightening of restrictions in the

coming day? Yes, I was struck by not only how Matt Hancock said that the current tier system wasn't strong enough to deal with this new mutation of the virus, the kind of Kentish variant, but also how he was saying that the best thing people can do is stop seeing other people.

I thought that was the government inching back towards that stay-at-home message.

We were all so used to hearing in March. And I think when you look at the data and the numbers,

it is clear that things are moving in the wrong way and that restrictions are going to get tightened up.

I also think there is, there is now a case that because you have this Oxford vaccine being rolled

out as of today, there is now clearly a time limit to how long these restrictions would have

to be in place for. And there is also a danger that if the virus got properly out of control,

that could retard your ability to roll out the vaccines. So, I mean,

...