Ongoing Covid booster drive to eat into health and social care levy funds December 12, 2021 An ongoing booster vaccination programme to deal with recurring coronavirus pressures will eat into funds yielded from the new health and social care levy earmarked for the NHS. The government could be forced to use some of the money produced from the 1.25 per cent levy on a permanent booster campaign, with the total bill [...]
Dominic Raab resigns from the government in wake of bullying report April 21, 2023 Dominic Raab has quit Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet following the conclusion of an inquiry into bullying allegations. He resigned after the PM received the report from senior lawyer Adam Tolley KC’s investigation on Thursday and had been considering the findings since. There was speculation as to when the Prime Minister would respond formally to the report, [...]
CBI: Government must act now on economy to prevent recession June 13, 2022 Urgent action is needed from the government to revive growth otherwise the UK will plunge into a recession. That’s the warning today from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the country’s biggest business group. Without a fresh package of measures before the summer parliamentary recess to boost business confidence, a recession will be “a very [...]
Putin ‘running out of missiles’ amid claims quarter of Russian Army now lost: Kremlin loses momentum in Donbas May 6, 2022 Vladimir Putin could be running out of missiles and armaments because of how much his forces have had to fire during the Ukraine war so far, according to the head of Britain’s Armed Forces. The Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, said Russia has now lost 25 per cent of all its forces [...]
London Marathon: Where are spectators being to told AVOID due to Extinction Rebellion disruption? April 19, 2023 Spectators have been urged to avoid a famous part of the London Marathon route on Sunday amid a planned protest, as a minister said Extinction Rebellion “must be stopped”. The climate group’s scheduled four-day protest in central London from Friday to Monday could see some 30,000 of its supporters in the Westminster area for the [...]
Inflation sliding and tough Bank of England means the pound will see better days April 18, 2023 “Hope is not a strategy,” Jordan Rochester, a wonk at Japanese investment bank Nomura, said last September, referring to politicians’ attempts to revive the pound after it plummeted to its lowest level ever against the US dollar following Liz Truss’s tax cutting mini budget. A lot has changed since then. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt raised taxes [...]
Editorial: These “tax-cutting Conservatives” seem very keen on hiking taxes January 30, 2022 If it quacks like a high-tax duck and talks like a high-tax duck, it is difficult to believe that it is fact anything but a high-tax duck. So it is with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, who professed this weekend to be “tax-cutting Conservatives” in a column confirming they were dead set on hiking national [...]
BP scales back climate ambitions as outcry over £23bn earnings ignites call for tougher windfall tax February 7, 2023 BP has scaled back its climate ambitions, easing plans to slash the amount of oil and gas it produces to meet global demand.
UK recession to hit sooner than first thought as economy unexpectedly shrinks May 12, 2022 The UK is “dangerously close” to tipping into a recession sooner than predicted due to households already cutting spending ahead of the cost of living squeeze tightening. That’s according to City economists’ assessment of weaker than expected GDP figures published today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The economy shrank 0.1 per cent in [...]
The Big-Bang 2.0 fails to make City rules fit for an era of crypto and email not Telex July 28, 2022 THE Financial Services and Markets Bill 2022, introduced last week, failed to usher in the “Big Bang 2.0” of financial services regulation we were promised. It is true that many of the initiatives contained within the bill are sensible, welcome, and necessary – but they are nowhere near as radical as what is required to [...]