09 March 2017
Week in Brief: UK
BHS: Sir Philip Green has agreed to pay £363 million into the BHS pension scheme. Commentators have said that the payment was made in an attempt to salvage his reputation and to ensure that he would keep his knighthood.
BREXIT: The Government suffered a defeat in the House of Lords when the upper house voted in favour of an amendment to the bill to trigger Article 50. The amendment is intended to ensure that the rights of EU workers who are at present in the UK would be guaranteed. The bill will return to the Commons which will then have to decide to accept or overturn the amendment.
Theresa May has been told by government lawyers that the UK can leave the EU without paying € billions. It has been estimated that the EU may want €60 billion, but the legal advice is to the effect that there is no legal basis for the claim.
LABOUR: There has been a leak from the Labour party which shows that it has lost 26,000 members. Membership rose after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, but many of those who joined have now resigned. Many more may have simply not renewed their membership.
RUBBISH: There has been a worrying spread of fly-tipping; 936,000 cases were recorded last year and the cost of removing the rubbish has been estimated at £50 million. It is thought that organised criminal gangs are behind the increase. The penalty which can be imposed if a fly-tipper is caught is usually substantially less than the payment received for dumping the rubbish.
GREAT WESTERN: The proposed electrification of the Great Western railway line has run into trouble after a Commons Select Committee raised doubts about the competence of the Department for Transport and Network Rail. The upgrade is running 3 years late and is £1.2 billion over budget. The chief executive of Network Rail said that the project had been agreed in 2009, long before the scale of the work had been properly understood.
TERROR: A so-called “terror map” has revealed that a tenth of all the UK’s Islamist terrorists come from 5 council wards in Birmingham. The wards contain segregated communities with a majority of Muslims and have been described as “deprived neighbourhoods”.
A report from Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner for Counter Terrorism has said that 13 potential terror attacks were prevented last year and 500 investigations are being pursued at any one time. British converts to Islam were 4 times more likely to become terrorists than those who had been born into the Muslim faith.
TREASURE: Two men using metal detectors have discovered a number of gold artifacts dating from the Iron Age. The torcs, which are 2,500 years old, will almost certainly be worth tens of thousands of pounds.
STORMONT: Recent elections in Northern Ireland resulted in a surge of support for Sinn Fein, formerly the political wing of the Provisional IRA. The Democratic Unionists lost their overall majority. The Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, accused the British Government of failing to comply with its undertakings under the Good Friday agreement. These included the issue of legal recognition of the Irish language, the use of flags and the question of parades. He raised the prospect of a referendum in Northern Ireland on the subject of Irish unity.
BUDGET: Chancellor Philip Hammond delivered the Spring 2017 budget – see comment Budget 2017.
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