13 April 2017
Week In Brief: UK NEWS
Foreign Affairs
BORIS STAYS AWAY: Boris Johnson cancelled this week’s visit to Moscow to the apparent irritation of his Russian hosts. Tweets from the Russian Embassy refer to him as Donald Trump’s “lieutenant.” It is assumed that the cancellation was designed to strengthen the hand of US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who is now visiting Moscow.
NEW SANCTIONS REJECTED: Calls by Mr Johnson for increased sanctions against Russia, if it continues to support Assad, were rejected at the Lucca meeting of the G7 (Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the US) and no reference was made to them in the final communiqué.
Other government news
DEATH TAXES: The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments has criticised proposals by the Lord Chancellor, Liz Truss, to increase probate fees, increasing the top level from £215 to £20,000. The Committee said that the new charges had the hallmarks of a tax rather than fees in which case they should not be introduced without full parliamentary scrutiny. A petition against the fees, which would go to funding the courts and tribunal service, gathered 30,000 signatures. Ms Truss is unpopular with lawyers following her failure to protect the judiciary, incorrect statements over a scheme to spare rape victims cross-examination in court, and her role in setting rules which exclude Sir Brian Leveson from the role of Lord Chief Justice.
FREE FOR LABOUR: Mr Corbyn has announced that Labour will, if elected, raise the legal minimum wage to £10 an hour by 2020 and will apply it to workers under the age of 25. This is designed to “outflank” the government’s position which is that by that year the wage will rise to £9 an hour for those over 25.
A pledge by Labour to add VAT to private school fees to pay for universal free school meals at primary level has been undermined by a statement from the Institute of Fiscal Studies that the report on which it was based is not as clear as the Party claimed. The Shadow Education Secretary had stated that evidence from the IFS report made it clear that universal meals would raise standards. The author of the report said that this was overstating the conclusions and that more work would be required before reliance could be placed on it.
FOREIGN OWNERS: A report by the Bow Group calls for a restriction on the foreign ownership of UK residential property. Apparently 10% of the housing stock is owned by foreigners and demand from abroad is a major contributor to house price inflation.
RECKLESS TURN: Former UKIP MP Mark Reckless, who was elected to represent the party in the Welsh Assembly in 2016, has now joined the Conservative Group in the Assembly although he has not as yet re-joined the Conservative party. Paul Oakden, chairman of UKIP, said that, as Reckless owed his position to being on the UKIP list, he should now resign it.
Health
COMPETENT DOCTORS: A paper published in BMC Medical Education has revealed that doctors from other parts of the world are more likely than British trained doctors to have to have their competence reassessed by the General Medical Cancel because of the quality of their work. At first sight the results, which are based on almost 20 years of data, are encouraging for the UK medical establishment. Doctors qualified in Germany are six times more likely to be referred than doctors who qualified in the UK; those who qualified in India are five times as likely; those who qualified in Eastern Europe four times as likely and those who qualified in Ireland twice as likely. Still, UK educated doctors should be able to perform better as they are working in their own language and can be presumed to have a better grip on local culture.
LOCUMS: New rules to prevent the use of personal service companies by locums have resulted in industrial action. The new arrangements will increase the amount of tax and national insurance paid by doctors and, although some hospitals have tried to increase rates to compensate for this, many locums have refused the extra pay. The General Medical Council has intervened to say that the industrial action must not be allowed to put patients at risk.
DR FOX: Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, came forward on a flight to the Philippines to assist a nine month old child suffering a fit. The child had recovered fully by the time the flight landed.
HOSPITAL PARKING: The RAC has criticised arrangements for parking at English hospitals, pointing out that in many cases drivers are expected to insert coins even though they do not know how long their visit will last. Use of modern technology or exit payments would make the system far more user-friendly. In Wales and Scotland, parking at hospitals is largely free.
RICH SCOTS: Breast cancer drugs regarded as too expensive for the NHS in England are to be available in Scotland. Although some disparity of treatment is inevitable bearing in mind that the Scottish Medicines Consortium, which recommends drugs in Scotland, is a separate body from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence which performs the same function in England, the difference draws attention to the disparity in health funding north and south of the border. In Scotland the NHS gets £2100 per person; the English figure is £1900. There is a similar disparity in public expenditure as a whole under the Barnett formula.
CARE WORKERS: Figures put together by the charity Skills for Care put the shortage of care workers at 84,000. That compares with some 1.3 million employed in the sector. The average hourly wage for care workers is £7.69 an hour and a quarter of them are on zero hours contracts.
Courts and crime
CHARITIES: Cancer research, the British Legion, Oxfam and the NSPCC are among charities fined for trading information about donors so that they could be pursued for more money. The information illegally swapped included details of wealth, telephone numbers and email addresses.
TERM TIME HOLIDAYS: The fine imposed on Jon Platt by the Isle of White Council for taking his daughter to Disneyland during term time without her school’s permission has been reinstated by the Supreme Court on appeal by the local authority. Mr Platt relied on a 90% attendance record as discharging the obligation for his daughter to attend “regularly” but the court decided that “regularly” in this context meant “in accordance with the rules”.
BATMAN: Mustafa Bashir, who beat his wife with a cricket bat and forced her to drink bleach, has had his sentence revised upwards to 18 months imprisonment on the basis that the trial judge was misled by his claim to have a contract to play professional cricket for Leicestershire County Cricket Club. The original sentence was suspended but the judge, Richard Mansell QC, when making it custodial, pointed out that the club had issued a statement to the effect that the defendant’s claim of a contract was wholly false.
EQUAL CONTRIBUTION: The Court of Appeal has rejected an attempt by American financier Randy Work to overturn a divorce court ruling that the matrimonial assets should be split 50:50. The assets were accumulated during the marriage of Mr Work and his ex-wife, with whom he had two children. His proposal that he should enjoy 60% of the assets was based on his exceptional contribution as a “financial genius”.
NO-WIN NO FEE: the Supreme Court has held that Times Newspapers should pay fees incurred by successful libel litigant Gary Flood even though these were inflated by a premium to reflect a “no-win no fee” arrangement.
Miscellaneous
GOOGLE: The dispute between Google and MPs over the publication of illegal videos has moved on, with the company telling Bloomberg that it will use programs to detach extremist videos from advertising on its social media networks. It will not, however, use the technology to remove them entirely. The fact that Google is able to identify extremist sites will increase the pressure for it to remove them.
BARBICAN LAVATORIES: The relabelling of the loos outside the Barbican Cinema to “gender neutral with urinal” and “gender neutral with cubicles” has resulted in queueing for the ladies because men can use the lavatories indiscriminately whereas women do not use urinals. One critic of the new arrangements received an online response to comments which read “we welcome all your feedback about the new system as we look to ensure an outstanding audience experience for all“. And we thought that you went to the cinema to watch the film!
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