SARAH VINE: Why is 16 too young for voting? Ask a brain scientist...
But the news last week that our glorious leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has followed through on his electoral threat to lower the voting age to 16 has rather dampened my mood. It is, quite simply, the height of idiocy. As any Year 11 teacher will tell you, most 16-year-olds aren't fit to tuck their own shirt in, let alone participate in the democratic process.
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Daily Mail
a few seconds ago
- Daily Mail
Number of London-listed companies warning of lower profits soars
The number of London-listed companies warning of lower profits has soared this year after Labour's tax raid on business. A damning report today shows that UK plc issued 59 alerts in the second quarter of the year – a 20 per cent jump compared to 49 a year earlier. In a blow to Rachel Reeves, almost half said policy changes – such as Labour's National Insurance and minimum wage hikes – and geopolitical uncertainty would hit earnings. That is compared to a level of just 4 per cent a year earlier, before Reeves announced £40billion of tax hikes in her Budget. The report by EY-Parthenon said uncertainty fuelled by 'rapid and unpredictable policy shifts' has a 'paralysing effect' on 'confidence, decision-making and spending'. 'Governments are tightening their belts in response to rising post-pandemic debt levels,' the report said. 'Companies are feeling the impact of cuts and delays in public spending across the globe, alongside tax changes such as the rise in US tariffs and higher National Insurance Contributions and the national living wage.' Other challenges included regulatory delays and shifts in green targets. Meanwhile, those citing contract and order cancellations or delays remained at a record high of 40 per cent between April and June, while one in three referred to Donald Trump's tariff war. EY-Parthenon partner Jo Robinson said: 'The data reflects the scale of persistent uncertainty and how heavily it continues to weigh on UK businesses. While this uncertainty has been a recurring theme since mid-2024, it has intensified this year, driven largely by geopolitical tensions and policy shifts, compounding pressure on earnings and forecasts.' Nearly a fifth of London-listed firms have warned on profits in the last year. In the second quarter, the sectors worst-hit were industrial support services, computer services and retailers. Listed retailers issued seven alerts, more than double the three recorded in the first three months of the year. The sector employs 10 per cent of UK workers and 'is disproportionately exposed' to tax and wage increases. 'Many have adapted their cost base but we're seeing the warnings from those unable to absorb the impact,' the report said. 'Tariff implications, whilst not yet a major driver of distress, have also added to supply chain complexity and the cost base.' Silvia Rindone, UK and Ireland retail lead at EY, said the retail profit warnings highlighted softening demand and 'structural headwinds'. She said: 'Retailers tell us that falling sales are indicative of a longer-term shift, with consumers becoming more value-focused and less brand-loyal, which leaves cost-pressured retailers in a bind.'
BBC News
a few seconds ago
- BBC News
Battle of Orgreave national inquiry confirmed by Yvette Cooper
A national inquiry will be held into one of the most violent days of the year-long miners' strike in the 1980s, the government has inquiry will look into the clash that involved police and miners outside the Orgreave coking plant in Rotherham on 18 June incident, which became known as the Battle of Orgreave, involved miners from across Britain converging on the plant to try to disrupt deliveries, but they were met with force by thousands of police Rollin, from the Orgreave Justice Campaign, has been calling for an inquiry for 13 years. He said he was "cautiously elated" by the news. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who announced the inquiry, said those affected by the confrontation had had "unanswered questions for over 40 years".She said the inquiry had been put "in our Labour manifesto last year and that's what we're now delivering". The inquiry will be chaired by the Bishop of Sheffield, the Rt Rev Dr Pete Wilcox, and will look at both the events of the day and the aftermath, Ms Cooper will include the eventually failed criminal prosecutions of 95 miners and what Ms Cooper described as the "discredited evidence" against incident was sparked after the National Coal Board (NCB) announced in March 1984 that it was shutting 20 UK collieries it said were resulted in the loss of at least 20,000 than three quarters of the country's 187,000 miners went on strike in response to the the day of the clashes in June, the striking miners wanted to stop lorries carrying coke to fuel the Scunthorpe steel furnaces as they thought disrupting production would help win their fight against the closures and job losses. But violent clashes between police and the miners left more than 100 picketers and officers injured at the coking plant.A total of 95 men who had been picketing at the plant were arrested and faced trial on riot and unlawful assembly the case against them collapsed in court due to allegations that South Yorkshire Police had falsified of those involved have said that even 40 years on, they want answers about what happened and is still considered one of the most violent episodes in British industrial Yorkshire Police said it would "fully cooperate with the inquiry in a bid to help those affected find answers". Mr Rollin said: "It's been a long slog these last 13 years and we can't quite believe it."We're really happy and we want to get to the truth."We want all the people who live around the country in mining communities that have been so badly treated to have a smile on their faces (in response to the news)."This has been a hard-fought thing and thank you to everyone who's supported us."South Yorkshire's Mayor Oliver Coppard said the announcement of the inquiry was a "landmark moment for justice and accountability"."We owe it to the miners, their families, and our communities to ensure that the events of Orgreave are finally understood," he Conservative government previously rejected calls for an 2016, the then home secretary, Amber Rudd, said it would not be in the public said that even though miners who were involved gave "forceful accounts" about its lasting impact on them, "ultimately there were no deaths or wrongful convictions".Rotherham MP Sarah Champion said former miners, their families and campaigners had worked "tirelessly" to secure an inquiry. She said: "I have stood shoulder to shoulder with campaigners over the years as they were led to believe an inquiry was about to be commissioned, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. "They have been let down time and time again, and I am proud that our Labour government is good to its word and will finally uncover the truth." Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.
BBC News
a few seconds ago
- BBC News
HS2 was doomed to be a mess, say insiders
"I can't answer those questions currently," says Lord Peter Hendy. More than 15 years have passed since the idea to build a high-speed railway up the west coast of England was first announced, and I am asking the rail minister when it will be finished. And, crucially, how much it will he is making it very clear that nobody knows what the final bill for Britain's biggest infrastructure project might be. Does it concern him that the government remains committed to the railway despite this deep uncertainty? I ask. "Oh yeah, we're dead bothered by that. Of course you would be..."Currently tens of billions of pounds over budget and around a decade behind schedule, the Public Accounts Committee describes High Speed 2 (HS2) as a casebook example of how not to run a major state that the now shortened line between Birmingham and London could cost £81bn. Accounting for inflation, that would mean at least £100bn will be spent, but only 135 miles of railway built. Many people involved - from civil servants, ministers and company insiders to HS2's original designers - have told me just how badly things went the project has suffered from mismanagement, misplaced optimism and failures when dealing with homeowners whose properties were in its path. But one chartered surveyor, who has been challenging HS2 for almost a decade, brought up another point. One that suggests that - far from this solely being down to poor decision-making - something greater was at play all along."There has always been a fundamental problem in this country with the cost of building anything," the surveyor says, "because we live on a small, highly populated, property-owning, democratic island."Which begs the question, was HS2 predestined to encounter major problems simply on the basis of the UK's geography and political system? And if that is the case, where should we go from here? Problems with the need for speed HS2 was initially conceived as a way to increase capacity on the West Coast Mainline; a tangled 700 miles of track between London and Glasgow, which was built in a patchwork fashion by competing Victorian Speed 2's early engineers proposed a vision of the future, making HS2 capable of running the fastest, most frequent trains in the up alongside the international alternatives, the plan was impressive: in France, high-speed trains run at 200 miles per hour; HS2 was to be built to withstand 250mph. In Japan, 12 trains run between Tokyo and Osaka every hour; HS2 would be capable of running 18 trains an hour going in and out of London Euston in that time. That's one every three minutes. To have any chance of doing this, however, the railway had to be as straight as possible. Slowing down to take bends around villages, woodland or canals wasn't an option. Faster trains also required more sophisticated junctions, and stronger slab government reviews now suggest this ambition had an insidious cultural impact - and that the vision to build the best possible line is what "drove the scope and dramatically increased cost."It also took the project away from the initial premise of increasing network capacity." Andrew Meaney is head of transport at the consultancy Oxera and advised the Oakervee review of HS2 that reported to government in suggests no analysis was done to set out comparisons of what the savings would be if trains ran at the slower speeds of Eurostar services in the south of England."I think those sorts of things should have been assessed in quite a lot of detail and a public conversation had about those trade-offs." A warning from the French But talking to HS2's original designers, there was a clear strategy behind this vaulting McNaughton, HS2's first technical director, remembers being at a conference in 2009 and hearing the chair of the French railway operator, Guillaume Pepy, deliver a is: "don't make the mistake of building yesterday's railway", with standards evolving, French high-speed trains could now go much faster than their tracks would bother building something that would already be out of date at the moment of completion? Mr McNaughton decided to future-proof the UK work by selecting an option that appeared capable of handling faster trains further into the understood that this would add roughly 10% to costs - and believed it would be worth it. 'You've cost us another hundred million' As politicians set about trying to get approval to make HS2 run straight and fast, they came across another of the route cut through rural constituencies, represented mostly by Conservative MPs, who made it clear to then-Prime Minister David Cameron that their approval for the project would require serious negotiation and picked something unusual to make it happen: a hybrid bill, only the third of its kind enacted since allow MPs to vote on whether a piece of infrastructure should go ahead, but those directly affected are given the right to petition against it and ask for details to be changed. Councils, businesses and individuals made their case in front of a government committee asking for everything from noise barriers to financial compensation for communities losing green space. Last-minute negotiations often took place in the corridors approach meant the bill was flexible - but critics have argued it was also needlessly complex and Geoffrey Clifton Brown was a Conservative MP and was one of the committee members who heard out petitions. "I remember very clearly one of the Secretaries of State for Transport, after an afternoon session, say, well done, Geoffrey, you've just cost us another couple of hundred million this afternoon." A spreadsheet shows the thousands of assurances which were added as a result - among them, £250,000 to insulate a church, £500,000 for a new park (on top of an extra £10m for a community fund), as well as £10,000 to renovate a listed drinking cost was added in order to avoid or compensate for individual inconvenience. One of the most expensive parts of these measures were the tunnels. Through public consultation and the hybrid bill, the design now features so many of them - along with noise barriers and cuttings, where track is laid below ground level - that on a 49-minute journey from London to Birmingham passengers will only have a view of the countryside for Ltd, the company created by the Department for Transport, accepts it failed to keep overall costs under control and says delivery has not matched what it describes as the unrealistic early expectations. Is the UK planning system to blame? Negotiation and compromise however, worked. The final vote for the first leg of HS2 between London and Birmingham was won by more than 350 votes in October 2013. The bill was supported across the main parties, and ministers understood HS2 had a clear road ahead."I was told that [the bill] basically gave the planning approval," says Patrick McLoughlin, who was the Transport Secretary between 2012 and 2016."Of course, it subsequently turns out that that was not the case." In reality, the hybrid bill only offered "deemed planning permission" - HS2 say they have since needed to acquire more than 8,000 further permissions from councils and other hasn't always been the case of Dobbins Lane in Buckinghamshire. In April, the local council considered planning permission for HS2 to upgrade a farm track running into a nearby field. This work was needed in order to build an underground box to monitor groundwater levels, which in turn was a requirement of a tunnel being dug through the nearby hills. Without it, HS2 warned, delays could cost tens of more than 800 local residents signed a petition against works because of a temporary increase in road traffic: 60 lorries would need to reach the site during a 12 week the request for planning permission was rejected - another potential cost added. Ed Lister, who was Deputy Mayor of London between 2011 and 2016 and later served as Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, blames the UK's planning system."You've got to break that log-jam," he argues. "If these are your big projects, then they have to go through."He wants changes to the judicial review system to make it harder to frustrate projects such as HS2 through the courts. Big questions to be confronted All of this is a reminder that building in Britain has always had its own unique challenges. France, for example, has more than 1,000 miles of high-speed rail - but it also has a greater land mass, with much more open empty countryside to sweep meanwhile, has nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail - but it also has a centralised power system and fewer protest brings it back to the chartered surveyor who observed, "We live on a small, highly populated, property-owning, democratic island".That in itself poses challenges - meaning that if Britain wants to build 'big' - whether it's a nuclear power station, reservoir or railway, we need to confront big questions as a society. How deep is our appetite for individuals to have their lives impacted in the name of national interest? How should we value century long investment in infrastructure? These are the questions that govern how our system works."The processes that we've got are so archaic and too costly and too complicated. There's surely got to be a quicker way of doing it," says the chartered surveyor. For Andrew Meaney, a fundamental problem is the way politicians communicate with the public."We don't have the confidence to say, right, this is what we're building and let's just go and get on and build it," he argues. "We tend to change our mind and we sort of bend with public opinion."For others, all these existential questions will always be secondary to the fact they think HS2 was simply the wrong project. "You've got to choose the right projects," argues Andrew Gilligan, who acted as a special advisor to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. "And this was the wrong project right from the start.""The answer to our transport crisis is lots of boring little things like bus lanes and tram systems and new stations," he continues, "and not one grand mega-project that is in fact only going to touch a handful of people in the country."If future governments did decide that small was the way forwards, the same fundamental issues of consent and compromise would still be ever present. Without answers HS2 will remain simply the latest project to be undone by political image credit: Christopher Furlong via Getty BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
