Steve McGookinTories gather amid shortages and cost of living fears
The Conservatives began their first in-person conference for two years this weekend in Manchester, ostensibly in a strong position politically despite ongoing issues surrounding HGV driver shortages and rising energy costs creating uncertainty in the run-up to Christmas.
The first military drivers begin delivering petrol to garages on Monday morning, while the furlough scheme and Universal Credit uplift are set to end this week.
The Labour party – described by the New Yorker as “Britain’s lost opposition” – ended its own conference this week with the Tories still ahead in opinion polls.
Here in Northern Ireland – at least temporarily insulated from the worst of the shortages – unionist calls to scrap the Brexit protocol intensified this week. The three unionist party leaders are set to appear at a Tory conference fringe meeting on Monday.
See Also:
The protocol: Where are we now and where does NI go from here?
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Trust the police, says totally trustworthy* PM
There was growing pressure this week for an independent inquiry and for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick to resign in the wake of the sentencing of former officer Wayne Couzens for the murder in March of Sarah Everard, accompanied by a loss of confidence in the force as more details emerged.
*A YouGov bi-monthly tracking poll in September found the highest percentage of respondents believe the prime minister is “untrustworthy” since he took office.
See Also:
‘She just wanted to go home..’
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‘Traffic lights’ scrapped as Covid rules change
The NI Executive will meet on Thursday to discuss further easing of Covid restrictions, while travel rules were amended again with effect from Monday, with the “traffic light” system for international travel being scrapped.
The Belfast Marathon returned post-Covid this past weekend; while for some stories, the jokes write themselves…
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Biden presses ahead on infrastructure, climate
After a stand-off within the Democratic caucus in both houses of Congress derailed Joe Biden’s plans to pass infrastructure legislation this week, the president again committed to progress on the issue, as well as his broader spending targets around climate and social programmes.
Biden will obviously want to show up to the COP26 conference next month having passed some form of legislation through his planned $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill which features ambitious climate change provisions.
Meanwhile, arguments intensify over the ongoing issue of the US debt ceiling, with a government shutdown averted until early December in what has become a regular political theatre of the absurd.
As the UK gears up to host COP26, the government is set to announce a significant investment in renewable and nuclear energy, with a commitment that “all of Britain’s electricity would come from renewable sources by 2035.”
See Also:
Broadcasting as usual as the planet burns: Media coverage of climate breakdown
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Pandora Papers remind the rest of us how the rich stay rich
A massive leak of documents across more than 90 countries and co-ordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists allegedly tied a number of world leaders to secretive wealth, five years after the Panama Papers famously “exposed how money was hidden by the wealthy in ways that law enforcement agencies could not detect.”
Follow Pandora Papers updates via the BBC here.
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See Also Last Week’s Five Points:
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