All of our cities are at risk this Christmas as they wrestle with Covid uncertainty again December 10, 2021 Boris Johnson has now confirmed our fears: Plan B will be brought in, and with it, more mask rules, Covid passports and work from home advice. It will undoubtedly have a monumental impact on businesses that rely on high footfall in city centres. December was supposed to be the month that saw many nightclubs, bars [...]
A diplomatic boycott of Beijing’s winter Olympics is a vote for a free Hong Kong December 10, 2021 The Olympic motto of ‘Faster, higher, stronger” is as famous as it is inspiring. The recent update from Pierre de Coubitin’s original iteration now includes “together”. It is in this renewed spirit that the UK must now stand together with the USA and other countries who are staging a full diplomatic boycott of the 2022 [...]
Opinion-in-brief: Reckoning with our online identity crisis December 9, 2021 Anyone can target other people anonymously and spread lies about them online – but as the law stands, very little can be done about it. Rampant hate speech and fake news allow conspiracy theories to flourish and online spaces become sowed with divisiveness. Absolute anonymity online is a key enabler: giving online users the ability [...]
Sunak’s tax policy is trying to straddle two worlds and failing on both fronts December 9, 2021 Chancellor Rishi Sunak seems to be in the midst of an identity crisis. After taking drastic measures to put the public finances on a sustainable footing in the wake of the pandemic, by raising the tax burden, he now wants to present himself as a tax cutting Tory. The problem is, he can’t be both. [...]
The Brexit jury is still out as we fail to grasp the vision of freedom we were promised December 9, 2021 Since leaving the EU, there is no doubt that the UK has made impressive progress in signing Free Trade Agreements, including not only roll-overs of EU agreements like those with Canada and Turkey, but entirely new ones with Australia and New Zealand. The UK’s application to join the CPTPP mega-regional trade agreement is also well [...]
The stages of a Downing Street scandal: first comes anger, then disillusionment December 9, 2021 There is a weary exhaustion to the fall-out of the cheese and wine, secret santa filled Christmas party at Downing Street last year, while many of us were in Tier 3 lockdown. It arrived in a week when we should have been talking about the ghost children missing from our schools, the people who were [...]
Explainer-in-brief: Dialling down the temperature in Ukraine December 8, 2021 US President Joe Biden and Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin were on the phone yesterday about what on earth are Russian troops doing on Ukraine’s borders. There’s been bad blood between the two presidents, with Biden previously calling Putin a “killer”. The relationship between Russia and Ukraine has historically been complicated. Europe’s magnetic attraction is at [...]
Naughty or nice: Big Tech is eyeing up our kids for their Christmas wishlist December 8, 2021 Christmas is coming and the Amazon parcels are gathering in drifts of tech gifts around Christmas trees all over the world. This year, again, Christmas wishes are being realised online as we wonder nervously whether we might be able to visit family for Christmas or if new travel restrictions may thwart Santa’s plans too. Like [...]
Modern slavery can be hidden behind even the most innocent businesses December 8, 2021 Britain’s millions of small and medium sized businesses may assume that modern slavery has nothing to do with them, as they’re not major firms with a global footprint. Little do they know that a Cornwall café owner could be using coffee produced by child labour in Colombia, or that a tech start-up’s furniture could be [...]
Schools across the country have forgotten how to teach kids to aspire to be better December 8, 2021 Omicron, the new Covid variant, has had an unexpected victim: the long-awaited White Paper on levelling up. Boris Johnson’s plans to put his 2019 election pledge into reality will not be published until New Year, to give the government more time to focus on containing Covid. The document, set to span industry, skills and transport, [...]