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George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the autumn statement would be on 5 December, and commentators said he would confront the dwindling chance of meeting debt targets set for 2015. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said the government would set up a ‘business bank’ to lend to companies. The Commons Public Accounts Committee said a £1.4 billion Regional Growth Fund set up in April last year had created only 2,442 jobs. Delegates to the Trades Union Congress voted to support co-ordinated strikes against a public sector pay freeze. Tories from the right of the party started a group called Conservative Voice. The nation took a keen interest in a quadruple murder near Annecy in France in which Saad al-Hilli, a British man of Iraqi background, from Claygate in Surrey, was shot dead in his car, together with his wife and mother-in-law, and a local cyclist; a seven-year-old daughter was wounded and a four-year-old was found by French police hiding beneath her mother’s body eight hours after the incident. Two burglars, out of four who had broken into a house near Melton Mowbray, were wounded with shotgun pellets; the householder and his wife were held before being released. A man was jailed for three and a half years for manslaughter after killing a man with a punch in a row at a takeaway in Blackpool over whether cheese was properly melted on his chips.
Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets from Mansion House to Buckingham Palace to cheer floats carrying 800 United Kingdom athletes from the Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the Paralympics, Britain ended up with 34 gold, 43 silver and 43 bronze medals, to come third in the table behind Russia and China, in first position, with 95 golds. The United States took only sixth position. During the closing ceremony, 120 disabled children decorated a giant fish with 600 painted hubcaps from scrapyards, and Coldplay performed for a long time. Andy Murray became the first British man for 76 years to win a tennis grand slam title by beating Novak Djokovic in the US Open.
Unemployment fell by 7,000 in the three months to July, compared with the previous quarter, to 2.59 million. Glencore, the commodities company, improved the terms of its merger offer to the mining group Xstrata after talks arranged by Tony Blair, a former prime minister. Sir Howard Davies, the former head of the Financial Services Authority, was commissioned by the government to look into airport expansion and on no account report back before the next election. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge flew to Singapore to begin a nine-day visit to South-east Asia and the South Pacific for the Queen’s jubilee.
Abroad
German judges refused to block the formation of the European Stability Mechanism, a permanent eurozone rescue fund. The European Central Bank had announced it would buy unlimited bonds from eurozone countries that formally requested funds and abided by the terms of any deal. Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister of Spain, went on television to say: ‘I could not accept being told which were the concrete policies where we had to cut.’ Thousands of padlocks attached by lovers to the Milvian Bridge in Rome were removed by council workers with bolt-cutters.
In Benghazi, Libya, militiamen, angered by an American film criticising Mohammed, stormed the US consulate and killed the ambassador and three other officials. The United States handed over Bagram jail, where 3,000 Taleban and terrorist suspects are held, to Afghan authorities. In Iraq, more than 100 were killed and 400 wounded in a series of bomb attacks in ten cities. Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice-president of Iraq, said in Turkey that he rejected a death sentence passed on him in absentia for alleged control of death squads. Said al-Shihri, the second-in-command of al-Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula, was said by authorities in Yemen to have been killed there. Major General Muhammad Nasir Ahmad, the defence minister of Yemen, survived a car bomb that killed 11, seven of them his bodyguards. At least 190 died in a fire at a Karachi clothing factory with bars over the windows.
Xi Jinping, who was expected to be appointed the leader of China at the Communist Party congress in October, disappeared from view. China sent two gunboats after Japan said that it was buying three of the five uninhabited Sendaku islands in the East China Sea that are also claimed by China and Taiwan. -CSH
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