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The Independent Commission on Banking, headed by Sir John Vickers, recommended that there should be insulation of high street banking from investment banking. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, accepted the commission’s call for its recommendations to be introduced by 2019. The report received cross-party support, although it would cost banking £7 billion a year, and some said it would make lending scarcer and lead to banks leaving Britain. The annual rate of inflation (by CPI) rose to 4.5 per cent, from 4.4 in the previous month; and (by RPI) to 5.2 from 5 per cent. Unemployment rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million. A shopping centre with 300 shops and 70 food outlets opened at Stratford near the Olympic site in London. London was found to have the highest tuberculosis rate of any capital in western Europe.
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Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former chief constable of Merseyside, was appointed the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Police freed 24 British and Eastern European men from a travellers’ caravan site near Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, where they were said to have been kept for as long as 15 years working without pay; four men, from a family called Connors, were charged under the ‘slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour’ provisions of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said that most of the 2,700 arrested after the riots in August were not members of gangs; in London 19 per cent were. At a memorial meeting in Grosvenor Square for the anniversary of September 11, 2001, 100 protestors burnt the American flag during a minute’s silence and held placards saying: ‘Islam will dominate’.
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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, on a visit to Moscow, rejected a call by Russia to restore links with its security services, frozen after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Mr Cameron said he had once been approached by two Russians during a gap-year trip to Russia; ‘I’m pretty sure that David would have been a very good KGB agent,’ President Dmitri Medvedev commented. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said that the date for raising the retirement age to 67, 2036, was too late. In reducing MPs from 650 to 600, the Boundary Commission decided north-west England should lose seven and Wales ten, a quarter of its present tally. Among seats to disappear would be Kenneth Clarke’s and George Osborne’s.
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Abroad
Stock markets in Europe fell in anxiety about the ability of Greece to pay its debts and of banks in France to withstand exposure to losses by Italian banks. Italy invited China to buy its debt. President Barack Obama of the United States criticised the EU’s failure to deal with the crisis. On the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, Obama read from Psalm 46 at the memorial bearing the names of the 2,983 killed that day. An orangutan called Shirley was removed from Johor zoo in Malaysia after becoming a heavy smoker and placed in a no-smoking zoo at Malacca.
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In Kabul, the Taleban attacked the US embassy, Nato headquarters and police buildings, engaging security forces in a gun-battle for 20 hours. Anti-Israeli rioters in Cairo stormed the Israeli embassy. Three rioters were killed and 1,000 injured. In Libya, Nato aircraft bombed defenders’ positions in Bani Walid. Mustafa Adbul Jalil, the head of the National Transitional Council said in a speech in Tripoli that he envisaged what he called ‘a nation with moderate Islam’ where ‘sharia is the main source for legislation’. Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saadi was given refuge in Niger. Swedish firemen freed a drunk moose from an apple tree at Saro near Gothenburg.
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A ferry overloaded with 800 sank between Zanzibar’s islands of Unguja and Pemba, drowning about 200. A gang murdered a man from Bishop’s Stortford at a coastal resort near Kenya’s border with Somalia and abducted his wife. At least 75 died when petrol from a pipe running through the Sinai shanty town in Nairobi exploded as people rushed to scoop it up. One person was killed in an explosion at a nuclear waste site at Marcoule, Gard, France, but no radioactivity was said to have escaped. Signals stopped from a transmitter attached to an emperor penguin, named Happy Feet, rescued after turning up in New Zealand and returned to the Antarctic seas; it may have been eaten by a shark.
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