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Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented a far-reaching ‘fiscal event’ (ineligible to be called a Budget), said to have cut more tax than any measure since 1972. The markets’ immediate response was to sell pounds, and sterling fell to $1.07 (though the euro also continued in its own decline against the dollar and the Chinese yuan fell sharply). The Treasury defensively said it would publish proposals for dealing with its debt and the Bank of England said it would buy government bonds to help ‘restore orderly market conditions’. The IMF spoke out, inviting the government to ‘re-evaluate’ its tax changes. The unBudget had reduced the 45 per cent top rate of income tax (on income above £150,000) to 40 per cent, and cut the basic rate from 20 per cent to 19 per cent, from next April. The recent National Insurance rise was reversed, and the rise in corporation tax from 19 to 25 per cent next year was cancelled. The cap on bankers’ bonuses would be scrapped. First-time buyers would not have to pay stamp duty on property costing less than £425,000 (at present £300,000). The government considered 38 sites for investment zones.
Sir Keir Starmer told the Labour party conference that within a year of a Labour government being elected, he would create a publicly owned renewable energy giant called Great British Energy. He declared that Labour was once again the ‘political wing of the British people’, as Tony Blair had called it. He led delegates in the national anthem, something former leader Jeremy Corbyn called ‘Odd’. Rupa Huq MP was suspended from the Labour whip after she remarked of Kwasi Kwarteng: ‘Superficially, he’s a black man… If you hear him on the Today programme, you wouldn’t know he’s black.’ MCC invited Eton to play Harrow next year after all.
More than 650 people crossed the Channel in small craft on one day, bringing the total for 2022 to 32,321. In England, the number of people testing positive for Covid rose to one in 70 by 14 September (from one in 75 a week earlier) but in Scotland fell to one in 55 (from one in 45), according to the Office for National Statistics. Hilary Mantel, the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, died aged 70. John McVicar, the armed robber who took to writing, died aged 82. The price of corgis rose to £6,000.
Abroad
In demonstrations in Russia against the drafting of 300,000 in a partial mobilisation, more than 2,000 people were arrested. Cars queued for miles at the Georgian border and hundreds of men left for Finland. In Russian-occupied Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia referendums on union with Russia were imposed. In the Donetsk region, the local poll body said 99.2 per cent of voters had chosen annexation. President Vladimir Putin of Russia sacked General Dmitry Bulgakov from his command of military logistics in Ukraine. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, was said to have played a crucial part in the release of ten foreign prisoners captured in Ukraine, including five Britons. Two Nord Stream gas pipelines were ruptured under the sea near Denmark’s Bornholm island.
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, with a slogan of ‘Dio, patria, famiglia’, became Italy’s first woman prime minister, heading a coalition, after a general election gave her party about 25 per cent of the vote. In Iran, at least 76 died in two weeks of anti-government demonstrations, provoked by the death of Mahsa Amini, aged 22, detained for wearing a headscarf wrongly. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian Sunni Muslim cleric seen as a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, died in Qatar aged 96. Nasa sent a 60ft space probe smashing into a 530ft asteroid called Dimorphos, to study the possibility of diverting other steroids from collision with the Earth.
In the past year, 2.15 million migrants had been detained at the US-Mexico border, according to US Customs and Border Protection. Tropical storm Fiona battered the coasts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and New Brunswick. Hurricane Ian swept across Cuba and over Florida. Charitable trusts in Gujarat that look after more than 450,000 cattle let loose thousands in government buildings in protest at receiving none of the £57 million promised by the state to support shelters for them. CSH
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