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Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, agreed with President Emmanuel Macron of France that Britain could return perhaps 50 asylum seekers a week to France and accept in their place the same number of applicants through a regulated system. To celebrate, 573 people arrived that day in England in small boats, bringing the total for the week ending 14 July to 1,387. Moygashel Bonfire Committee in Co. Tyrone defended the placing of an effigy of a small boat with 12 migrants on a bonfire to usher in 12 July. Britain had, it was revealed, offered asylum to thousands of Afghan soldiers and their families caught by the accidental publication of their application for asylum in 2022; their resettlement was kept secret by a government super-injunction. Unite, whose members pay affiliation fees of £1.2 million to Labour, suspended Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, from membership over the dustmen’s strike in Birmingham, though she had already resigned. President Donald Trump of America will make a state visit from 17 to 19 September, while parliament is in recess.
Ofcom allowed Royal Mail in future to deliver second-class post only every other weekday. A BBC review of the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone criticised the BBC for failing to disclose that the narrator was the son of a Hamas official. Seventy-one arrests were made at protests against Palestine Action being proscribed as a terror group. Lord Blair of Boughton, Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 2005-2008, died aged 72. The two men who cut down the Sycamore Gap tree were jailed for 51 months each. Production began in Hertfordshire of a television series of the seven Harry Potter books, expected to take ten years to complete.
GDP shrank in May by 0.1 per cent, the second month in a row it had contracted. Inflation rose from 3.4 to 3.6 per cent. Sir Keir refused to rule out extending the freeze on tax thresholds but stood by Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined the ‘Leeds Reforms’ first in Yorkshire and then in her Mansion House speech; these are meant to cut regulation and promote growth. The government is to offer grants of up to £3,750 to buy an electric car and will spend £25 million to build little trenches across pavements for households without driveways to charge cars. Resident (junior) doctors belonging to the British Medical Association union will strike for five days from 25 July. A child with measles died in Liverpool, where one in four are not vaccinated. Julian Cash and Lloyd Glasspool became the first British winners of the men’s doubles at Wimbledon for 89 years. The Notting Hill Carnival will go ahead after councils provided an extra £1 million for it. Thames Water announced an annual loss of £1.6 billion. It imposed a hosepipe ban, as did Southern Water, bringing to 8.5 million the number of people under such bans. Burst water mains caused flooding in Clapham and Bermondsey.
Abroad
Ukraine again suffered heavy aerial attacks from Russia. President Donald Trump said he would send weapons, including Patriot air defence systems, via Nato, with European nations paying for them. He said that President Vladimir Putin of Russia ‘talks nice but then he bombs everybody in the evening’. He met Mark Rutte, the Nato Secretary General, in Washington. In talks with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean ruler, offered ‘unconditional support’ in the war. Mr Trump announced he would impose a 30 per cent tariff on goods from the EU and Mexico. The Italian owner of Ferrero Rocher negotiated to buy Kellogg’s. A resident of Coconino County, Arizona, died of plague.
The preliminary report by India’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau into the Air India crash on 12 June that killed 260 people said both fuel control switches were moved to the cutoff position after takeoff; in the cockpit voice recording, a pilot is heard asking the other why he ‘did the cutoff’, and he responded that he did not do so. President Paul Biya of Cameroon, 92, said he would stand again for office in October.
Houthis sank the Greek-operated Eternity C cargo ship, carrying 25 crew, in the Red Sea; at least four of the crew were killed and many of the survivors kidnapped. Dozens died in fighting between Sunni Bedouin and Druze militias in southern Syria. Israel bombed Syrian forces closing in on the Druze. CSH
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