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BBC News | UK | World Edition

Jobless rise highest for 17 years
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:30:44 -0000
The UK jobless total rose by 164,000 - the most in 17 years - to 1.79 million for the three months from June to August.
Three-year police pay deal struck
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:19:17 -0000
A new three-year pay deal for UK police is agreed between the Police Federation and the Home Office.
Madonna and Ritchie confirm split
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:57:20 -0000
Pop star Madonna and her film director husband Guy Ritchie are to divorce, their PR representatives confirm.
Man admits botched bomb attack
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:04:04 -0000
A Muslim convert pleads guilty to attempted murder in a failed suicide bomb attack on an Exeter restaurant in May.
BBC evicts top shows from London
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:11:26 -0000
The BBC moves The Weakest Link and Newsnight Review to Glasgow as part of a plan to make sure it represents all of the UK.
Retailers push petrol to below £1
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:37:41 -0000
Supermarket chains Asda and Morrison's, and oil giant BP cut the price of petrol to 99.9p per litre, as the price of oil falls.

The Economist: Britain

University finances: Feeling the pinch
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:48:13 -0000
A whopping pay rise for lecturers will cost students, in the endWHEN the government rammed through an increase in student fees in 2004, the extra cash was supposed to make good decades of university underfunding. Decrepit old buildings were to be replaced with swanky new ones and lecturers, finally, were to be paid enough to stop the best decamping to America. The following year the unions looked for some of the largesse, demanding a 23% pay rise. That was unrealistic, although they gave it their best shot with a disruptive boycott of exams in 2006. Eventually they accepted 10% over two years, to be followed in October 2008 by the higher of 2.5% or retail-price inflation. Now vice-chancellors are bracing themselves to stuff around 5% more into pay packets, if the RPI figures released on October 14th are as expected. That will hurt, for salaries already eat up nearly three-fifths of university budgets. Some vice-chancellors give warning of job cuts: Queen Margaret University, in Edinburgh, wants to shed 35 of its 500 staff; Southampton is reviewing staffing and as many as 400 of its 1,400 non-academic staff could go; Strathclyde is looking into the matter; and the Million+ group, which represents ex-polytechnics, says some of its members may postpone the rise. The body that represents university finance directors says that staff should expect low, or no, pay increases next year. ...
Energy markets: Losing their gloss
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:48:13 -0000
A liberalised market model is falling from favourBANKS may be the villains of the hour, but they have only recently stolen that mantle from energy companies. Earlier this year Ofgem, the energy watchdog, announced an investigation into allegations of collusion, after a series of stonking gas and electricity price increases. It published the results on October 6th, and although the regulator flagged up concerns (such as the difficulty of persuading poor customers to switch suppliers), its main conclusion was that the market is working well.For over a decade Britain’s energy market has been among the most liberalised in the world. At one end, firms compete to sell electricity and gas to customers; at the other, market forces determine investment in power stations and infrastructure. But despite Ofgem’s relatively clean bill of health, in some respects the market is not delivering the goods. ...
The Met's next police chief: The decision is… whose?
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:48:13 -0000
A spectacular coup by London’s mayor creates a constitutional pickleANOTHER Blair era is over. Three years and eight months into his job as head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair resigned on October 2nd after a hefty shove from London’s Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson. Despite presiding over “falling crime levels, virtually across the board”, as Mr Johnson himself put it, Sir Ian had long been a marked man. An ongoing contracts-for-cronies investigation and a squabble with the Black Police Association might have been survivable. But the killing in 2005 of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man mistaken for a terrorist by police, made Sir Ian enemies among liberals, as well as among conservatives who already disliked his trumpeting of equal opportunities and other lefty notions. His eventual departure was therefore not surprising. The manner of it, however, turned out to be extraordinary.In theory, only the home secretary can hire and fire chief constables. Now Mr Johnson, who took office in May, appears to have usurped that power. After a meeting with the mayor, Sir Ian told reporters that, despite the support of the home secretary, “without the mayor’s backing I do not consider that I can continue in the job.” Cheekily, Mr Johnson went on to suggest that he should have equal say in appointing the next chief. (Likely candidates include Sir Paul Stephenson of the Met, Sir Hugh Orde of the Northern Ireland force and Bernard Hogan-Howe of Merseyside.) This was dismissed by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, who is officially in charge. But everyone knows there is a new sheriff in town. Sir Norman Bettison, West Yorkshire’s top cop, ruled himself out of the running, blaming Sir Ian’s removal on “short-term political expediency”. ...
Rescuing the banks: We have a plan
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:48:13 -0000
A big banking bail-out and a cut in interest rates may stave off the worst, but the economy will still suffer in coming yearsOVER the past year the British government has looked asleep at the switches as the credit crunch accelerated. No longer. On October 8th a far-reaching plan was revealed that for the first time addresses the full gravity of a crisis that now imperils both the banking system and the wider economy.Before the markets opened on Wednesday, the Treasury unveiled an historic bail-out of Britain’s beleaguered banks, including a capital injection of state money that amounts to partial nationalisation. Then at midday the Bank of England broke with its usual practice of announcing interest-rate decisions on Thursdays and nudging rates no more than a quarter-point. In a co-ordinated move with other central banks, including America’s Fed and the euro area’s ECB, it cut the base rate by half a percentage point, from 5.0% to 4.5% (see chart). ...
Gordon Brown's recovery: A war on two fronts
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:48:13 -0000
The prime minister has wounded Labour rebels, but only stunned the ToriesGORDON BROWN is having a good autumn, if a hyperactive one. A strong speech at the Labour Party conference in September staved off internal challenges to his leadership. His government’s vigorous response to the financial system’s woes in the form of a GBP400 billion ($693 billion) bank bail-out this week is likely to boost his reputation outside his party too. As economic times get tougher, more people seem persuaded that they would do well to hang on to the skipper they’ve got.Not that Mr Brown has escaped the familiar charge of dithering—uncertainty over what kind of intervention, if any, was planned by Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, contributed to huge falls in share prices. That the struggling Treasury will be burdened with still more borrowing to pay for the bail-out is also a concern. But whatever the caveats, the rescue was supported by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—a spectacle that recalled Mr Brown’s moment in the sun as bipartisan “father of the nation” in his early months in office. Though only time will tell whether the plan actually works, coping with crisis has given the government the sense of mission it lacked. ...
Small-company finance: Locked in
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:48:13 -0000
The banking crisis overflows into the real economyRICHARD VAUX, director of Cobalt Blue, a communications consultancy, was shocked by a letter from Barclays, his bank, in late September. It said that from October 8th his business overdraft would cost him 15.87% a year—a jump of four percentage points. Mr Vaux was incensed and contacted the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). Some 70% of its members are “locked in” as customers of one of Britain’s four big banks—HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Barclays—says the FSB’s Priyen Patel. As the credit crunch hits the banks, so banks are tightening terms for their customers. In a snap poll by the FSB in September, three-quarters of those who borrow said they had seen an increase in their cost of finance in the past year. About a tenth of Barclays’s overdrafts to small firms have been raised to Cobalt Blue’s rate “to reflect the risk”, says Steve Cooper, head of local-business banking at Barclays. ...

 

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