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With war engulfing Iraq, Britain set about reopening its embassy in Tehran, closed in 2011. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, ruled out British military action. The government made it a crime to associate with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or al-Sham), the salafist armed movement known as ISIS. About 400 Britons were thought to be fighting on their side. The government can intercept Facebook, Twitter and Google without individual warrants, because they are based externally, the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism admitted in a law case. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, ran into heavy weather trying to prevent Jean-Claude Juncker being appointed president of the European Commission. Dominic Cummings called the government approach to the European Union ‘whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow’. Food inspectors complained that infected meat could find its way into pies because new European regulations prevented their finding tuberculous lesions. The government exempted paper bags in small shops from a new 5p bag tax.
The Court of Appeal in England ruled that doctors at Addenbrooke’s, in Cambridge, had acted unlawfully by not consulting the family before placing a ‘do not resuscitate’ order on the medical notes of a woman dying of cancer. The president of the Royal College of Physicians called upon the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to withdraw advice for statins to be prescribed to five million extra people. A backlog of 712,000 people awaited assessments for employment and support allowance; 30,000 people awaited passports. Numbers of prisoners rose to 85,468, against 86,431 places. Taxi drivers blocked streets in London in protest against minicabs using a telephone metering service from the American company Uber. Blackpool sold its 6,000 deckchairs, saying that holidaymakers preferred to sit on benches on the front.
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