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Portrait of the week: DeepSeek, Duke of Sussex’s damages and an iceberg the size of Cornwall

The Spectator
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 01 February 2025
issue 01 February 2025

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The government would invest 2.6 per cent of GDP a year to create growth, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech. Standing behind a placard reading ‘Kickstart economic growth’, she kept repeating the word ‘growth’. Welfare and the visa system would be reformed. A third runway at Heathrow would bring 100,000 jobs. But net zero, she said, was the ‘industrial opportunity of the 21st century’. Earlier she had said that the government’s own Finance Bill implementing October’s Budget would be amended to soften the effects of its tax measures against non-domiciled residents. The Ministry of Defence ordered £9 billion worth of nuclear submarine reactors from Rolls-Royce. Sainsbury’s was to cut 3,000 jobs. WHSmith said it was in talks to sell its 520 high-street shops, but said the 195 post offices in the shops would remain. Shops will not be compelled to accept cash, Emma Reynolds, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said. NatWest is to close branches in Goole, Bridlington, Willerby and Louth, pushing customers to use digital banking.

For the decade 2022-32, 9.91 million people will settle in Britain, the Office for National Statistics predicted, with net migration of 4.9 million raising the total population to 72.5 million. Axel Rudakubana, the Southport murderer, was sentenced to at least 52 years in prison, but could not be given a whole-life sentence because he was under 18 at the time of the crime. Alder Hey Children’s Hospital Trust said he had been under the care of its community mental health service from 2019 to 2023. Police should record more non-crime hate incidents, a Home Office review said; a recommendation that ‘extremists’ should include environmentalists, the far left and misogynists was rejected by the government.

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