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The Conservatives promised to reduce National Insurance from 8 per cent to 6 per cent (and abolish it for most of the self-employed by 2029) in their 76-page election manifesto. Despite other tax cuts already announced, the tax burden would continue to rise steadily. The Tories also promised to halve migration. In its manifesto, Labour decided after all not to reinstate the lifetime limit on tax-free pension savings, but it was tempted by capital gains tax. Labour promised 100,000 extra childcare places, with nurseries set up in classrooms expected to be empty because of falling numbers of primary school children; the costs would be met by VAT on private schools. Douglas Ross announced that he would resign as leader of the Scottish Conservatives after the election. In the week up to 9 June, 799 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats.
The nation was moved by the ceremonies for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, but Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, returned from Normandy early, leaving Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, to be photographed with President Joe Biden, President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Mr Sunak apologised, but Penny Mordaunt took a few seconds off from shouting in unison with Angela Rayner on a seven-way TV election debate to say: ‘The Prime Minister has rightly apologised for that… What happened was very wrong.’
A ransom cyber-attack on King’s College hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’, which also badly affected blood transfusions, was said to be the work of the Russian group Qilin. GDP remained unchanged in April. Unemployment rose a touch, from 4.3 to 4.4 per cent; but the inactivity rate rose too, with more than a fifth of working-age people deemed not to be actively looking for work. Two 12-year-old boys were convicted of the murder, by stabbing with a machete, of 19-year-old Shawn Seesahai in Wolverhampton last November. The convicted sex offender Gary Glitter was ordered by the High Court to pay £508,000 to a victim he abused when she was 12. Michael Mosley, 67, the broadcaster who aired the merits of the 5:2 diet, was found dead on a Greek island four days after going for a walk.
Abroad
Four hostages kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October were freed by the Israel Defence Forces after intense gun battles with Hamas in the Nuseirat area of Gaza. Hamas said that 274 people had been killed in the operation. Israel said there had been fewer than 100 casualties. Benny Gantz, a minister in the Israeli war cabinet, resigned from the emergency government over Benjamin Netanyahu’s post-conflict plans for Gaza, saying that the Prime Minister was ‘preventing us from approaching true victory’. The UN Security Council voted in support of a US resolution backing a ceasefire plan for the war in Gaza; Russia abstained.
President Macron called a snap election after his party, Renaissance, won only 14.6 per cent of the French vote in the European elections, less than half of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (led by Jordan Bardella, aged 28); voting would take place on 30 June and 7 July. Elsewhere in the elections for 720 members of the European parliament, the European People’s party grouping made gains as did the far right. In Germany the right-wing AfD won about the same share as Chancellor Scholz’s centre-left SPD, both ahead of the Greens and none near the 30 per cent share of the opposition conservatives. In Holland, the anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders’s Freedom party came second to the Green-Left alliance. In Spain the hard-right Vox came third and the right-wing Se Acabo La Fiesta (The Party is Over) group won three seats. But in Denmark, SF (the Socialist People’s party) won more votes than the prime minister’s Social Democrats. Cyprus elected as one of its six MEPs Fidias Panayiotou, aged 24, a YouTuber who recently shocked Japan by broadcasting his escapade of evading the fare on a bullet train.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia, commenting on tactical nuclear weapons, said that Europe does not have a developed early warning system: ‘In this sense they are more or less defenceless.’ Ukraine used a drone to destroy an Su-57 Russian stealth fighter-bomber on the ground near the Caspian sea. Hunter Biden, the son of the American President, was found guilty on all three felony charges of lying about his drug use when buying a gun. A boat carrying 260 migrants, mostly from Ethiopia, sank off Yemen, and at least 49 drowned. Jürgen Moltmann, the German Protestant theologian, died aged 98. Françoise Hardy, the French singer, died aged 80. CSH
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