Miscellaneous

Amanda Pritchard, the new NHS England chief executive, has had quite a week. She wrote an article for the Health Service Journal about the pressures on the NHS and followed up with a Sky News interview where she had this to say: Where did she get that 14 times figure from? By using statistics in a strange way, highlighted by Kate Andrews fairly shortly afterwards. By ‘have had’ she was technically correct insofar as this was the peak ratio. But comparing a wave to a non-wave, and presenting a peak value as somehow representing the current situation is fundamentally misleading. The actual picture for Covid hospitalisations is here. I won’t

During a visit to the UN, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told other world leaders he was ‘increasingly frustrated’ that efforts to tackle climate change were ‘nowhere near enough.’ At McDonald’s we believe it’s never been clearer that now is the time for us all, including businesses, to match our words with action. We’ve been serving communities across the country since 1974, and have a long history making a difference where it matters. From turning cooking oil into fuel for our delivery trucks to removing thousands of metric tonnes of plastic from our business, we’re committed to making a positive difference to our planet. But this moment in time requires us

Since 1924, ‘Swifter, Higher, Stronger’ has been the motto of which international organisation? – The International Olympic Committee On the day Prince Philip died, the historian Guy Walters tweeted: ‘If anybody else on this planet has met both Winston Churchill and Tom Cruise, apart from the Queen, then I’ll eat my hat.’ He received replies nominating several possible contenders. But only one was shown to have definitely met both Churchill and Cruise. The British man was — at the time of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death — 88 years old. The proof consisted of a photo of him with Cruise at the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony, and the following quote:

You wait 2,000 years for a papal visit and three come along almost at once. Reports in the Scottish press suggest that Pope Francis would like to say Holy Mass while in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit in November. It would mark the third time a sitting pope has visited Scotland and celebrated Mass there. Saint John Paul II was the first to come, in 1982, and led an estimated 300,000 in worship at Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park, then in 2010 his apostolic successor Benedict XVI gave an open-air Mass in the same park to a crowd of 70,000. Both events were seen as successes, attracting interest from non-Catholics and

When the pandemic struck, we at The Spectator adopted the brace position. Like many publications, we furloughed staff and prepared for the worst. When subscription growth picked up, we became the first company in Britain to return the furlough money to the taxpayer and say we’d instead trade our way through the storm. Our last reported sales in 2019 were 83,000 (a record high) and we set a pretty big goal: to hit 100,000. I’m delighted to report that sales of The Spectator averaged 105,850 copies in the first half of this year, up 27 per cent on the first half of last year. Digital-only sales are popular but when new

The level of interest within the UK in responsible and sustainable investing has been unprecedented in recent years. This strong momentum has rightly led to greater scrutiny over the authenticity of many asset managers’ approach to environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. In addition, lack of standardisation remains a key issue for consumers, who are faced with a variety of labels — including ethical, SRI, responsible, sustainable, ESG, impact and transition, to name just a few. The choice of an appropriate asset manager has therefore never been more vital for willing responsible and sustainable investors, who are faced with this bewildering choice of funds, all of which appear to have

Wales 0 Denmark 4 (blonde self-satisfied young men 4) The battle between the neutrals’ favourites. Brave Denmark, with their stricken player and heroic travails against the evil Russkies. Wales – a small nation, although not so small as several others in this contest – magnificent conquerors of the Erdogan Caliphate. Here, though, in Amsterdam, they were hammered senseless and the score could and should have been more: Wales are out – iechyd da. Basically a Championship side – Luton Town, Swansea, Cardiff, Bornmuff – gilded by Aaron Ramsey and the gently dwindling brilliance of Gareth Bale. Oh – and Dan James, one of the world’s more overrated players. A winger

At EdenTree, we are committed responsible and sustainable investors in UK equities, despite a challenging few years in which Brexit and the pandemic have weighed heavily on share prices and hampered investor confidence in the market. We believe the UK has a unique opportunity to take a global leadership position as a home for Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) aware investors, driven by a number of sustained industry trends and a more supportive macro-economic picture for UK equities as we move through 2021. A key development is the enormous shift in attitude towards ESG issues that we have seen in the past few years, putting the UK government and capital

So much has been changed by Covid. Science and entrepreneurship have combined brilliantly to mass-produce life-saving vaccines. Working from home, video communication and online retail have become the new normal — perhaps heralding a permanent shift that will leave office towers and city centres searching for new roles. And the responsibility of every business as a corporate citizen as well as a profit generator has come into focus as never before. In 2021 and beyond, innovators have a huge opportunity to make our lives better again. In bioscience and healthcare. In logistics, data analytics and every kind of digital technology. In sustainable housing, transport and agribusiness and all the ways

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a depressing assessment on the state of U.S.-Russia relations earlier this month. While holding out a sliver of hope that ties between Washington and Moscow could improve, Lavrov said ‘the confrontation has hit the bottom’. His remarks came a fortnight after U.S. president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin scolded one another like two children in the schoolyard, with the former calling Putin ‘a killer‘ and the latter hinting that Biden may be suffering from ill health. Relations, in turns out, weren’t at the bottom as Lavrov thought.  We know this because the dynamics between the U.S. and Russia have only gotten worse in the

More than 24 hours after plans for a new ‘European Super League’ first leaked there appears to be no sign of the public anger abating. Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer and virtually every other member of the political establishment have now denounced the proposal which would not allow promotion or relegation to the new division, effectively ensuring a continental closed shop. There are already reports about a Whitehall probe into whether the scheme breaches competition law while the European body UEFA has suggested players in the teams involved ‘could be denied the opportunity to represent their national teams’ – denying England some of its best players. Who are the geniuses managing this PR

Education researchers rarely agree. But on one thing, at least, they are unanimous: the pandemic has widened the gulf in educational attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their privileged classmates and exposed deep inequalities in our education system. A study by University College London’s Institute of Education found that during the first lockdown, while a fifth of pupils did less than an hour of schoolwork at home a day, just under a fifth regularly put in more than four hours. The study showed ‘substantial inequality’ between both regions and social groups. All children need these skills for their future wellbeing and disadvantaged children will have least access to them without the

Swiss banks are hardly exciting places. Family names adorn old buildings on alpine lakesides where most of the world’s wealthiest deposit their money. But take a look at what has been going on in Swiss courts this year and you might think again. In late January, two Swiss banking executives were reprimanded in a case of serious money laundering. FINMA, the Swiss regulator, had uncovered CHF9 billion ($10 billion) of embezzled funds from Venezuelan oil company PDVSA stashed in 30 Swiss banks. Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche called it ‘the largest source of suspicious funds in Swiss banks’. In a country whose banking sector is still recovering from the reputational damage

It is wonderful to have pupils back in school. However, we have not returned to life exactly as it was before the pandemic – nor should we yearn to. Schools have been forced to adapt swiftly during this past year and in some areas of school life, this has led to improvements that we will want to retain. Having seen the advantages that remote teaching can bring, why would we pack up these skills and file them away as having been some peculiar quirk of 2020-21? Remote learning and communication are here to stay in some capacity. Not as a permanent replacement, obviously; nothing compares with face-to-face learning in a