The Week 1569

In the mid-2000s, the RSPB began transferring millions of tonnes of earth excavated to build London’s Elizabeth line to Wallasea Island in Essex, to create a new nature reserve. Now almost 40,000 birds live in the wetlands, including 3,000 grey plovers and 800 avocets sheltering on its man-made salt marshes and islands. The RSPB’s Rachel Fancy called it an amazing transformation, saying that it used to look “an awful lot like a construction site – because that’s what it was.” It took the combined efforts of the Coastguard, Royal Marines and armed police, but a reindeer that escaped a Santa’s grotto in Merseyside was successfully led back to safety this week. Buddy sparked a huge rescue operation when he fled Santa’s Enchanted Forest in Formby. For the first few hours,…

The Budget fallout What happened The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, accused Rachel Reeves of lying to the public so that she could fund increased welfare spending with tax rises in last week’s Budget. Reeves faced calls from the Conservatives, the SNP and Reform UK for her resignation. In a speech on 4 November, the Chancellor had raised expectations of tax rises by warning that the UK’s productivity was weaker “than previously thought”, and that this would have consequences for the public finances. But it emerged last Friday that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR, see page 13) had told the Treasury on 31 October that the downgrade in productivity would be offset by larger tax revenues from higher wages, meaning that Reeves was actually on course to meet her fiscal…

What happened The Government announced this week that it is abolishing jury trials in England and Wales for offences with a probable sentence of three years or less. Justice Secretary David Lammy said that Crown Court judges will sit alone in “swift courts” to decide “either-way” cases, in which defendants could previously choose to be tried by a jury or by magistrates. The reforms are designed to help clear a backlog of 78,000 cases in the criminal justice system; other measures unveiled by Lammy include the removal of jury trials in many cases involving fraud or complex financial crime. The announcement follows the release in July of a government-commissioned report by the former senior judge Brian Leveson, which said that, without major reform, the criminal justice system faces “total system…

Controversy of the week The art of the deal “By the end of this year, Russia’s war against Ukraine will have lasted as long as the Soviet Union’s against Nazi Germany” – and we are still no closer to peace, said Lawrence Freedman in The New Statesman. The latest efforts failed in Moscow this week; following five hours of talks with President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Vladimir Putin rejected a revised deal. The main obstacle remains Putin’s fixation with gaining total control of the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. But Team Trump have only caused confusion and prolonged the bloodshed. First, they presented a 28-point peace plan so sympathetic to Putin’s demands it might as well have been drafted by the Kremlin. It…

If you find your blood pressure rising as you scroll through your news feed, you’re not alone. Oxford University has chosen “rage bait” as its word of the year – use of the term having tripled in the past 12 months. The phrase refers to online content that is “deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive”. A Cambridgeshire school attended by Samuel Pepys has proposed removing his name from one of its houses, because of his “abusive and exploitative” attitudes towards women. Hinchingbrooke School said the author’s behaviour – in his diaries he writes of trying to touch at least one woman’s “mameles” (breasts) every day – did not “align with [our] values”.…

The Cornish language, which is to be given protected status. Kernewek is spoken as a first language by 563 people, according to the last census; it will be recognised alongside Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic under a Council of Europe charter, meaning people will have a right to use it in legal hearings and in education. Grace Richardson, who became the first openly gay Miss England. The 20-year-old, who will compete at Miss World 2026, said she was bullied badly for her sexuality at school. “So it’s nice being able to stand up now and say, ‘Look what I’ve done.’”…