The Week 1512

What happened Rachel Reeves announced £40bn of tax rises on Wednesday in a Budget that she said would help “fix the foundations” of the economy and spur growth. The biggest revenue-raiser was a 1.2% increase in the rate of employers’ national insurance contributions, to 15%, together with a near halving of the threshold at which employers start paying that levy. Those measures, said Reeves, would raise about £25bn a year. The Chancellor increased capital gains tax on the sale of shares and some other assets, and announced reforms to inheritance tax, limiting exemptions for businesses and agricultural land, and bringing inherited pension pots within the tax. However, contrary to expectations, she said the freeze on income tax and NI thresholds would not be extended beyond 2028. Delivering Labour’s first Budget…

What happened Donald Trump and Kamala Harris continued their tour of crucial battleground states as the US election entered its final week, with the polls suggesting that the pair were still neck-and-neck. Harris maintained a small lead of perhaps 1% over Trump in national polling averages, while polls of the swing states showed Trump leading by a tiny margins in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, and Harris leading by similar margins in Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan. At her last major rally, in Washington DC, Harris vowed to put America on a “different path” and called Trump a “wannabe dictator” (see page 15). Her campaign received a boost when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the ex-Republican governor of California, endorsed her candidacy. Trump’s campaign attracted criticism when a comic at a rally in…

A previously unknown waltz by the composer Frédéric Chopin has been discovered nearly 200 years after it was written. The minute-long piece, which has been dated to the 1830s, was written on a card measuring about 4 inches by 5 inches, and found by a curator in the vault of New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, who then worked with a leading Chopin expert to authenticate it. The pianist Lang Lang said the piece’s opening evoked the harsh winters of Chopin’s native Poland. Two parrots that went missing from London Zoo have been returned after being spotted by a family in Cambridgeshire. Lily and Margot, who are both blue-throated macaws, failed to come back to their enclosure on 21 October after going for a flight in the open air, as…

Controversy of the week “What were your ancestors doing 200 years ago,” asked Julia Hartley-Brewer in The Sun. I’m pretty sure mine weren’t “busy benefiting from the slave trade” – and, since the vast majority of Britons back then had nothing to do with such horrors, I’d wager yours weren’t either. So why should the descendants of ordinary Britons pay reparations to those descended from the victims of the transatlantic slave trade? This question dominated last week’s biennial meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in Samoa, where Caribbean nations lobbied for the issue to be put on the agenda – despite Keir Starmer’s best efforts to keep it off. They wanted to agree plans to examine reparatory justice for the transatlantic slave trade, said James Landale on BBC News, something…

Pubs fed up with people queuing up to buy drinks are putting up signs to encourage them to order in the traditional way – by standing around the bar, trying to catch the bartender’s eye. The culprits, The Daily Telegraph reports, are Gen Z, who are said to be clinging to lockdown habits designed to ensure social distancing. “This is not a Post Office, there is no need to queue like one,” one pub sign reads. The grumble that “Christmas is getting earlier every year” is grounded in fact, reports The Guardian. A detailed analysis of “Christmas creep” shows that, for instance, the average supermarket launch date for Mr Kipling’s mince pies has retreated from 28 September in 2020 to 7 September this year.…

Tito, the late Indian tycoon Ratan Tata’s German shepherd, who was named as the recipient of a large chunk of its owner’s £91m fortune. Tata, who died last month without having married or had children, was known to be devoted to his dog; he also named his cook and his butler as beneficiaries of his estate. The A19, which was voted the UK’s best A road. In a survey by the Transport Focus watchdog, the 124-mile stretch in North Yorkshire won praise for its “decent surface and good markings”. Contrition, with the news that a burglar who stole a treasured engagement ring has returned it to its rightful owner. Darren Horsnell, 62, had realised the ring was missing from its place next to the ashes of his late fiancée Tracey…