Portrait of the week: record inflation, record NHS waiting lists and the return of Trump

Home

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said, ‘We’re all going to be paying a bit more tax’ as he polished up his Autumn Statement. ‘The number one challenge we face is inflation,’ said Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister. The annual rate of inflation rose to 11.1 per cent from 10.1 per cent the month before. Regular pay increased by 5.7 per cent in the year to September but its real value fell by 2.7 per cent because of inflation. In a survey of grocery prices, the consumer group Which? found Heinz tomato ketchup had gone up 53 per cent in two years and Anchor spreadable butter by 45 per cent. Unemployment rose a little from 3.5 to 3.6 per cent, but an increase in the economically inactive was largely attributed to the long-term sick, of whom there are now 2.5 million.

The number of migrants arriving in Britain in small craft in 2022 exceeded 40,000. The British government will pay the French an extra £8 million in the hope of controlling the numbers leaving France; few had a lively hope that the plan would have much effect. Numbers testing positive for Covid declined in England to one in 40 by the beginning of November (one in 35 a week earlier) and Scotland to about 1 in 50 (also one in 35 a week earlier), according to the Office for National Statistics. A Bill was introduced to make the Princess Royal and the Earl of Wessex Counsellors of State to avoid the embarrassment of the Duke of Sussex or the Duke of York having to stand in for the King in his absence.

The NHS would have waiting lists of 8.7 million by March 2024, compared with 7.1 million now, according to a projection by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which found that the service had ‘struggled to increase’ its volumes of treatment above 2019 levels. Two formal complaints were made against Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, who is accused of bullying. The England team flew to the World Cup in Qatar, where homosexual acts are illegal, in an aeroplane called Rain Bow with an image of a man wearing shoes with a rainbow motif on its fuselage.

Abroad

Two people were killed when a missile left a crater in a Polish farm near the border with Ukraine. That day, Russia had launched dozens of missile strikes on cities including Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv, where half the population was reported to be without electricity. The attacks coincided with a meeting of the G20, which declared that ‘most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine’. The UN General Assembly passed a non-enforceable resolution saying Russia ‘must bear the legal consequences of all of its internationally wrongful acts, including making reparation’. Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, visited Kherson, from which Russian forces had withdrawn to the other side of the river Dnieper. He said this was ‘the beginning of the end of the war’. US officials were reported to have urged Ukraine to consider peace talks.

The cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy in the United States, owing perhaps a million people money. Sam Bankman-Fried, aged 30 and days earlier reckoned to be worth $16 billion, resigned as its chief executive. The Democrats retained control of the Senate with 50 seats to the Democrats’ 49 and a second round of voting due on 6 December in Georgia. Donald Trump said that he would stand for President in 2024.

President Joe Biden of America held talks for more than three hours with Xi Jinping, the ruler of China at the G20 summit in Bali. Crowds in the Chinese city of Guangzhou overturned a police vehicle and tore down Covid barriers. A cruise ship with about 800 cases of Covid among its 4,600 passengers and crew docked in Sydney. In Japan, GDP fell by an annualised 1.2 per cent in the three months to September.

A Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced to death an unnamed demonstrator charged with setting fire to a government facility and of ‘waging war against God’. Turkey blamed a bomb that killed six and wounded 81 in Istiklal Caddesi, in central Istanbul, on Kurdish terrorists. France allowed the Ocean Viking, a charity-operated ship with hundreds of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean, to dock at Toulon after Italy refused to give it harbour. The Netherlands was to ban the general use of nitrous oxide from January out of fear of its effects on health and road safety. CSH