News

Britain’s leading supermarkets have launched an investigation into claims of bad practice by a key UK fishing group after the Financial Times exposed the mistreatment of migrant crew on several of its member boats. The probe into the conduct of the Anglo-North Irish Fish Producers Organisation (Anifpo) and local boat owners will examine concerns over

I am on my fourth pint of the night and I feel fantastic. The atmosphere has, after simmering away with a post-work propriety, jolted alive with that inimitable spark of possibility that comes when an entire room of the tipsy and the timid finally drop their guard. On the table to my left, three hop-bellied

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has ruled out big pre-election tax cuts this autumn, warning he must “double down” on inflation and would not “pump billions of pounds of additional demand” into the UK economy. “We will not countenance tax cuts if they make the battle against inflation harder,” Hunt told the Financial Times, admitting that meeting

Jeremy Hunt badly needs some good news. After weeks of gloomy economic data, especially on inflation, on Monday the chancellor will turn to the City of London in the hope of channelling billions of pounds of the UK’s pensions savings into boosting growth. Hunt’s annual Mansion House speech comes at a crucial time for an

The Dutch government has collapsed after a dispute over curbs on immigration. Mark Rutte, the prime minister, announced on Friday night that his four-party coalition government would tender its resignation to King Willem-Alexander and there would be an election.  Rutte, 56, has been in power since 2010 with four coalition governments and is the EU’s

Dinner with a couple who are in town for a week. Then with another. Each pair, unknown to the other, expresses an itch to move to London. Each testifies that it is more “cosmopolitan” than their present habitat. No news there. A common report. Now, if I tell you that one of the couples lives

The OECD helped persuade Australia to water down a law that would have required thousands of multinationals to publicly say where they pay tax. Two people familiar with the discussions told the Financial Times that the Paris-based organisation pressured Australia’s ruling Labor government to drop a crucial part of a new finance bill that would

If Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s recent sparring online is to be believed, the two entrepreneurs will soon face off in a “cage match” in Las Vegas or Rome. The president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White, has said he is trying to organise this real-life clash of the tech titans, claiming that both

The message the world’s top central bankers delivered late last month could not have been clearer. Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, and his US and eurozone counterparts Jay Powell and Christine Lagarde, all insisted that high inflation — and high interest rates — would endure. When it comes to the US and the eurozone,

The writer is a former UK prime minister The Paris I just returned from is calm again. The streets are busy, the tourists doing their thing, the Parisians behaving typically. There have been worries that next year’s Olympics could be affected by the riots of the past 10 days. But in 2011, London had serious

Elon Musk has sued the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to recover a portion of the $90mn fee paid by Twitter, the bulk of which was wired in the hours before the billionaire took over the social media company. Wachtell Lipton, an elite Wall Street firm, had helped Twitter’s then-board to close the

It was in the early hours of Monday, as a stream of soldiers entered his house via a hole they had just smashed in his daughters’ bedroom wall, that Ali Saadi realised that the latest Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp was different from the many others he had witnessed in recent years. Having

The dire state of the NHS has led to predictable calls for a royal commission. But that would be a time-wasting distraction. The big secret is that there is widespread agreement, in the NHS and all political parties, on what needs to be done. The real question is why it still hasn’t happened. You could

The US will supply Ukraine with cluster munitions for the first time after President Joe Biden approved the move as part of a new military aid package, US officials familiar with the decision said on Friday.  The move to send cluster munitions, which are banned by many countries, comes as Washington and western allies try

“Mark Zuckerberg goes in for the kill.” “A hit to Elon Musk.” “Meta lands knockout blow on Twitter.” Headline writers reached for the age-old tropes this week as the owner of Facebook announced the launch of Threads. Who can blame them? Business is boring compared with violence. Hence why (mostly) men in suits love metaphors

Wealthy individuals who benefit from the UK’s non-dom rules paid record sums to the exchequer in the past tax year, in spite of tighter rules governing the regime. HM Revenue & Customs raised £8.5bn from non-domiciled taxpayers in 2021-22, it said on Thursday. Receipts were at their highest level since rule changes were introduced in

BP is in talks over a landmark insurance deal for its £30bn final salary pension fund as rising interest gives companies the chance to shift billions of pounds of liabilities off their books. Trustees for BP’s UK defined benefit scheme, which has more than 60,000 members, are in talks with multiple insurers over a so-called

It is a gloriously sunny day as I squeeze into the elevator of the cheery six-storey building that houses The Conduit, a trendy members’ club in London’s Covent Garden for self-appointed “changemakers”. The man I’m here to meet, Mark Malloch-Brown, has taken many guises during a protean career in which the one constant has been

European stocks followed Asia lower on Friday, extending the sharp global equities sell-off from the previous session, as investors turned to US jobs data to offer further clues on interest rates. Europe’s region-wide Stoxx 600 lost 0.2 per cent, led by declines in utilities and healthcare stocks. France’s Cac 40 fell 0.1 per cent, Germany’s

Six more women have alleged that financier Crispin Odey sexually assaulted or harassed them, expanding the timeline of his abuse across five decades and raising further questions as to the extent his behaviour was tolerated by senior colleagues. The women came forward after the Financial Times last month published the accounts of 13 women who

Imagine two countries. The first is proudly Christian, it allowed racial segregation in living memory and racism is mentioned more frequently in its media than anywhere else in the developed world. The second is strictly secular and legally prohibits the collection of data on people’s race, a conscious effort by its leaders to avoid using