Kate Andrews

Over the past few months, Matt Hancock has been seeking forgiveness for his rule-breaking affair during the pandemic. And the former-health-secretary-turned-reality-TV-star has been pursuing redemption in some strange places. He’s been buried six feet underground with snakes; covered in slime, frogs and spiders; and dared to ask the harshest audience these days – the public – to ‘please forgive me’ in a sit-down interview with the Daily Mail ahead of the release of his new book. Hancock is not asking, but begging, to be forgiven. And today’s news is certainly his most serious plea to date. Writing to the Prime Minister (and TikToking), Hancock has announced he will be standing down at the next election to discover ‘a whole new world of possibilities.

Will NHS Scotland withstand the winter? According to draft minutes of a meeting of CEOs from each health board in September, there is growing concern the health service will not be able to operate normally over the winter months. It ‘is not possible to continue to run the range of programmes’ it reads, before stating that ‘unscheduled care is going to fall over in the near term before planned care falls over’. The warning fits a pattern.

Rishi Sunak has ushered in a new era of austerity, not just Osborne-style spending cuts, but tax hikes as well. His Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, says the plan is not just to balance the books but to control inflation, and so this will be the theme of the Sunak years: Austerity 2.0. Throughout the leadership campaign, Sunak repeatedly argued that persistent high deficits were no longer an option. Difficult decisions lay ahead, he said, and claims to the contrary were ‘fairy tales’. His critics said this was a safety-first ‘Treasury view’, and Britain had plenty of scope to borrow more. But Sunak was certain that the debt racked up during the pandemic – not just by Britain but countries the world over – guaranteed a wake-up call at some point.

The workforce has not sprung back. According to the latest labour market figures, released by the Office for National Statistics today, the UK workforce is falling, not rising. Employers may be crying out for workers but the number in employment fell by 52,000 in the three months to September, twice what was expected. This was due to a remarkable drop of 249,000 in September alone. Meanwhile, job vacancies still stand near the record high, at 1.23 million – about twice the average seen in the past decade.  Unemployment, by formal definition, has fallen: a dip of 0.2 percentage points on the quarter, down to 3.6 per cent. Very few people seeking work are struggling to find it.

There was no ‘red wave’ in America last night. This became obvious fairly early on, when congressional seats the Republicans hoped to pick up in New England failed to flip. Many on the American right had made the assumption that seats won by Democrats by a few percentage points in 2020 would easily turn red. This turned out to be wrong. In fact, there has been very little turnover in the House of Representatives or the Senate in either direction so far. The election map looks stuck in time, a close replica of how politics panned out two years ago, with both Democrats and Republicans holding their seats. Yet much has happened since the last election: mainly economic turmoil. The US, like the UK, is dealing with inflation rates at a 40-year high.