Impressionism

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Elk are staging a 3,000-year comeback in the UK.

Wildlife trusts in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire just scored £15,000 to study bringing them back to British soil.

It remains to be seen what tariffs will be imposed upon their export.

PRESENTED BY TANGLE

Burst Your Bubble

As much as we like to think everyone else is living in a social or political bubble… The truth is, we likely are as well.

Tangle is here to burst those bubbles and help you understand the opposing view.

Every day, Tangle will drop into your inbox and unpack a highly visible and often contentious issue in the news by providing the most thoughtful points from the left, right, and in-between for 340,000+ readers across the political spectrum (including our founder, a long-time Tangle fan).

Sign up for free and get a major news story broken down fairly and clearly in just 10 minutes.

Start reading.

WESTMINSTER
Is Britain really an “island of strangers”

Starmer announced big plans this week to cut legal migration numbers down each year because the UK is “becoming an island of strangers”. Very few people were impressed. Badenoch gave an (as always) cool, forensic read of the situation, calling the proposal “half-arsed”. 

So what’s Sir Keir’s big idea?

Sir Starmer, toolmaker’s son and now arson victim, says he’ll cut legal migration down by 100,000 every year by

• Banning care homes from recruiting overseas

• Making it mandatory for skilled workers to have degrees

• Lowering the time foreign UK uni graduates can stay in the UK post graduation

• Making English compulsory for all applicants

• Imposing a 6% tax on money made by universities teaching foreigners

Amongst other things. 

Why are people annoyed? 

Scrapping the social care visa, for one, seems a bit mad.

Even with record levels of overseas recruitment, there were still 131,000 job vacancies last year in England alone. 

Being a care worker isn’t exactly an easy or attractive job because it (let’s not beat around the bush) involves wiping arses for minimum wage, something that Brits just don’t want to do for some inexplicable reason. 

But Starmer wants more Brits wiping British arses. And he’ll see it through, my god. 

He’s planning a “fair pay agreement” for care workers. Whatever that means. I can already hear out-of-work Brits scrambling to care home recruiters. 

Why is he doing this? 

Yes, it is odd for the government to announce a brave new plan to cut migration numbers just after getting absolutely battered by Reform UK. A cynic might call it funny timing.

This wasn’t lost on co-leader of the Greens Carl Denyer, who said, “No matter how good his Nigel Farage impression gets, it won't save him from wipeout at the hands of Reform.” 

Still, migration numbers are staggeringly high: nearly 1 million people migrated to the UK in 2023, although that number’s been declining since. 

What other exciting plans do they have in store for us? 

The White Paper outlines a few other schemes to stop more people from coming to the UK. 

This includes making it easier for people to get deported for (shock horror):

• Violence against women and girls

• Knife crimes

• Sex crimes.

Nice of them to think about that now.

EMPLOYMENT
The UK job market is sad

There are more unemployed Brits and fewer businesses are hiring full-time staff, according to the Office for National Statistics. But at least wages are rising, right? 

What’s the low-down?

There are 

• fewer people on company payrolls

• fewer job vacancies

• and the UK has the highest unemployment rate since the pandemic. 

But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. 

Wages grew by 5.6%, which, though slower than before, is still higher than inflation.

Thank heavens.

So what’s going on? 

Employer confidence is rocked—it’s at its lowest level since the pandemic. 

One in four employers plan redundancies and just 11% plan to recruit more staff. 

All because the government forced businesses to

• Pay more National Insurance contributions towards employees

• Pay a higher minimum wage. 

Which means businesses have less incentive to take on extra people. They just can’t afford it. 

What happens now? 

When in doubt, look at the Bank of England. Those boffins are watching wage growth and price increases like hawks. 

If companies start hiking prices due to higher wage growth, they could increase inflation. 

So they’re dealing with interest rates as one might deal with an incoherently drunk angry builder whose drink you have just spilt: looking for signs of potential turmoil while cautiously backing down.

RETAIL
All this warm weather is going to our heads

Brits went on a bit of a shopping spree in April, thanks to all the warm weather we’re having. 

What happened? 

Data from Barclays shows a 5.1% increase in non-essential spending in April, mainly on takeaways, furniture, and gardening tools. 

This was the biggest rise since June 2023. 

But why?

It’s been the warmest (and driest) April since records began. More people were out on the high street, buying things they want but don’t really need. 

This is good news, obviously. 

Things are pretty uncertain, what with the prospect of a looming trade war, and the fact that most of us think World War 3 is coming. 

Is the summer over? 

Things are looking up (kind of). 

• The Bank of England just lowered interest rates

• The UK just agreed a trade deal with the US

• And Trump and China are on talking terms again

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🤖 ©️ The House of Lords voted to amend the government’s AI bill, demanding that AI companies reveal whose copyrighted work they’ve trained their models on. If the government refuses to change the bill, they’ll have to have yet another showdown with their elderly but formidable counterparts. 

• 🌧️ 🧽 80% of Britain’s peatlands are degraded and dry, which isn’t good for anyone. Peatlands (think bogs, moors and marshes) store CO2, reduce flood risk by soaking rain like a sponge, and are a foster home to Britain’s ancient wildlife. 

• 🏠️ 🤦 Ed Miliband’s wife objected to a new build near her North London home because it’s “too tall”, which is funny, considering that her husband’s party have pledged to defeat NIMBYs just like her and fellow complainant Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor known for playing just about every misunderstood genius England has ever produced. 

• 🙅 🎙️ Politicians will be banned from working as news presenters on TV or radio. MPs like Nigel Farage and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg present shows on GB News, and the regulator Ofcom worries that this prevents them from being impartial. This presupposes, of course, that stopping this will make GB News impartial.

• 🏠️ 🔥 A car and two houses owned by Sir Keir Starmer were set on fire this Tuesday. A 21-year-old man was arrested for suspicion of arson. Starmer and his family lived in one of the houses before moving to No. 10. 

• 🇮🇱 🔫 The government is being sued for selling arms to Israel because it broke its own export control rules. Arms export licenses cannot be granted if the arms in question could be used to “facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. The UK supplies Israel with 15% of the F-35’s parts, but the government claims they’re not doing it “directly”.