Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 21 August 2022

1. Tories fear losses under Truss

Senior Tories have warned that their party will suffer devastating electoral losses under a Liz Truss premiership that fails to address the cost of living crisis. Labour now enjoys an eight-point lead in an Opinium poll, its biggest for months, while Sir Keir Starmer has surged past Truss when voters are asked who would be the best PM. Meanwhile, a poll for The Times by YouGov showed Starmer’s party enjoying its biggest lead in 10 years, on 43% – 15 points ahead of the Conservatives on 28%.

2. Libraries to be ‘warm havens’

Museums and libraries are preparing to act as “warm havens” for people unable to afford to heat their homes in the winter months, reported The Observer. The government is being asked to provide urgent new funding so public buildings can cope with a surge in visitors as the energy crisis bites. The call for support to ensure key public buildings can keep their doors open comes as one care homes group said that its annual energy bills are rising from £1.5m a year to £7.7m.

3. MPs ‘binned’ 2.6m dinners

“Pampered” MPs and Lords have “binned” 2.6m dinners as ordinary people struggle to feed their families, said The Mirror. The tabloid reported that “mounds of heavily subsidised grub” went to landfill in a “waste scandal” that has angered food poverty campaigners. Noting the “stomach-churning figures” it said that over six years the dumped food would fill 153 eight-ton skips and weighed 1.23million kilos – or 1,230 tons. In contrast, said the tabloid, more than two million hard-up adults admit often going without food for an entire day.

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4. Shapps calls for vote on offer

Grant Shapps has urged the head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union to put Network Rail’s 8% pay rise offer to workers for a vote. In a letter to RMT general secretary, Mick Lynch, the Transport Secretary said the railway operator’s proposal was “fair” and members should have the opportunity to resolve the dispute. However, Lynch rejected suggestions that rail workers would agree to the offer. “I speak to thousands of our members every week, we consult at least 600 Network Rail reps on a weekly basis and we know exactly what the mood of our members is,” he told the BBC.

5. Putin ally’s daughter killed

The daughter of a close ally to Vladimir Putin has been killed near Moscow, according to state media. Darya Dugina reportedly died after her car exploded in flames while she was driving home. Analysts believe her father, the philosopher Alexander Dugin who is known as “Putin’s brain,” may have been the intended target of the attack. Meanwhile, Russian forces in Crimea have been targeted by a fresh drone strike, the latest in a string of attacks on Russian forces and installations in the annexed peninsula in recent weeks.

6. Jagger calls for papal support

Bianca Jagger has urged Pope Francis to intervene against an “unhinged” dictatorship persecuting Catholic clergy in her homeland of Nicaragua. “His silence is my greatest disappointment, is the Pope really not aware of what’s happening in Nicaragua?” she said. After Rolando Alvarez, the Bishop of Matagalpa, was “kidnapped” by suspected state security agents last week, Jagger said: “I am deeply saddened to see that the holy father has not made an appeal on behalf of his bishops. Why has he forsaken his church in Nicaragua?”

7. Rise in dumped dogs

A rescue centre said there has been a “sharp rise” in the number of dogs being abandoned due to the cost-of-living crisis. Hope Rescue Centre in Wales said it had taken 300 calls in the past three months about pets, amid a “perfect storm” of an increase in dog ownership during lockdown and the cost-of-living crisis. In the year after the first lockdown, UK households bought 3.2m pets. Veterinary experts estimate that the potential lifetime cost of a dog could be £30,000.

8. Mushrooms could treat depression

The use of magic mushrooms to treat conditions such as depression could become a standard treatment within five years, say scientists, with hopes that major progress can be made from just one session of “psychedelic-assisted therapy”. Experts said trials are underway using “short-acting” drugs that give patients a 20-minute psychedelic experience – which can include hallucinations – followed by a two-hour therapy session. It is thought that this approach can “reset the networks in the brain”, helping to end entrenched negative patterns of thought, and making patients far more receptive to therapy, said The Telegraph.

9. Call for sat nav ban in trucks

Councils have said lorries should be banned from using car sat nav systems that leave them stuck in country roads. A lorry crashed into a bridge in Leicestershire earlier this year, causing a road to be closed for around 12 hours and a lorry blocked a road in Bristol for more than 15 hours after it got stuck in a narrow side street. Seizing on those and similar episodes, the Local Government Association, which represents councils in England and Wales, called on ministers to force HGVs to use specialist navigation tools to guide them away from narrow roads.

10. ‘Nice’ heatwave ahead for UK

Britain is set for a late summer heatwave with temperatures higher than Mexico, said The Sun. Although spells of rain will continue to bring the country’s driest period in half a century to an end, the highs of 25C today will creep up by one degree each day, with temperatures reaching around 28C by midweek, higher than Mexico City which where it is expected to be around 24C. Nicola Maxey, spokesperson for the Met Office, said: “It looks like we're going to have a nice, settled warm spell for the end of the summer.”