Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 4 November 2022

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1. UK ‘faces longest recession’
2. Trump set for 2024 run
3. Bomb victim ‘totally failed’
4. Rates ‘won’t go much higher’
5. Israel’s ‘theocratic’ new government
6. Khan survives ‘assassination bid’
7. Kremlin using ‘energy terrorism’
8. Tube numbers bouncing back
9. D-day for Twitter staff
10. Senior bishop calls for same-sex reform

published 4 November 2022

1. UK ‘faces longest recession’

The UK is facing its longest recession in almost 100 years, said the Bank of England yesterday, as it warned that the country faces a “very challenging” two-year slump. The downturn risks reducing the economy by almost 3% and unemployment is forecast to nearly double from 3.5% to 6.5%, said The Times. The forecast is a “horror show” for Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, said ITV News, because “the politics of putting up taxes and cutting public services when the economy is shrinking are dire”.

Donald Trump has dropped one of his strongest hints yet that he may run for the White House again. The former US president told a crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, that he will “very, very, very probably do it again” in 2024. Repeating his claim of election fraud, he said: “I ran twice, I won twice, and did much better the second time than I did the first, getting millions more votes in 2020 than I got in 2016. And likewise, getting more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country by far.”

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The family of a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing have “slammed emergency services failures”, said the Manchester Evening News, after it was found his injuries were survivable. A public inquiry found that police, fire and ambulance services repeated mistakes made after the 7/7 bombings in 2005 because “no one really thought it could happen to them”. The family of the man who the inquiry found would probably have survived had he not been left to bleed to death by the emergency services said he had been “totally failed at every stage”.

Bank of England has signalled that interest rates probably won’t go much higher after it hiked them to 3% yesterday, the highest rise since 1989. The minutes of its latest meeting show a majority of its nine-strong monetary policy committee believes “further increases in bank rate may be required for a sustainable return of inflation to target, albeit to a peak lower than priced in to financial markets”. The market expectation is a peak of 4.75%. Threadneedle Street “sees the risk of pushing rates too high”, said The Guardian.

Israeli prime minister, Yair Lapid, has called Benjamin Netanyahu to offer his congratulations on the veteran politician’s election win. “The state of Israel comes before any political consideration,” Lapid said in a statement after Netanyahu, the chair of the conservative Likud party formed a coalition with religious and far-right allies to form a government. “Israel’s next government will be by far the most religious in its history,” said Haaretz, adding the country may become a “theocracy”.

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, survived a shooting at a political rally, which killed one person and injured several others. Footage of the incident shows Khan waving from an open-topped bus just outside the town of Gujranwala, Punjab province, when shots ring out. There was no immediate official comment on the motive for the attack, which “Khan’s allies say was an assassination bid”, according to the BBC. He was treated for a wounded leg at the Shaukat Khanum Hospital, said Pakistan Today.

Ukraine has accused Moscow of resorting to “energy terrorism” as Russian troops make few gains on the battlefield. President Volodymyr Zelensky said 4.5m people were without power following the Kremlin’s attacks on its energy network. Russia has carried out “large-scale missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian power facilities” in recent weeks, said the BBC. Meanwhile, the US said it believes that Ukrainian forces are able to retake Kherson, calling their work “methodical” and “effective”.

Tube passenger numbers have reached their highest levels since the start of the Covid pandemic as workers return to the office. Average passenger numbers on London Underground were 78% of pre-pandemic levels in the week ending October 28, up from 71% at the start of September and 45% at the beginning of the year. “There is still some way to go to bring our overall fare revenues back to levels seen pre-pandemic,” said Nick Dent, the director of customer operations on the tube at TfL.

Twitter says it will inform its staff today about whether they will be laid off in a round of cuts to put the company on a “healthy path”. In a memo, the company added that its offices would be temporarily closed and badge access would be suspended. While the memo doesn't detail how many employees will lose their jobs, “Musk is expected to cut roughly half of Twitter’s roughly 7,500-person workforce”, said The Verge.

The Bishop of Oxford has called for the Church of England to accept same-sex marriage. The Rt Rev Steven Croft said that he was sorry that his views on same-sex marriage were “slow to change” and had “caused genuine hurt, disagreement and pain”. According to canon law, no Church of England minister can currently bless or marry gay couples. In August, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, acknowledged that there are “deep differences” within the church.

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