Hammond holds back declared insurance hike
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, had announced to increase National Insurance CONTRIBUTIONS IN HIS fiRST AND LAST SPRING BUDGET.
Security forces shot dead a man who seized a soldier’s gun at Paris Orly airport in France on Saturday soon after the same man shot and wounded a police officer during a routine police check, the interior minister said.
The man was known to police and intelligence services, Interior Minister Bruno le Roux told reporters. A police source described him as a radicalised Muslim but did not identify him by name.
The anti-terrorism prosecutor opened an investigation. The busy Orly airport south of Paris was evacuated and security forces swept the area for bombs to make sure the dead man was not wearing an explosive belt, but nothing was found, interior ministry spokesman PierreHenry Brandet told Reuters.
“The man succeeded in seizing the weapon of a soldier. He was quickly neutralised by the security forces,” Brandet said.
Noone else was injured at the airport.
Flights were suspended from both terminals of the airport and some flights were diverted to Charles de Gaulle airport north of the capital, airport operator ADP said.
Earlier, a police officer was shot and wounded by the same man during a routine traffic check in Stains, north of Paris.
The incidents came five weeks before France holds presidential elections in which national security is a key issue.
The country remains on high alert after attacks by Islamic State militants killed scores of people in the last two years -including coordinated bombings and shootings in Paris in November 2015 in which 130 people were killed. A state of emergency is in place until at least the end of July.
The attacks would have no impact on a trip to Paris by Prince William, second-in- line to the British throne, and his wife Kate, who are due to end a two-day visit to the French capital on Saturday, a British spokesman said.
The soldier whose gun the man tried to seize was a member of the army’s “Sentinelle” operation responsible for patrolling airports and other key sites since January 2015 when Islamist attackers killed 12 people at the satiri- cal weekly Charlie Hebdo. It was reinforced after the Paris attacks. Around 3,000 passengers were evacuated from the airport, the second busiest in the country.
In March 2016, Islamic State claimed responsibility for suicide bomb attacks on Brussels airport and a rushhour metro train in the Belgian capital which killed 35 people, including three suicide bombers. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond made a dramatic U- turn on the National Insurance hike that he had announced in his first and last Spring Budget to Parliament on 8 March. He had planned to increase National Insurance Contributions (NIC) for the self- employed, on profits between £8,060 and £43,000 (affecting about 2 million people), to 10% in April 2018 and to 11% in April 2019. There followed an absolute furore from the circa 2 million people affected, including many of UK’s NRI population. Hammond was accused of breaching the election promise of 2015 not to raise income tax. One week later, a humiliated Hammond published a letter in the Sun newspaper, saying he had climbed down and withdrawn the increased NIC “…after listening to the views of readers, MP colleagues and others, I announced that we will not go ahead with the changes to self-employed National Insurance… By making these changes, I hope we have shown we are listening to people and demonstrating our determination to keep to both the letter and the spirit of our commitments.” Will his ability to acknowledge he was wrong be enough for him to remain as Chancellor for the full term in the eventuality of a premature election?
The Electoral Commission is the independent body which oversees elections and regulates political finance in the UK. The Conservative Party has been fined £70,000 after an investigation into the party’s national and local campaign spending. The investigation concluded there were failures to report accurately on how much was spent campaigning at three by-elections in 2014 and at the 2015 General Election; in 2015, payments worth £104,765 were missing and separately payments worth up to £118,124 were incorrectly reported. Additionally, the Party did not include the required invoices or receipts for 81 payments to the value of £52,924. The Tories released the information only after a High Court order demanded the missing papers. An embarrassed Tory chairman, Patrick McLoughlin did not want to answer questions. A police investigation now follows to discover if there has been a criminal breach in election spending rules. This is a hard lesson that shows that proper accounting procedures and systems are not in place; in the chaos of an election campaign existing systems are not adhered tobut it has always been so. Both Labour and Liberal Democrats have been fined for the same reasons before. It is also possible the rules are opaque and have consistently been broken and thus become the “norm”, if some reform is advised this may throw a few by-election results into doubt and by-election re-runs will be mooted.
Hot on the heels of the Penelope and Francois Fillon scandal that has seen the French Presidential hopeful plummet in the polls, nepotism is to be banned in UK Parliament. In a new order from the Independent Standards Parliamentary Authority (IPSA) following the next election (2020?) MPs will be banned from employing their wives and relatives paid for by the public purse. At the moment, 84 Conservatives, 50 Labour and 10 SNPs employ a relative. Roughly, 150 MPs’ family members cost about £4.5million a year. This cost will quite likely rise as many family members are undervalued and outsourced support will have to be competitive. MPs argue that only family members can cope with the long and unpredictable hours, necessary confidentially and trust.