Harry Dunn's family expecting a 'painful' government review
The review will be led by Dame Anne Owers, who will look at the actions of the FO between Mr Dunn's death on 27 August and the end of the year.Sacoolas pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving in 2022 and was given an eight-month suspended jail term.The UK government allowed her to leave the country after the incident and, in the family's view, gave inappropriate advice on the issue of immunity.
Speaking to BBC Radio Northampton's Annabel Amos, Radd Seiger said: "I think it will be painfully embarrassing for the then Tory government."We know the Foreign Office is a wonderful establishment that looks after British citizens all around the world, but what it isn't good at is helping people locally."I think [the review] is going to be a very revealing exercise. We want to do this constructively, we don't want to be destructive – we aren't asking for people to be held to account."We just want to make sure that if this ever happens again that the government puts its best foot forward and doesn't run away from the problem."
Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who announced the review, said: "We are honouring the commitments we have made to [the Dunn family]."I am confident the review into how the case was handled by the previous government has the remit required to properly address the family's concerns and to ensure lessons are learned."
The FO said the review's final report would be published in full, subject only to redactions relating to national security or personal information.It will look at the role of the FO but not the actions of the US government.Monday's announcement came just over a week after an independent report criticised Northamptonshire Police, which apologised for its handling of the investigation.
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The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
I was jailed with UK's most evil killers… I slapped Myra Hindley for sick tune & saw raging Rose West froth at mouth
HEARING 'Britain's most evil woman' cheerfully singing along to the radio, convicted killer Linda Calvey felt something snap inside. Seconds later Linda - dubbed 'The Black Widow' - slapped child killer Myra Hindley so hard she left a handprint mark on her face, leaving the child killer recoiling in horror and pain. 12 12 12 'It all happened in a split-second,' Linda tells us. 'I yelled, 'How dare you sing when you murdered all of those children!' I slapped her without thinking.' This was her first of many encounters with the Moors Murderer, who butchered five kids aged 10 to 17 alongside partner Ian Brady in the Sixties, in three different prisons. Linda, jailed for multiple robbery offences and murder, would, reluctantly, get to know Myra better than anyone behind bars and now reveals all for The Sun's Meeting a Monster series. She tells us how Hindley duped prison staff to feed her interest in the occult and hid her secret fling with another notorious inmate. Recalling her attack on Myra, Linda tells us: 'I walked into the washing room and couldn't believe she was singing along to the radio. 'The next second I snapped, before I knew it, without even thinking, I slapped her. I thought, 'Oh God, what have I done?' but I'm still glad to this day that I did it. 'I remember she looked at me, rubbed her face and there was a handprint. She yelled, 'I could get you shipped off to [HMP] Holloway'. 'I said 'Holloway holds no fears for me' and walked out. The mad thing is she never reported me but I think part of it was that she had been attacked so many times before. 'Prior to that an inmate had broken her nose and there were various other issues, I think she feared officers would force her to give up her job washing inmates' clothes. 'That wouldn't have benefitted her, she would have been locked in her cell all day with nothing to do.' It would take four more encounters before Myra spoke again to Linda - who next week releases gangland crime fiction Hope, loosely influenced by her experiences in prison and London's East End underworld. By this time, Hindley no longer sported her trademark blonde hair, instead dying it red. But she had the same 'harsh features and look about her' that made many lags feel uncomfortable. 'You wouldn't look at her twice on the street. She looked more like an everyday housewife than a monster but there was this evil, horrible feeling around her,' Linda recalls. 'There was no warmth or niceness. She had this unpleasant aura and was very aloof but highly, highly intelligent.' Evil obsession Linda worked in the prison library and Myra would often come in to order books - permitted for inmates - but the monster had a dark motive behind it. While she requested romantic books under her own name, she secretly used the identity of other inmates to pursue her real passion. 'She would say, 'Can you order a book under this name?' and choose totally different books. They were about Adolf Hitler, black magic and obscure things,' Linda says. 'I told one of the staff, 'This is ridiculous. Is she allowed to do this?' 'They told me to just order the books. Myra bucked the system and it proved her true feelings and desires. This was long into her sentence too.' The serial killer considered herself 'far superior' to her fellow inmates who she considered 'stupid and thick' according to Linda. It was right for her to suffer so intensely at the end of her life after all the harm she caused. I remember I used to look at her and think, 'You deserve this' Linda on Myra Hindley Myra mainly kept to herself and few prisoners wanted to talk to her. One who did was fellow monster Rose West, who tortured and killed 10 young women with her husband Fred. Linda noted that they 'became thick as thieves', spending every meal time and any spare moments together, as well as often disappearing into each other's cells, in HMP Durham. 'Everybody knew they were having a fling, it was like they were stuck together. It's just beyond belief to think about,' Linda says. 'These were the two worst women in Britain, two mass murderers, and they were getting involved with each other, having an affair. 'They used to go to each other's cells all of the time and while you couldn't lock the door you could close it. Everybody knew what was going on. 'I remember one prison officer, who came over from the men's wing, being horrified when he saw them together and said, 'If I had a camera I could retire tomorrow.'' Their fling lasted seven weeks before it 'suddenly stopped' according to Linda, which she found 'very bizarre' due to how cosy they had been. She suspects the lawyer representing Rose, who was then awaiting trial, may have advised her against spending time with Myra because it was 'not a good idea and didn't look good'. 'Poetic justice' The final time Linda met Myra was in HMP Highpoint, where the villain was kept isolated living in two cells between the hospital wing and cell block. 12 12 Linda says: 'It was called 'no man's land' and they decided she had to live there. Her life was totally solitary. She lived in one cell and she had a job repairing books in the other. 'She was a really ill woman then. She did suffer a lot. She had such brittle bones that they were always snapping and chronic COPD but remained a chain smoker. 'Normally you'd feel sympathy for someone like that - 'that poor person' - but for her it felt like poetic justice. 'It was right for her to suffer so intensely at the end of her life after all the harm she caused. I remember I used to look at her and think, 'You deserve this.'' Knowing she trained as a hairdresser and that they had met before, Linda was the unfortunate soul picked to style Myra hair - a task she couldn't refuse, fearing it would impact her chance of parole. She would dye it red once a month and wash it twice a week and noted that the murderer was 'very particular' as her hair was the 'only thing left she could control'. During their time together, Myra asked about life on the prison wing and spoke about her longing to go to the gym - which she was unable to do. In a bizarre moment, after several weeks styling her hair, Linda was forced to speak to Myra's mum on the phone and was told she was the beast's 'only pal'. 'With a really elderly voice, her mum said 'Hello' and 'I'm so pleased my Myra's finally got a friend',' Linda tells us. She was hysterical, absolutely enraged and yelled, 'He should be hanged! That poor cyclist'. While yes, it was terrible, that was coming from a mass murderer Linda on Rose West 'I thought, 'I am not her friend', but didn't say it. I thought about all her poor mum must have suffered having her for a daughter. She must have taken a lot of stick.' Myra was so desperate for attention that she gave Linda a bevvy of gifts including a cardigan 'to keep me warm, which looked awful' and an empty chocolate box, because it was velvet and she thought it 'looked lovely' . The monster, who died from respiratory failure in 2002, had a miserable time rotting in prison before she passed. Linda says: 'Myra was really lonely and the longer into the sentence she got the worse it was for her. In HMP Highpoint she couldn't mix with anyone and had a very lonely existence in the final two years before she died.' 'Foaming with rage' Another famous lag Linda shared her stint with was Rose West - but unlike Myra, the former was a woman of 'quite low intelligence'. One moment that highlighted it to her, was the night her husband Fred took his own life in 1995 while the House of Horrors killers were awaiting trial. 'We could hear the men from the male prison wing singing 'Fred West, has gone and hung himself' to the tune of The Village People song Go West,' Linda says. 'We all heard it but Rose never associated what they were singing with Fred having killed himself and that it was about her husband. She wasn't intelligent. 'When she found out about his suicide, she wasn't happy at all. She wasn't upset, she was angry and absolutely raving about what he had done. 'I think she felt that way because until that point she thought she was going to walk away and Fred would take the rap for their crimes.' Besides being 'rather thick', Linda thought Rose was 'very drab, dry and very old fashioned' and the only positive thing about her was that she was a very talented seamstress. And while she gave off a meek persona, claiming to have been bent to evil under duress from Fred, there were a few times where the monster's mask slipped. Once was during a prison session with a university lecturer, who encouraged inmates to debate stories in the newspaper. The one they chose was about a drunk driver who ran over a cyclist, killing him, which Linda says left Rose so enraged she was 'foaming at the mouth'. 'She was hysterical, absolutely enraged and yelled, 'He should be hanged! That poor cyclist'. While yes, it was terrible, that was coming from a mass murderer. 'She started foaming at the mouth, it looked like toothpaste and we were transfixed by this gross white gunk coming out of her mouth. That's when the debate ended.' Another outburst followed an arsonist setting fire to her cell, which nearly killed her pet budgie, who was left covered in black soot. Linda recalls: 'Rose was hysterical, 'How could anyone be so evil to set fire to a cell and leave a bird in there' she yelled. She begged the guards to save it. 'It was given to another inmate to nurse back to health. After that, she went and lay on her bed for two days straight. She didn't get off it until the budgie was better.' Serial proposers In another surprising twist, Linda found herself on the receiving end of affection from two notorious prisoners - mobster Reggie Kray and violent lag Charles Bronson. The former, she tells us, would call her every week from prison, lavished her with gifts and once proposed before telling her 'forget I said anything' after she turned him down. Meanwhile Bronson popped the question 'probably every three months and at least 14 times' in letters as well as sending her photos. The lag, who has nearly served 50 years behind bars, contacted her claiming he knew some of her friends and said 'what a lovely person I was'. 'Due to being in prison for so long, he didn't have a lot to chat about so would ask me questions like, 'How are you?', 'Any family visits?' and that kind of thing. 12 'Then all of a sudden, 'Would you like to marry me?' I said, 'I don't think it's a good idea'. He said 'That's ok' and then three months later, was like, 'Would you like to marry me?' again. 'He was always proposing. He didn't write love letters, he would just say, 'I was thinking, if you'd like to marry me the offer is still there.' Although Bronson was originally jailed for petty crime and robbery, his attacks on fellow inmates and prison officers have seen his sentences extended to total five decades. 'I feel sorry for him, that he's still in prison. It's a shame when you put it into context. Everyone assumes he murdered someone but he didn't," says Linda. 'He just drove authorities mad for so many years with his antics. What he did wasn't that big and he's been in there forever.' Linda, who was released on parole in 2008, has put criminality firmly behind her and dedicated her life to her family and writing - she's published two memoirs and is about to release her fourth novel. Titled Hope, it's about three generations of women caught in the grips of London's murky underworld and many of the characters are loosely based on crooks she met. 'It's a world I came from, which makes it more real, and some characters are based on women I knew and met in prison,' she says. 'It was my late husband, George, who died from cancer nine years ago, that inspired me. He told me, 'Linda, go for it. Do your writing'. I've found my niche and I know I'm making him proud.' Hope, the second in a crime gangster trilogy, is published by Mountain Leopard Press on July 17. To preorder, visit here
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Cash use to be tracked amid ‘two-tier society' fears
The Bank of England will monitor the use of cash payments amid fears that vulnerable groups risk being excluded in a 'two-tier society'. Threadneedle Street officials are set to intervene after MPs warned more checks were needed to ensure people can still pay with cash in public places, such as coffee shops, leisure centres and on public transport. There are currently no legal requirements in the UK for businesses or organisations to accept cash, fuelling fears that pensioners and people with disabilities could be shut out. Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury select committee, welcomed the move by the Bank and said it was a 'positive first step'. It comes after the committee revealed earlier this year that vulnerable groups were having to pay higher prices for essential goods amid an increase in the number of shops not accepting cash. However, it also said there were significant obstacles in assessing the true level of cash acceptance across the UK. A study by Link, the UK's cash machine network, in 2024 found that half of those surveyed had been to a business or organisation in the last eight weeks that did not accept cash or discouraged cash use. Yet 98pc of small businesses said they accepted cash when polled by Savanta. A lack of consistent evidence makes it challenging for the Government to determine how widespread the issue of cash acceptance is in the UK. There are concerns that a decline in cash acceptance will lead to the exclusion of vulnerable groups such as the elderly, people with learning disabilities, and domestic abuse victims. Dame Meg said that the Government 'consistently agrees' with the Treasury committee's view 'that action needs to be taken to avoid financially excluding vulnerable groups'. In response to the committee's findings, Emma Reynolds, the economic secretary to the Treasury, said: 'Ensuring individuals have access to the appropriate financial products and services they need is a key priority for the Government.' The Treasury is due to publish a financial inclusion strategy later this year, 'which will examine the barriers consumers face to accessing products and what more industry and government can do to support them'. ATM decline When appearing before the Treasury committee in January, Ms Reynolds said the Government had 'no plans to regulate businesses, big or small, to compel them to accept cash'. Yet the committee has argued that ministers may have to legally mandate cash acceptance in the future if a 'two-tier society' arises. Worries of a decline in cash acceptance have emerged alongside a significant fall in the number of free ATMs. The number of cash machines in the UK fell by 5pc year-on-year to 46,182 in 2024, according to Link. Since the pandemic, there has been a rise in the number of businesses that call themselves cash-free, with others stating that they prefer customers to accept card or contactless payments. Over the last decade, there has also been a significant decline in the number of cash transactions. Cash accounted for just over half of all payments in 2013, but that fell to 12pc in 2023 as the popularity of card and digital payments increased. Blackouts in Spain and Portugal earlier this year prevented the public from making card payments. The committee highlighted the importance of physical cash in emergency situations, warning that alternatives must be in place in the event of a major technological failure or a state-sponsored cyber attack.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Britain is broke: how inflation-linked debt costs us £60bn
Britain is broke. That was the depressing conclusion of the Office for Budget Responsibility's annual report on the future of the public finances published this week. Of course the fiscal watchdog did not choose those exact words. Instead it used 65,000 other words, but if you were to distil the overall message, it's hard to come to a different conclusion. The watchdog chose to focus its report this year on the ruinous cost of the triple-lock pension promise and the strain that net zero will place on the public purse. But in Westminster, all the talk is about how a little-known policy decision made decades ago is putting the government in an uncomfortably tight fiscal straitjacket. That decision was to start promising investors who lent money to the government that their cash would be protected from the ravages of inflation. Or in more technical language, the government started issuing index-linked gilts that were tied to the retail prices index (RPI) measure of inflation. This innovation meant investors could lend the government money safe in the knowledge that if inflation rose, the amount of interest they would receive and the amount returned at the end of the term of the loan would rise so the real value of their investment would never fall. Conventional gilts offer no such protection. The lender is just paid a fixed amount of interest each year, and a fixed amount of cash is returned at the end of the term. The consequences of this policy for the public purse are only now beginning to be felt because of the higher levels of inflation since the pandemic. The numbers are stark. In 2020 the government spent £25 billion a year on debt interest, but in the last tax year it spent £105 billion. By comparison, it spends £60 billion on schools, £55 billion on defence and £20 billion on the police. So who is to blame and how did we get here? The short answer is politicians. The long answer is more complicated. Decisions on the type of debt to issue each year are made by the chancellor but they are informed by officials and subject the demands of the market. The record shows that particularly high levels of index-linked gilts were issued under the chancellorships of Gordon Brown and George Osborne. However, the policy itself was first introduced by Geoffrey Howe, who was chancellor in 1981. Howe made the decision in part because the early Thatcher government was struggling to borrow what it needed after the economic crises of the 1970s, but also because it signalled that the Treasury was serious about cracking down on inflation. By promising to protect the real value of money lent to the Treasury, investors were reassured that the new government would not repeat the reckless and inflationary policies of the previous decade. There was also strong demand for this type of government debt from the pensions industry because it helped to fund the inflation guarantees in final salary schemes. • OBR rings alarm on pensions, climate change and the fiscal rule In the decades that followed, index-linked gilts, or 'linkers' as they became known, were hailed as a clever innovation because they met this demand and actually saved the government money. The reason was that investors would accept a lower rate of return on index-linked loans than conventional gilts because of the inflation protection they offered. Provided the RPI rate remained low — and over the next few decades it generally did — the government benefited by having to pay less interest on its debts. Indeed, an official analysis in 2023 found that the Treasury cumulatively saved £158 billion by issuing linkers in place of conventional gilts between 1981 and 2022. However, the equation dramatically shifted in 2022 when inflation surged to a high of 14.2 per cent. Suddenly, the amount the government had to pay to service its debts ballooned. Britain's public finances were hit uniquely hard because over the preceding decades the UK government had issued so much more index-linked debt than anyone else. By 2022, nearly 25 per cent of Britain's outstanding borrowing was index-lined, more than twice as much as any other G7 country. Italy has the next highest holding at 12 per cent but US debt has only 7 per cent and Germany less than 5 per cent. This meant that between 2019 and 2022, debt interest costs increased faster in the UK than in every other OECD country. The proportion of this increase that is down to linkers is subject to debate because the pandemic greatly increased government borrowing generally and the interest rates on conventional gilts also increased. However, an analysis by The Times of RPI rates and the stock of outstanding government debt, suggests the decision to issue linkers over conventional gilts cost the Treasury £62.8 billion in higher interest payments during 2022 and 2023. To put this in perspective, a penny on income tax raises only about £6 billion. These higher borrowing costs are set to continue for years to come as linkers mature and are repaid. It is one of the main reasons why the annual bill for servicing the nation's debt is set to hit £132 billion by 2030, according to the OBR. Whatever the exact cost of linkers, there can be no doubt that they have severely constrained Rachel Reeves's ability to enact meaningful policy, or borrow to invest in Britain's creaking public services. To make matters worse for the chancellor, investors in the gilt markets are acutely aware of the government's inflation-based debt problem so they scrutinise her every policy decision. Any move that suggests Labour might abandon fiscal responsibility rapidly raises the interest rates they demand to lend to the government. That is a major problem when the Treasury needs to borrow more than £250 billion this year and why these investors have been nicknamed the 'bond vigilantes'. The bond market really is an ever-present sword of Damocles hanging over the government. Anyone who doubts its power should remind themselves what happened to Liz Truss following her disastrous mini-budget. Perhaps understandably, no one is jumping to the front of the queue to take the blame for creating this situation. A Treasury source said that successive chancellors had to decide between the 'short-term attraction' of index-linked gilts and the longer-term risk. The 'red hot' demand from the pension industry made those decisions harder. However, the source admitted that, in hindsight, the issuing of index-linked gilts 'went too far'. While no politicians have publicly blamed the officials who advised them, questions have been asked about the role of civil servants. The principal official responsible for advising the government through the Brown and Osborne period was Sir Robert Stheeman, who was chief executive of the Debt Management Office (DMO), a Treasury agency created in 1998 when the Bank of England became independent. The DMO took on the bank's role of issuing and servicing gilts, with an objective to 'minimise financing costs over the long term, taking account of risk'. While there is no public record of Stheeman, who was earning £145,000 a year when he left in 2024, explicitly calling for more linkers, he did repeatedly describe them as a 'key part of the UK financing programme' and emphasised their cost advantages under certain market conditions. Last year, his replacement, Jessica Pulay, noted the markets' robust demand for index-linked gilts. However, ascribing any blame to officials at the DMO is tricky because they have no decision-making role and are only there to advise and execute government orders. So as successive chancellors were making merry in the bond markets, drunk on the illusion that inflation was a historic problem, did anyone raise the alarm? The short answer is very few. There were some warnings but they were muted. For example, in the mid 2010s, the House of Lords economic affairs committee highlighted that the UK's large share of inflation-linked debt made the public finances unusually vulnerable to inflation shocks — however it was presented only as a theoretical risk. Given the extended period of low inflation the country had benefited from, few took much notice. It was only when the OBR raised the alarm in 2017 that the Treasury decided to act. In the 2018 budget, Philip Hammond announced the government would gradually reduce the proportion of index-linked gilts it issued. Over the next five years, the share of government borrowing raised using linkers fell from 23.5 per cent to 12.4 per cent. However, it was too little, too late. Decades of much higher levels of issuance, and the fact that the inflation uplift on these debts kept their value rising, meant that by 2022, when inflation surged, more than 25 per cent of all outstanding gilts were still index linked. Rumours in Westminster suggest that for years the Treasury did not want to address the risks because linkers were considered a useful tool to constrain excessive departmental spending and the profligacy of No 10. The theory is that having a high proportion of index-linked gilts meant that large increases in public spending would be inflationary and therefore prohibitively expensive. Whether that theory is true, remains to be seen. However, what cannot be disputed is that Britain's debt experiment will handicap chancellors for years to come.
