| Keir Starmer has promised patients a "doctor in your pocket" as he made the NHS app the centrepiece of his 10-year plan to reform the health service. Every patient in the country will have a unified medical record on the app within three years, and a "neighbourhood health service" will see new local health hubs – open 12 hours a day, six days a week – shift healthcare away from hospitals. Zarah Sultana, Labour MP for Coventry South, has resigned from Labour, saying she will co-lead a new hard-left party with Jeremy Corbyn. The ex-Labour leader is yet to comment, but The Sunday Times's Gabriel Pogrund says Corbyn was "furious and bewildered" at Sultana for launching the party without consulting him. Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye has been crowned France's favourite village after a national television vote. "This is a great honour," says Maryline Longis, the mayor of the medieval village in southeast France, known for its soaring Gothic abbey, half-timbered houses and cobbled streets. "Even with more tourists, life will continue to be calm and untroubled." |  | Instagram/@theconnexion.france |
| | |  | Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty |
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| Can Reeves keep Labour's "hotheads" at bay? | Given all the changes to the government's welfare reforms before Labour MPs let them pass, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves may end up spending slightly more than if they had done nothing at all. This is, patently, bananas. Young people are "dropping out of the labour market in unprecedented numbers", which our economy cannot support, and the bill for disability and incapacity benefits will soon rise to £100bn a year, "which the government cannot afford". Our debts are almost the same size as our entire economy and our borrowing costs are the highest since 2008. Yet Labour MPs are "unwilling to accept fiscal reality". Which means the only option left is to raise one or more of the main taxes – income, National Insurance and VAT – which account for more than 60% of total government income. The question is whether they dare. | Despite the teary scenes this week, says Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph, Reeves is "perhaps the best hope the country has" of getting through the current "quagmire of challenges" without descending into a devastating fiscal crisis. Her failure to push through the welfare reforms worried the bond markets – raising the government's cost of borrowing – but they really spiked when it looked like she might get the boot. What investors are afraid of is what "madnesses and delusions" might come after her, from a Labour Party which, despite its appalling poll ratings, still has an "absolutely secure" majority. If, or when, Reeves goes, the floodgates will be open to the "hotheads of Labour's rank and file", with their inevitable calls for ever higher spending and wealth-destroying taxation. Reeves is the "last line of defence". | 💸 Top Labour types are terrified of raising taxes on "ordinary voters", says Will Dunn. But the truth is that UK taxes on "working people" are at a multi-decade low. Economists calculate something called the "tax wedge" – the percentage of labour costs that become taxes of any kind. And the UK's is among the lowest in the developed world, "below the US, Japan, Ireland and Canada". The richest get fleeced (60% of income tax is paid by the top 10% of earners) while others, like landlords and pensioners, get a "much easier" ride. Strange as it sounds, "middle earners are not being taxed enough". | | | | The New York Times has compiled a list of some of the world's most beautiful swimming pools. They include: the black-bottomed pool outside the bedroom of writer Anaïs Nin's Los Angeles home; the actress Julianne Moore's pool in Montauk, New York, overlooking a meadow of wildflowers; a cantilevered pool at a home near Monte Carlo; the writer Ian McEwan's infinity pool in southwest England; the winding pool at actor Robert Downey Jr's Malibu property; and a pool nestled in the dunes at a modernist house in Southampton, New York. Click on the image to see the rest. |
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| | | | You're missing out… | | The rest of today's email contains a piece on how Donald Trump has changed US military doctrine for the better, as well as shorter pieces on: | 👶 The 17-year-old primed to take over Chechnya
🥪 How the first Earl of Sandwich got "toasted"
😷 Why the young are dousing themselves in scent
🤖 Using Chat GPT to get an "unsparing assessment" on your look
💀 How Keir Starmer handles Donald Trump's "obsession" with death
💬 Machiavelli on why reform is a lonely business | To go back to receiving The Knowledge in full every day, please click below to subscribe. | |
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