Jeremy Hunt indicates ministers not opposed to offer from Czech billionaire in principle

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The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has said the UK will look at the national security implications of a bid for Royal Mail by the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, but indicated ministers were not opposed to the takeover in principle.

Royal Mail’s owner, the London-listed International Distributions Services (IDS), on Wednesday backed a £3.5bn bid by Křetínský’s EP Group, after initially rejecting a £3.2bn offer.

Unite launches bid to persuade Keir Starmer to invest more in north-east Scotland

The UK’s oil and gas workers risk becoming “the coal miners of our generation,” Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, has warned, urging Labour not to ban new North Sea licences without a clear plan to safeguard jobs.

Unite is launching a billboard campaign in six Scottish constituencies aimed at persuading Keir Starmer to commit more investment to north-east Scotland, the centre of the offshore oil and gas industry.

Restrictions on collective power led to decades of exploitation and stagnant pay for workers. Why not try another way?

Profiteering is nothing new. Stanley Baldwin had a pithy description for the new intake of Conservative MPs at the 1918 general election, noting that they were “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”. The future Tory prime minister was right. Many companies had found a war economy greatly to their liking, securing lucrative government contracts and making a mint in the process. Profiteering was rampant.

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the Unite union, says something similar has been happening since the war on Covid began in 2020. A study of the reports and accounts of almost 17,000 firms – big and small – showed that pre-tax profit margins were, on average, 30% higher in 2022 than they were in the years immediately before the pandemic began.