It's time to get rid of the Rich List

Here's a takeover tale that captures the zeitgeist. It involves two FTSE 250 companies and some deep-pocketed US investors – and I'll explain it as simply as I can. In essence, how would you feel if your GP surgery fell into the hands of American investors associated with the book title Barbarians at the Gate?
The first of the two London-listed companies is Assura, which owns 600 NHS surgeries and diagnostic facilities and has accepted a cash offer of £1.6 billion from a pair of New York investment giants. They are Stone-peak, which holds a huge global portfolio of infrastructure assets, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, whose initials KKR may be familiar to older readers as a pioneer of aggressive private–equity dealmaking – most famously the 1989 buyout (chronicled by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in the Barbarians bestseller) of the food and tobacco group RJR Nabisco. Imbued with Trumpist swagger, investors like these habitually prowl the London market for undervalued targets.
The second company, Primary Health Properties, is the only other significant player in Assura's marketplace, as the owner of 516 GP facilities in the UK and Ireland – and has cut in to offer £1.7 billion for Assura in cash and shares. KKR claims PHP's deal will hit competition issues, though the merged company would hold a relatively small proportion of the NHS surgery estate, most of which is owned by the GPs themselves.
In an era in which public markets are shrinking and private equity is rampant, largely to the detriment of smaller investors, this is a rare example of a listed company challenging the Goliath of KKR and its ilk.

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The Guardian

20 minutes ago

• The Guardian

Monday briefing: Four ways Iran could retaliate to US bombing of nuclear sites

Good morning. After he ordered the attacks on Iranian nuclear sites that constituted the US's entry into Israel's war against Iran, Donald Trump insisted that he wanted peace 'quickly', and that the alternative would be 'tragedy for Iran' and 'far greater' attacks in future. His vice-president, JD Vance, said that the US was 'not at war with Iran' and that 'we do not want to protract this'. But in Tehran, with Trump now also talking of regime change, the conclusion appears to be that there is no choice but to respond. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said that 'The Americans must receive a response to their aggression'. And foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said that the US strikes will have 'everlasting consequences'. While there is little doubt that Iran's military capacities have been severely degraded since Israel's attacks on 13 June, the country retains immediate options – and may now be more set on a path to nuclear weapons than it was before this began. So what might an Iranian reaction look like – and would it be calibrated to avoid escalation, or to punish Trump as aggressively as possible? For today's newsletter, I spoke to Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran expert and editor of about the scenarios that might unfold. Here are the headlines. Assisted dying | Health secretary Wes Streeting has voiced doubts over whether the NHS can afford to establish an assisted dying service, after MPs passed a bill to legalise the procedure last week. The bill now heads to the House of Lords, where there are expected to be continued battles over its progress. Health | Thousands of patients in England will be able to access weight-loss jabs via their GP from Monday for the first time. Family doctors will be allowed to prescribe Mounjaro to severely obese people living with a range of other health problems. Syria | A suicide bombing by Islamic State targeting a church in Damascus has killed 20 people and wounded 52, Syrian authorities have said. The attack on Sunday night was the first major IS operation and the first suicide bombing in Syria since former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December. Domestic violence | Domestic abuse is a public health emergency, experts have claimed, after a report concluded that the NHS is failing victims by not training staff to spot and respond to the signs of domestic violence. more than 20% of people in England and Wales aged 16 years and over have experienced domestic abuse. UK politics | Reform UK have proposed offering wealthy foreigners and returning British expats a bespoke tax regime in exchange for a one-off payment of £250,000 with the proceeds redistributed to Britain's lowest-paid workers. But there are concerns over a two-tier tax system allowing millionaires to buy their way out of full UK tax liability. Since Israel's first attack on Iran ten days ago, Israeli officials believe that Iran has used up between a third and half of its ballistic missile stock. Senior military leaders have been killed, air defence systems have been crippled, key command centres have been destroyed, and now the US has dealt a devastating blow to Iran's nuclear programme. But it would be a mistake to think Iran's leadership is therefore bound to accept the 'unconditional surrender' Trump has demanded. 'They are pragmatic people,' Mohammad Ali Shabani said. 'They prefer to live to fight another day. But there is a question with Trump about whether, if you exact no cost, you increase the risk of further bombing. There will be a desire to show that Israel has not obliterated their retaliatory capacity, and to show a domestic audience that they are not defeated.' Here are some of the options that might be considered. The 'proportionate' response | Military action that aims to avoid escalation 'The feeling may be that they have to choose a kinetic response,' Shabani said. 'That's a fancy way of saying 'bomb something'.' In this analysis, considerations will include whether any Iranian lives were taken by the US attack – none have yet been reported – and the fact it was executed by submarines and bombers that did not depart from US bases in the region. 'It was a bloodless attack, and since we know that these sites have largely been evacuated, there may be a desire to do the same thing.' Options Shabani thinks may be on the table include an attack on US interests in Iraq – 'it's so close, it has limited air defences, and there is unlikely to be unmanageable blowback from the Iraqi government'. There could also be strikes on the headquarters of the US fifth fleet in Bahrain and US military installations in the tri-border area between Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. 'The Bahrain naval complex is a big symbol of US power, but it appears to have largely been evacuated, except of essential personnel,' Shabani said. 'And Bahrain has neither fully normalised relations with Iran nor explicitly condemned the American attack. So they may decide to say, you hit a symbol of our power, we hit a symbol of your power, and alert the US to get their remaining personnel out of there first.' That approach might reflect reporting of claims in Tehran that the US gave advanced notice of the attack and said it did not seek an all-out confrontation. Whatever the move ultimately is, Shabani said, he would expect it to be more severe than the action taken after Trump ordered the assassination of the senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020. That involved the first direct ballistic missile strike on US interests since the second world war, against two bases in Iraq. 'That was in response to an attack that did not violate Iran's territory, because Soleimani was in Iraq,' Shabani said. 'Iran will see such a significant series of attacks on its soil this time as a step up the escalatory ladder. So they could decide to target several places at once.' It might also seek to link continuing attacks on Israel to the US's actions. Decisions on those measures will be taken by the Iranian supreme national security council, which is headed by the president and includes cabinet ministers, military leaders, and representatives of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 'It's important to emphasise that Iran is a state, with institutions and a bureaucracy,' Shabani said. 'This is not a personality cult. Khamenei is very keen to signal that those institutions are still functioning.' The diplomatic response | Inspectors expelled, no immediate return to talks Alongside any military action, 'Iran may well decide to end foreign inspections and downgrade the level of IAEA monitoring that they allow,' Shabani said. It is likely that in the end Iran and the United States will return to some form of talks. But having been so weakened, it appears improbable Iran will return to a solely diplomatic route without taking some kind of 'kinetic' action first. As Reza Salehi, a conservative political analyst in Tehran, told the New York Times: 'The big challenge that we face this week is that if we go to the negotiating table, the other side will have more and newer demands, such as our defense abilities, and that will make things complicated.' Meanwhile, the domestic optics of accepting the US and Israeli red lines – sending all uranium out of the country for enrichment – in the face of such a heavy military blow appear likely to be unacceptable to senior Iranian leaders. 'The notion that they would be willing to be seen as crawling to the negotiating table is not realistic,' Shabani said. 'They need to be able to save face first in order to make a deal.' The wildcard response | Deterrence through unpredictability 'Iran's actions have so far been a little bit predictable – rational,' Shabani said. 'But part of deterrence is your opponent not being able to calculate what you're going to do.' That might point to an asymmetric response that aims to cause significant economic damage to the west, he said. 'One of the extreme options would be to target maritime traffic in the strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea' – two major routes for western shipping and the transit of oil supplies. 'If you close the strait of Hormuz, that's 20% of the world's seaborne oil supplies off the market overnight. But it's problematic because it's also an artery for Iran, which hasn't stopped exporting oil. It's a last resort option, and I don't know if they're there yet.' Iran's parliament yesterday approved the closure of the Hormuz shipping channel, but the decision ultimately rests with the supreme national security council. (Here's a useful explainer on the shipping route's significance.) Some have also warned that Iran could once again turn to sponsoring terror attacks or hostage-taking. But, Shabani said, 'they have recently tended to prefer to act alone, and to act directly – to say, we're not hiding our responsibility. Doing that could even signal weakness, that they do not have other options at their disposal.' Cyber-attacks might be a more realistic option. But it is similarly hard to see Iran targeting US critical infrastructure – partly because doing so would be seen as escalatory, partly because the US's defences are robust. 'But I wouldn't remove it completely from the table,' Shabani said. 'If there are bloodless non-critical systems that they can get to – a bank rather than water supplies – that could be possible.' The nuclear option | Following the North Korean example If expelling IAEA inspectors would be a symbolic gesture of limited practical weight given the damage done to Iran's nuclear facilities, a much more significant long-term approach may easily follow: working to increase enrichment, and to actively pursue a nuclear weapon outside any international oversight. (Ironically, that is a decision that US intelligence agencies recently assessed that Iran had not yet taken.) 'We reported a senior source in Iran saying that 'most' of Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is intact,' Shabani said. 'That would not be surprising: they have already said they have moved parts of the stockpile to protect it.' Iran has also claimed it has another secret and secure enrichment site, though there has been no reporting yet of western intelligence assessments of the truth of that claim. Meanwhile, while Trump claimed that Iran's enrichment facilities were 'totally obliterated', US officials have reportedly concluded that in fact the heavily fortified Fordo site was seriously damaged, but not destroyed. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion The consequences of this path might not be felt for years – but it would be foolhardy to assume that Iran is suddenly incapable of pursuing it, Shabani said. 'People have a tendency to think about Iran's nuclear capabilities as a bunch of buildings. But you cannot bomb away knowledge held by thousands of scientists or 40 years of work that easily.' Events of the last few weeks appear to have had a significant impact on public opinion on nuclear weapons, Shabani added. 'I'm not a pollster, but I can tell you that what I hear anecdotally from many of my Iranian contacts and acquaintances is that they need a deterrent to stop this happening in the future. The mood seems to have shifted from support of enrichment to support of nuclear weapons themselves. People look at North Korea's nuclear weapons and see that nobody is attacking North Korea. That lesson is being internalised.' ​80 years ago, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by American atomic bombs. Saturday magazine published an extraordinary piece by Stephen Walker, who interviewed some of on the men on the planes that dropped them before they died. It's riveting, devastating, and salutary. Archie Peatlands account for 3% of global landmass, but hold at least 30% of soil carbon. They are, as Alys Fowler puts it, 'the air-conditioning units of the world', and deserve our love and respect. Aamna After Palestine Action was banned as a terrorist group, the novelist Sally Rooney has a coldly furious piece about the jarring contrast with the government's view of the Israeli government: 'If killing 23 civilians at an aid distribution site is not terrorism, how can we possibly be expected to accept that spray-painting a plane is?' Archie On 10 April, a pack of lifesize puppet animals set off from the DRC. This week they arrive in the UK, en route to the Arctic Circle. Kate Wyver joins the Herds, from the team behind puppet refugee Little Amal. Alex Needham, acting head of newsletters Allison Williams, the star of Girls and M3gan, is more convincing than most celebrities in her attempts to sound like she doesn't take herself too seriously. As the sequel to the cult horror comes out, she tells Emine Saner, of her love of Botox: 'I'm not better than you because I have no wrinkles, I just paid to put chemicals in my face.' Archie Tennis | Carlos Alcaraz​ has sealed victory in the men's singles final at Queen's. With his third title in a row following victories at the Italian Open and Roland Garros, Alcaraz has now extended his career-best winning streak to 18 matches​. Cricket | India led England by 96 runs on the second innings after three days of an enthralling Test series opener at Headingley. Harry Brook's 99 kept England in contention before India reached stumps at 90 for two. Basketball | Oklahoma City Thunder became NBA champions on Sunday evening, topping the Indiana Pacers 103-91 in the finals' decisive Game 7. 'Iran vows revenge after US bombs its key nuclear sites,' is the splash on the Guardian today, referring to the unprecedented attacks on Iran that dominated headlines across the UK. 'Iran vows revenge on US,' says the Times, while the Mirror says 'Stop now' and the Metro: 'Hammered.' In the i, the headline is 'Trump pushes Middle East to the brink.' The FT runs with 'Trump declares victory with massive air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities,' and the Mail, 'Fears UK will now face Iran terror backlash.' 'Starmer warns of 'escalation' risk as UK terror threat rises,' writes the Express, and finally the Telegraph with: 'Revenge would be Iran's worst mistake, warns US.' Why Trump bombed Iran The United States has joined Israel in its attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. Michael Safi hears from reporter Hugo Lowell and world affairs correspondent Andrew Roth on what happens now. A bit of good news to remind you that the world's not all bad After forgetting her younger sister's 40th birthday, Melanie rushed to send her flowers, only to learn that her sister had died before they arrived. Melanie received the devastating news just before boarding a flight to Brisbane. Overwhelmed with grief, she broke down while boarding the plane. A compassionate flight attendant noticed her distress, she tells Katie Cunningham in this edition of our Kindness of strangers column, and upon learning what had happened, simply offered quiet support: holding her hand, checking on her throughout the flight, and helping her disembark quickly upon landing. His calm presence and acts of kindness stood out as an extraordinary comfort in a moment of raw heartbreak. And finally, the Guardian's puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply

The Herald Scotland

21 minutes ago

• The Herald Scotland

US strikes on Iran nuclear sites could hit weakening American economy

Energy analyst Rachel Ziemba told USA Today on June 22 oil prices may not trade much higher until and unless there's a sustained supply shock, like Iran deciding to block the crucial Strait of Hormuz. Iran's parliament on June 22 reportedly approved a measure endorsing exactly that, though whether it happens comes down to Iran's Supreme National Security Council. Ziemba calls that a "low probability, high impact" risk - and one that commodities traders will likely struggle to price. That means energy prices may be volatile until conditions settle down - even as summer vacations start in earnest and a massive heat wave grips the central and eastern parts of the country. Any shock to financial markets and disruption of American consumers' expectations for the summer months comes as the overall economy is weakening quickly. "The world economy is not in a strong position to absorb another energy shock," warned Nigel Green, chief executive of deVere Group, a financial advisory firm. The U.S. joining the conflict between Israel and Iran raises the risks of a "sharp, global reaction," Green added. "Investors are currently positioned for rate cuts, stable energy prices and an orderly global outlook," he said in a June 18 note. "A sudden and serious expansion of this conflict would force a violent repricing of risk across all major asset classes." On June 18, the Labor Department reported that claims for unemployment insurance continued to rise. "Uncertainty is leading companies to trim staff ahead of what could be a downturn in the economy. Batten down the hatches is what company executives are saying as the trade war and rumors of real war are starting to take a toll on the business outlook," said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist with market research firm FWDBONDS LLC, in an email. Analysts at Oxford Economics take a more benign view. "Rising Middle East tensions represent another adverse shock to an already weak economy," they wrote on June 18. Their models suggest that oil prices at about $130 a barrel would pressure inflation to 6%. Post-pandemic inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022. That would put the Federal Reserve in a difficult position. The Fed raises interest rates to tame inflation, and cuts them to support borrowing and economic growth. So far this year, the central bank has held rates steady as it waits to see more information about how tariffs are playing out in the economy, but that may change. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, speaking after the central bank held interest rates steady for the fourth consecutive meeting on June 18, told reporters the Fed is watching the situation in the Middle East, "like everybody else is." "What's tended to happen is when there's turmoil in the Middle East, you may see a spike in energy prices," Powell said prior to the U.S. strikes. "Those things don't generally tend to have lasting effects on inflation, although of course in the 1970s, they famously did, because you had a series of very, very large shocks. But, we haven't seen anything like that now." The U.S. economy is far less dependent on foreign oil than it was back in the 1970s, Powell added.

BBC News

41 minutes ago

• BBC News

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust looks to cut 150 posts

A hospital trust is looking to reduce its overall number of posts by 150, to help meet its savings target for the current financial Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust said it would look at options such as redeployment, not filling vacant posts and reducing hours before it was forced to consider compulsory trust has a target of saving £41.4m by March 2026 and it said it aimed to cut spending on staffing by £ said 2% of its workforce would be affected by the proposed cuts. The hospital trust's chief executive, Jo Williams, said she wanted to have "the right staff, with the right skills, in the right places".That would mean increasing the number of posts in "critical" areas by 267, but the net loss would be 150 also said she wanted to reduce hospital spending on agency said she accepted this would be a "worrying time for some staff" and promised to support them through the changes. Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.