Summary
Interest rates rise as the Bank of England warns we’re facing a “sharp economic slowdown”...
Adam is joined by Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to discuss the state of the UK economy and the Bank’s attempts to stem the pace of rising prices.
Also… as the World Health Organization estimates that the Covid pandemic caused the deaths of nearly 15 million people around the world, Fergus Walsh and Natasha Loder from the Economist unpack the data.
Today’s Newscast was made by Tim Walklate, with Alix Pickles and Cordelia Hemming. The Technical producer was Emma Crowe. The assistant editor was Alison Gee.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Hello. Now, I know I promised that we would look at other innovative public transport projects |
| 0:09.8 | elsewhere in the country to balance our enthusiastic conversation about London's new cross-rail |
| 0:15.1 | in the last episode. The issue is, though, quite a lot of these innovative public transport |
| 0:19.5 | projects are in areas that are having elections today and they're sponsored by the local |
| 0:23.6 | authority, which means talking about it would fall foul of the very strict rules about |
| 0:28.2 | not talking about politics on polling day. So don't worry, we will come back to it, keep |
| 0:32.4 | your suggestions coming in to newscast.bbbc.co.uk. Do not worry, you're pushing at an open |
| 0:38.0 | door when it comes to logistics and transport and infrastructure. But we do have a transport-related |
| 0:43.1 | story to take its place. A virgin Atlantic plane from London to New York had to turn back |
| 0:49.7 | over Ireland because it turns out one of the pilots wasn't fully qualified to fly the |
| 0:54.1 | plane. What on earth is going on? Newcast's resident pilot, Kat Burton, who worked at British |
| 0:59.4 | Airways for 45 years, is here to explain. Hello, Captain Katz. |
| 1:03.2 | Hi, how are you today? Yeah, very well. Thank you. Lovely to have you back. So this, |
| 1:06.5 | a virgin Atlantic spokeswoman said, the qualified first officer who was flying alongside an |
| 1:11.4 | experienced captain was replaced with a new pilot to ensure full compliance with Virgin |
| 1:16.2 | Atlantic's training protocols, which exceed industry standards. So what do you think went |
| 1:21.2 | on here? What it sounds like to me is that this first officer had finished his course and |
| 1:28.0 | was probably waiting for his final check flight. And that would be alongside a qualified |
| 1:33.0 | training captain. But it turned out that it was just an ordinary captain he was flying |
| 1:37.4 | with. And that meant that just from the point of view of their standard operating procedures, |
| 1:42.7 | they would have had to call them back to London to replace him with a fully qualified first |
... |
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