The blonde leading: Britain’s two years under Boris Johnson
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
As the country tests a bold reopening strategy in the face of the Delta variant, our political editor charitably characterises the prime minister’s tenure as a mixed bag. Hong Kong’s national-security law has now come for its universities, sending shudders through the territory’s last bastion of pro-democracy fervour. And why the alcohol-free beer industry is fizzing.
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| 0:00.0 | Saudi Arabia's economy is transforming. What's behind it? The Public Investment Fund, or PIF. |
| 0:07.1 | It's one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, creating 13 new sectors, |
| 0:12.2 | 66 companies, and more than 500,000 direct and indirect jobs so far. PIF is also the first |
| 0:19.5 | sovereign wealth fund to issue a green bond supporting Saudi Arabia's 2016 Net Zero emissions target. |
| 0:26.6 | Find out more at pif.gov.sa. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:41.2 | Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:49.9 | In Hong Kong, students' voices are getting quieter. Authorities have been invoking the sweeping |
| 0:55.7 | year-old national security law to shut student unions down and shut students up. |
| 1:01.2 | Academic freedom is just the latest kind under threat in the territory. |
| 1:06.2 | And alcohol-free beers used to be pretty awful, but with more |
| 1:10.5 | abstemious customers, the big brewers are making it ever more palatable, |
| 1:14.5 | and they see opportunity positioning it as a kind of adult soft drink, rather than just a |
| 1:19.3 | sob to the designated driver. First up, though. |
| 1:38.0 | At the stroke of midnight on what was dubbed Freedom Day in Britain last week, |
| 1:42.4 | clubbers hit the dance floor, starting what is in effect a grand epidemiological experiment |
| 1:48.4 | watched by the world. Restrictions on the size of gatherings, social distancing, and masks |
| 1:54.5 | all lifted. This weekend, a major music festival called Latitude happened in the |
| 1:59.2 | county of Suffolk, with 40,000 attendees. |
| 2:07.3 | The unlocking is powered by a belief in the strength of Britain's vaccination campaign. |
| 2:12.2 | Although deaths remain low and cases have fallen from a peak last week, |
| 2:16.1 | nearly 30,000 people a day are still catching COVID, and 5,000 people are hospitalized. |
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