Ben Jackson

The UK has introduced a healthcare surcharge for immigrants from non-EEA areas. Adults have to pay £200 a year for access to the NHS whether or not they make use of it; students have to pay £150. UK citizens who want to bring their partner to the country must apply for a 30-month residency visa: the NHS surcharge on this is £500, almost doubling the previous cost of the visa (£601). Skilled migrants can be stuck with bills of more than £1000. An applicant with a dependent spouse and three children could be charged £5000.

A year ago yesterday the European Court of Justice passed down the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling. It held that, under the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive, members of the public could request that search engines remove ‘information relating to a person from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of that person’s name’ if the information was ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant’. Since then, Google has received about 250,000 requests to remove more than 900,000 links. It has accepted around 40 per cent of them.

Last night, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party took power in the Canadian federal election. It was an astonishing victory. In 2011 the Liberals won only 34 seats, their worst ever performance, which left them trailing both the Conservatives and the New Democratic Party (NDP). This year they took 184 (out of 338). It’s the first time since 1925 that a party has gone from third to first place in a single election cycle. And it’s the first time ever that a third-placed party has gone on to form a majority government in the next election. Two months ago, the Liberals trailed both the NDP and the Conservatives in the polls. Last night, they took 8 per cent more of the popular vote than the Conservatives, and 20 per cent more than the NDP.