Three times this week sections of the M25 have been closed by activists from the Insulate Britain group, demanding government take responsibility for insulating all social housing by 2025, and re-fitting all houses with low energy heating by 2030. The protests certainly succeeded in provoking a reaction. Video footage of angry motorists scuffling with demonstrators and being ordered back to their trapped cars by police offices soon went viral, as did a recording of an officer telling activists if they felt any discomfort, or needed anything, they only had to ask for assistance. Some columnists have blamed protestors for a crash which occurred in Surrey on Wednesday morning, although that incident remains under investigation.

Nimbys get a bad press. They live in attractive houses in expensive areas but want to deny that chance to others. They are a powerful lobby motivated by selfishness who often behave badly – check out the recent viral video of a local woman hurling abuse, and a chair, at Camden Councillors when a planning decision didn’t go her way. They have climbed up the housing ladder and grown rich on an asset boom that has more to do with Bank of England policy than hard work.

This week’s announcement of a health and social care levy was hugely significant. Much has been made of the impact on the taxation system: a 1.25 percentage point increase in national insurance contributions across employee earnings and employer wage costs (representing a 2.5% overall increase in the tax rate on earnings). It’s a move that will raise £12-14bn a year, and take this Conservative Government into new territory on exchequer spending at a time the economy remains in a vulnerable position.

The Bank of England has appointed a new chief economist to succeed Andy Haldane. Huw Pill’s experience should offer the UK central bank a novel intellectual perspective drawn from having worked at both the ECB for many years and as Goldman Sachs chief European economist.

When the Taliban were toppled in Afghanistan in 2001, I had only been a member of Parliament – representing a constituency that has many Muslim, as well as non-Muslim, voters – for a matter of months. But I can remember well the mood of the House in the weeks that followed. No one was under any illusions. This wasn’t going to be easy. The West’s involvement in Afghanistan was likely to continue for years.

On Thursday the Taliban took to social media to declare that after a 20-year interruption, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was back in business. In a month’s time, when we mark the anniversary of 9/11, they will doubtless again be governing nearly all the country. In the West there are understandable fears that the return of the Taliban means the return of Al-Qaeda, whose presence in Afghanistan provoked the American-led intervention in the first place.

Afghan women are once again cast in the role of collateral damage, as Afghanistan’s politics is played out via brutal images of desperate mums throwing babies over barbed wire to American soldiers at Kabul Airport,  interspersed with photos of an Afghan woman shot by a Taliban goon for not covering her hair. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and the collapse of its institutions, was as fast as the Americans’ dash to leave the country at breakneck speed.

Brandon Lewis, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in the briefest of Commons statements this week, announced a “statute of limitations, to apply equally to all Troubles-related incidents”. To understand how radical this move was, you need only look at his predecessor’s 2014 Stormont House Agreement – and the misguided reaction, yesterday, from Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, who wrongly claimed that the announcement was a breach of the UK’s international obligations.

Should a government provide subsides and intervene in the economy? This is an area of focus and some controversy following the recent decision to provide a government subsidy to Nissan and intervention to aid the steel sector.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the biggest criticism of such government intervention was from those arguing to reduce the size of the state. Government spending is, after all, at high levels, and the tax take, in relation to the size of the economy, at an all-time high. In fact, the biggest criticisms appeared to be from those wishing we were still in the EU, or so it seemed. Notwithstanding that, what is the issue?