Politics

The Budget is out and, as expected, its measures include the removal of the two-child benefit cap, along with tax rises of £26 billion. Today, though, the headlines focus on whether Chancellor Rachel Reeves deliberately misled the public about the state of the public finances to soften the reception of her Budget. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Reeves why she had given the impression she would have ‘no choice’ to put taxes up, when in fact the Office for Budget Responsibility had said there was a £4 billion surplus. Reeves said her headroom had been downgraded from the £9.9 billion she had in the spring and claimed that £4

Four days after a Budget is usually the time when it starts to unravel. Some within Labour see it as a victory of sorts for Rachel Reeves that, so far, the post-Budget debate has focused mostly on the run-up to her statement rather than the measures it contained. Certain policies – such as business rates changes for small businesses – have the potential to blow up into political rows. But the collapse of the Chancellor’s authority this summer has meant the Budget did not contain any serious reform that could stir up major trouble.  Reeves made it through her media round but the impression was, at times, shifty and unconvincing Fearing

As Moscow and Washington prepare for talks on the latest version of Donald Trump’s peace plan next week, leaked recordings of a conversation with US envoy Steve Witkoff have thrown a spotlight on to senior diplomat Yuri Ushakov. It seems he, not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position. The stature of Lavrov, once a legend in the diplomatic community, has steadily diminished since 2014, when he wasn’t even consulted before Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. Every year since then, the now-75-year-old minister has petitioned Putin to be allowed to retire; every year this is denied. Instead, Lavrov remains confined to a role of

The late Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah – the nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, released in 1985 and widely considered the greatest cinematic work on the subject – would have turned 100 this week, a destiny he missed by only eight years, dying in 2018. What would the filmmaker – who devoted almost a decade to his masterpiece, nearly obliterating himself in the process – make of Europe in 2025, a place where idealistic crowds of the young march for Israel’s annihilation, where the words ‘Dirty Jew’ are spray-painted on Parisian walls, and where, in the first six months of 2025, there were a registered 646 anti-Semitic acts

David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as seriously compromising the traditional rights of defendants to be tried by their peers, not to mention revealing the hypocrisy of the man who, under the Tories, robustly defended the right to trial by one’s peers. They also think, rightly, that Lammy is now acting not so much from principle as from a desperate need to