TODAY’S WEATHER

🌦️ Expect a bright day with showers in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and London. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Badenoch’s “extract every drop” North Sea vow | Huge warship order for Clyde | Peggie hearing resumes

📣 Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will use a speech in Aberdeen to call for as much oil and gas as possible to be extracted from the North Sea, in an echo of Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” slogan.

That slogan was credited with helping propel him Trump to the White House: Badenoch hopes her stance will draw a “clear dividing line” with Ed Miliband, who plans to ban new oil and sea licences even as North Sea neighbours, including Norway, open new fields. It also echoes Reform’s pro-fossil fuel policies. (🎁Telegraph - free to read) (BBC) (Guardian)

• North Sea oil and gas will disappear “within years, not decades” an industry body is warning, unless Chancellor Rachel Reeves reforms the windfall tax being levied on the industry. (The Scotsman)

📣 British defence firm BAE Systems has sealed a £10 billion contract to build warships for the Norwegian navy at its Clyde yard. It’s a huge deal for shipbuilding on the upper Clyde (the yard’s in Govan), safeguarding 2,000 jobs at BAE Systems directly and a further 2,000 in the supply chain.

Scottish Secretary Ian Murray said the choice of the UK showed “the world-class skills and expertise of our workforce on the Clyde", while Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said his government had weighed two questions in its decision: "Who is our most strategic partner? And who has delivered the best frigates?... The answer to both is the United Kingdom." (BBC) (Scotsman)

• Scotsman columnist Jeremy Grant wrote a prescient piece in June about the “dramatic revival” in shipbuilding in Glasgow, highlighting BAE Systems’ £300 million investment in a vast new hall at its Govan site to build the Type 26 frigate that Norway is ordering for its own navy. Scotland is at the heart of a European defence industry that has rosy prospects, he said: “Investors have taken notice, powering explosive growth in the share prices of European publicly listed defence companies such as Rheinmetall of Germany, Italy’s Leonardo – which has an avionics and radar business in Edinburgh – and Babcock, the UK’s second largest defence contractor that’s building Type 31 frigates at Rosyth.” (Scotsman £)

📣 Hundreds of people are feared dead after an earthquake in eastern Afghanistan. The magnatude 6.0 quake has caused widespread damage in a remote part of the country, with officials saying “entire villages have been destroyed”. (BBC - live coverage of what is a developing story)

IDEAS
5 things from the weekend: From saving our unis, to expensive skinny jabs, via how to stop thinking too much

🗣️ Radical action may be needed to save Scotland’s universities. Prompted by continuing angst about the future of Scottish Universities - specifically the troubled University of Dundee - Michael Stewart unleashed this interesting thread on X. To boil it down: he says education policy is killing Scottish universities, and Scotland’s future, by limiting University funding, by limiting access to courses for Scottish students, by encouraging a brain drain.

Some will dismiss Stewart’s claims, but I’ve heard a similar sort of analysis from those in the sector. His proposed solution is radical, but don’t bet against future Scottish governments having to enact policies a lot like what he suggests.

🗣️Nicola Sturgeon has done nothing remotely illegal in minimising her tax exposure - she simply has her business earnings paid into a company, not directly to her - but Alex Massie didn’t half skewer her on the hypocrisy of arrangements which, he says, “minimise her exposure to the higher rates of income tax her government imposed upon wealthier Scots.” (The Times £)

🗣️ People are thinking a lot about thinking too much. David Cain writes: “I appreciate Sam Harris’s apt analogy about inner monologues - being caught up in your own thinking is like having been kidnapped and held hostage by the most boring person on earth. You’re forced to listen, as though at gunpoint, to an internal commentator who insists on telling you its impressions of everything it notices or thinks about.

“Nothing is too petty, too repetitive, or too obvious for the boring kidnapper’s ongoing monologue,” he writes. There are also some useful techniques to stop thinking too much - you might be surprised to learn that heavy drugs and alcohol are not the only options. Staring at corners works, too. (Raptitude)

🗣️Jeremy Clarkson urges us not to all abandon the UK for America, southern Europe or Dubai, even if you believe “Britain is now an unsalvageable basket case, a country that’s slipped into a pair of Fairy Liquid butter trousers and is currently hurtling down the slide of doom into a broken future full of nothing but taxation, crime and disease.” Everywhere else is either boring or terrifying, he warns. And Dubai - favourite bolt hole for monied run-aways, now “feels like the bastard love child of Las Vegas and Mickey Mouse”, in which your neighbour may be “a stubbly man who teams a suit with a T-shirt and does not wear socks.” (The Times £)

🗣️The price of weight loss drug Mounjaro doubles today but, as James Tapper reports, demand for this and the other “skinny jabs” is unlikely to fade. Initially, clinicians thought that patients would be reluctant to inject themselves. “But what we found was that people said: ‘You had me at weight loss’,” one doctor tells him. (The Observer £)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 The Sandie Peggie industrial tribunal restarts today with the two sides summarising their cases. The case, which revolves around an encounter between two colleagues in the changing room of a hospital in Kirkcaldy on Christmas Eve, 2023, has drawn huge attention because of its implications for policy around transgender people who want to use single-sex facilities, and the rights of women.

• Andrew Learmonth offers a “story so far” review of the complexities of the case. (The Herald)

• Mandy Rhodes: The Sandie Peggie case has revealed the cowardice at the heart of the NHS. (Holyrood)

📣 Former First Minister Humza Yousaf is calling for Scotland’s top law officer to except peaceful protestors supporting Palestine Action from prosecution. (BBC)

📣 Rail travel in Scotland gets cheaper from today: the Scottish Government is scrapping peak rail fares on state-owned ScotRail. (STV)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Labour is caught in a “civil war” over who should succeed Keir Starmer, and it’s fuelling the Angela Rayner “sleaze crisis”, the Tories are claiming. (Daily Mail)

📣 Chancellor Rachel Reeves has written for the Independent today, admitting hardworking people feel “stuck” because of sluggish economic growth. (Reeves in the Independent) (The title’s own coverage)

📣 Queen Camilla fought off a sexual assault as a teenager, according to a new book. (Guardian)

📣 Israel has killed a Hamas spokesperson as its cabinet met to discuss expanding its offensive in some of Gaza’s most populated areas. (AP)

📣 Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has been badly injured in a car crash. (AP)

SPORT

⚽️ It was a little like two bald men fighting over a comb, except eventually they gave up and agreed it was all pointless. Yesterday’s 0-0 draw between Rangers and Celtic may still leave the visitors six points ahead of their great rivals, while Rangers seek their first league win of the season, but neither set of fans will regard this as a good point, while neutrals may only take solance in having witnessed a game so bad, some are saying it was the worst Old Firm match… ever. It was history, right?

The reports today are suitably scathing.

• Tom English: “Half an hour after an almost offensively poor Old Firm derby had ended - a slugfest in the bearpit - a seagull swooped down from above the Sandy Jardine stand at Ibrox. In the millisecond it took to flip a piece of bread in the air and shove it down its beak while staying airborne it provided more entertainment than the players had done for the 90 minutes that went before.” (BBC)

• Andrew Newport: “By the time the final whistle blew, Russell Martin was just relieved it wasn't his dead horse getting another flogging.” (Daily Record)

• Robert Grieve: “Martin is safe in the Ibrox job for the time being at least after his players gave him everything they had to avoid their latest Premiership defeat.” (The Sun)