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In your briefing today:

• Big tax rises are on the way - and they could cut the Scottish Government’s budget by a billion

• As the hard right agitates about crime and immigration, a journalists asks: just how violent is Britain? The answer might surprise you.

• Rangers remain upset over Sunday’s refereeing calls

📣 The Chancellor will continue to prepare the ground for tax rises with a speech today in which she will say her Budget will offer “fair choices” and focus on “fairness and opportunity” to bring down NHS waiting lists, the national debt and cost of living.

Those tax rises will almost certainly break Labour’s promises not to increase income tax, VAT or National Insurance in last year’s general election manifesto. (BBC) (Guardian)

These tax decisions have big implications for Scotland - although income tax is mostly devolved to Scotland, the way Scotland’s funding is calculated means an additional 2p on the UK basic rate would actually cost the Scottish Government £1 billion next year. It could raise the prospect of further tax rises in Scotland, or cuts to services.. (Fraser of Allander Institute)

• The Prime Minister has also been warning of hefty tax rises, in a private meeting last night with backbench Labour MPs. (Financial Times £) (Sky News)

• Reeves prepares for Budget betrayal (Mail)

• Budget tax rises “inevitable” says think-tank (Independent)

• Reeves could introduce a “pay-per-mile” charge to replace road tax (Express)

📣 Police investigating the Cambridgeshire train attack on Saturday evening are looking into four knife incidents alleged to have taken place hours earlier.

Anthony Williams, 32, has been charged with 10 counts of attempted murder relating to the train stabbing, and a charge of attempted murder in connection with an attack in the early hours of Saturday morning, in London.

Prior to that, on Friday evening, a 14-year-old was stabbed by a man with a knife in Peterborough city centre: the offender had left the scene by the time police arrived.

Also that evening a man was seen with a knife in a barber’s shop in Peterborough: officers were not sent after the crime was called in two hours later. (BBC)

• Train attack victim “didn’t have much choice but to fight back” (Sky News)

• Scunthorpe United footballer injured in train stabbing (Guardian)

📣 Train services on the West Coast Main Line will remain a mess for “a number of days” after the derailment of a Glasgow to London service in Cumbria yesterday. It’s thought the Avanti West Coast service was travelling at 80mph when it hit a landslide and came off the tracks at Shap in Cumbria. The good news: only four people suffered minor injuries in the accident: they didn’t require hospital treatment. (BBC)

• Passenger: “My initial thought was there had been a terrorist attack. It was really scary” (Daily Record)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 The picture of Alex Salmond’s financial ruin painted yesterday may not have been wholly accurate: he was living in a luxury £7,000-a-month London apartment, overlooking the Palace of Westminster, when he died. Fees from his chat show on Russian-backed RT were paying the bills. (The Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has warned of “financial and economic challenges” after its surplus halved in the last year despite record ticket sales. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 The first scientific evidence of the Black Death in Edinburgh has been found on the remains of a teenage boy who died in the 14th Century. The remains were originally excavated from the grounds of St Giles’ Cathedral in 1981, but have been subjected to new scientific methods to uncover the latest discovery. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 The BBC has been accused of “shocking” breaches of its own impartiality guidelines after a speech by Donald Trump was misleadingly edited to make it appear that he had encouraged the Capitol Hill riots. (Telegraph has the exclusive £) (Mail)

📣 The US Government shutdown continues towards record territory: Donald Trump has insisted he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats. (AP)

• Today is the first election day in the US since Trump’s victory last year. There are big contests in Virginia and New Jersey. (AP)

📣 Israel’s top military prosecutor has been arrested after admitting to leaking a video that showed Israeli soldiers allegedly abusing a Palestinian prisoner. (Independent)

📣 Pornography depicting strangulation is to be outlawed in the UK, amid growing concerns about the brain injuries being inflicted on women by the practice. (Guardian)

📣 The new John Lewis Christmas ad is out, if that sort of thing floats your boat. It’s a nostalgic effort, as ever, with father and son bonding over a 90s house music track. (The Sun)

SPORT

⚽️ Rangers remain unhappy after the SFA failed to satisfactorily answer their questions over why Celtic’s Auston Trusty was not sent off for kicking Jack Butland in the head. In a statement, the club has said “the handling of key incidents during Sunday’s semi-final has again raised legitimate concerns about the consistency of refereeing in Scottish football.” (Rangers’ statement) (Daily Record) (Sun)

⚽️ It’s an exciting card of Champions League fixtures tonight: pick of the ties looks to be Liverpool welcoming Read Madrid, and old boy Trent Alexander-Arnold, to Anfield. PSG also take on Bayern Munich. Most games kick off at 8pm, although Arsenal’s trip to Slavia Prague is at 5.45pm.

IDEAS
As the right leaps on the Cambridgeshire train attack, a journalist looks to the data: just how violent is Britain?

🗣️ You might have noticed that, in the aftermath of the horrific Cambridgeshire train attack on Saturday evening, police were relatively quick to state the race and place of birth of the two men they’d detained, and say the incident didn’t appear to be terrorism-related. (Two were held at first: later, British-born Anthony Williams, 32, from Peterborough, was charged with ten counts of attempted murder).

There was, of course, a reason for that information being made public so early: to quell the now-immediate groundswell of speculation about the nature of the attack, and the background of the people carrying it out.

That speculation doesn’t just happen in the backwaters of social media: as Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford points out in his newsletter, Former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, appearing on Talk Radio, said “the British state has been complicit in a crime like this” because governments “haven’t done enough to deport illegal immigrants”.

Meanwhile Former GB News presenter Dan Wootton was tapping away on X, where he’s followed by more than 600,000 people: “GB News now talking about knives rather than the elephant in the room: MASS MIGRATION FOR DECADES HAS PUT US ALL AT RISK. The MSM are following the narrative of the police as per.”

Matt Goodwin, a GB News presenter, went further on X (followers: 277,000): it doesn’t matter if suspects are British - or “British”, as he puts it: “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’,” he writes.

His point, as Fraser Nelson puts it in a far more thoughtful post on Substack, is “that many recent killers, even if born here, are of non-British descent so their crimes can be seen as an indirect result of immigration.

“Social media allows such theories to be shared without any fear of coming into contact with actual facts,” notes Nelson.

He goes on to take apart an underlying assumption across much of the far-right debate: that crime is soaring. In fact, while immigration has doubled over the last decade, crime has halved.

(An aside: crime in Scotland has fallen by only 2% in the same time, but has also halved since a 1990s peak).

Across the board - whether you’re looking at NHS hospital data for people treated for assult, or murders in London - you’re seeing crime rates fall.

And people feel that, too - in England and Wales, 90% of men and around 70% of women feel safe walking alone after dark, a generational high. Clealry, there’s work to do for women… but growth in migration has not damaged that sense of safety.

We can say with reasonable confidence the streets of Britain have never been so safe.

Yes, as Nelson puts it, acts of “random, senseless, grotesque violence” can happen. But all the numbers suggest we are safer now than we, or any of our ancestors, have ever been. We want easy answers for this stuff, for the comfort of having someone to blame. The race-based answer, however, just isn’t backed by reality.

But we have elections coming next year. Reform will be pushing hard, asking - in code - a modern version of Howard’s “are you thinking what I’m thinking” to surface dark concerns - seeded by its propagandists - that skin colour predicts propensity to commit violent crime, and that violent crime is rife in our streets because of migration.

The success of those race-based lies will, whatever Reform says about it not being a racist party, be central to the party’s success.

It remains to be seen if reality will have any impact on that debate, here in Scotland or elsewhere.

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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