In your briefing today:

📣 Andy Burnham will deliver his first party conference speech as Prime Minister today, and is expected to unveil a notably left-wing programme which could see the first steps towards the nationalisation of utilities, and the abolition of the “triple lock” which has grown the value of pensions, but has been criticised for its high cost.

Burnham will tell activists that a new publicly owned company, Great British Grid, will increase competition for projects to connect large projects to the national grid, a bottleneck for a number of green energy projects that’s blamed, in part, for high energy costs.

Burnham is also expected to promise greater public control of the water industry, and intervention in the housing market. (The Guardian has the exclusive)

📣 The Scottish Government is running out of time to improve the care system, six years after then- First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made “The Promise” to transform the lives of Scotland’s care-experienced children.

The Oversight Board for the promise says Scotland has still not made enough progress in the extent, speed, or number of people impacted by the change.

“Too much of the promise remains on paper, not in practice, with unnecessary barriers standing in the way of true care for those who need it,” the Board says in the foreword to its fourth report. “Activity is not the same as action.” (Herald) (BBC)

📣 Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has scrapped the release of its latest AI model due to safety concerns. The new version, called GPT-6.1 Astra, was due to be released next month, but researchers unearthed problems with the model’s behaviour during internal testing.

Compared with its predecessor, the new version performed poorly on tests designed to measure its alignment with what humans would like it to do, according to a company executive.

It was also found to be dishonest about the actions it was taking, and crossed boundaries by not asking for permission to act. (WSJ has the exclusive)

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📣 Nigel Farage says not enough time has passed since the last Scottish independence referendum for another to be held. The Reform UK leader was speaking during a trip to Scotland yesterday. (STV)

📣 Nicola Sturgeon has been announced as a speaker for a women’s leadership programme. The Corridors of Power programme, launching in Edinburgh next January, will teach women from around the world how to lead under pressure. (Holyrood)

📣 A Glasgow dad has told of how a hero taxi driver saved his life, after he had a heart attack in the back of the cab while travelling to hospital. (Daily Record)

📣 Scottish crime writer Peter May has died, aged 74. (BBC)

📣 There’s a degree of bafflement over why five suspects in a UK bomb plot at RAF Fairford have been released on bail. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the incident “clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor” while US President Donald Trump said he was “surprised” by their release on bail. (Independent) (Guardian)

📣 Sir Ranulph Fiennes is believed to be back home at his “isolated farm” in Shropshire, the latest development in an episode marked by concerns about the whereabouts of the world’s greatest living explorer. (Mail)

📣 A Russian attack has badly damaged Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, “source of almost all of the country’s major scientific discoveries”. (New York Times)

⚽️ Lewis Ferguson says talks about joining Rangers over the summer never got off the ground, despite his dad hyping up claims that he’d agreed to sign for his boyhood club from Bologna. (Daily Record)

⚽️ How might Scotland line up against Switzerland tonight? Mark Atkinson suggests a striker switch after Saturday’s 0-0 draw, and a defensive conundrum for new boss Sebastien Pocognoli to solve. (Scotsman)

🗣️ Two stories in yesterday’s Early Line showed yet more signs of (di)stress in Scotland’s universities. I didn’t make the connection then, but made a mental note that it might be worth doing so today.

It might be easy to associate strikes, department closures and deficit warnings with a funding crisis. But a vast influx of rich American students to one of our most ancient and prestigious universities, spawning accusations of “shame and snobbery” towards poorer, Scottish students? The link’s less obvious. But it still exists.

At the heart of all this are tuition fees. They were abolished in Scotland in 2000, only two years after Tony Blair’s Labour government had introduced them. It was a huge moment for the fledgling Scottish executive, and a fragile Labour/Lib Dem coalition led by Donald Dewar.

The Lib Dems had made abolition a “non-negotiable” part of their election manifesto. Later, in 2008, a one-off graduate endowment fee of £2,000 was also scrapped.

The trouble is, that meant - at least for Scottish students - a fixed fee for each student. And that fee hasn’t kept pace with costs. Alarm bells were being rung a decade after abolition: in the 16 years since then, things have only got worse.

Today, as pointed out by the Future Framework for Universities project led by the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, there’s a structural funding gap. Collectively, Scotland’s universities have not been able to recover their costs each year since 2016.

A big problem lies in what they are paid for each Scottish student: it’s usually less than the £9,500 that students from the rest of the UK pay, although it varies by course. The numbers of Scottish students are also capped. Overall, only 82% of the cost of teaching Scottish students is recovered, resulting in a £288 million loss on teaching Scottish students in 2023/24.

The consequences of that gap result in the two stories yesterday. Thousands of staff at the University of Edinburgh began a five-week programme of industrial action over cuts. Those cuts are vast: the institution is preparing to “teach out” 90 academic programmes.

Cuts are one way to go. The other is to recruit large numbers of overseas students, who pay top-tier fees. And that’s what’s happening at St Andrews.

There, American students now account for around 20% of the undergraduate population, each paying £33,250 this academic year for the privilege of studying at one of Britain’s top-ranked universities, favoured by royals and the rest of the British aristocracy.

That draw to the upper classes has always ensured a circle of privileged, rich students on campus: as the Guardian reports, the traditional black-tie dinners and balls are “now rivalled by fashion shows and exclusive societies”.

A student website wrote last year that “St Andrews is the Scottish Upper East Side”. “American and other international students bring with them immense wealth, and as such St Andrews has gradually become like a pot of gold nestled into the Fife coastline,” a contributor wrote.

What’s to be done? Speak to senior politicians about the chances of bringing back fees for university, and they’ll offer not much more than a weary (or wary) look - this has long been regarded as one of the third, deadly rails in Scottish politics, not to be touched at any cost.

But things can change. In 2011 then First Minister Alex Salmond said, famously, that “The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.”

The quote was immortalised in a near one-tonne piece of Elgin sandstone, unveiled on his last day as First Minister at Heriot-Watt University in 2014. Amid his legal travails, it was removed and placed in storage in May 2020.

But it’s notable that civic Scotland is starting to talk about the funding crisis more now - the Muscatelli report, supported by both the Scottish Government and Universities Scotland, offers a clear and data-driven view of the crisis. Think tanks, such as Enlighten, talk of “wake-up calls”. The press reports some of the unintended consequences of underfunding our universities, both academic and social.

Could fees return? Today’s Scottish political leadership are faced with a difficult choice: continue to watch the sector erode, reduced through cuts, and with access for Scottish students capped as foreign counterparts pay an increasing proportion of the bills. Or Scots are asked to pay fees for the first time in almost three decades, addressing the crisis but ending a totemic point of difference between Scotland and England and other parts of the world.

It’s an unenviable choice, but one that may come soon.

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