In your briefing today:

📣 Andy Burnham will attempt to fill in policy blanks today with a speech in which he’ll outline plans for a “No 10 North” - a push for devolution across government which would see large parts of the London-based government machine moved to the UK’s nations and regions.

Speaking in Manchester, he’ll also talk about the economy. Burnham is expected to commit to a “10-year mission” to raise living standards, as well as proposals on youth employment, in order to “lift Britain back up to where it should be”. (BBC)

📣 Scotland’s social workers are being forced to take children home amid a chronic shortage of suitable care. Scotland’s 32 Chief Social Work Officers have jointly released a warning that the system is close to collapse, increasing the risk of harm to children who are at risk from a variety of harms.

They say newborn babies are remaining in the care of hospital nurses, children as young as three are ending up in residential homes with young adults, and older children are sleeping on the sofas of foster carers. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Iran launched new missile attacks on Bahrain and Kuwait following US airstrikes, and has threatened a complete halt to negotiations if Washington continues its attacks. (AP)

📣 Business confidence in Scottish politicians continues to slide: the latest Understanding Business survey says 41% of firms think the Scottish Government is taking action to address business concerns, against 47% last quarter. For the UK government, the picture is even worse: only 28% (33%). (Daily Business)

📣 The King has sent his sympathies to the disappointed Tartan Army… and urged fans to consider supporting England. (Mail)

📣 Scientists at Heriot-Watt University are working on a way to make sausage rolls healthier. (Scotsman)

📣 A huge international relief effort is arriving in Venezuela, devastated by last week’s earthquake. The death toll now stands at 1,430, but with tens of thousands still missing. There is sharp criticism within the country of the military's role in relief efforts. (Times) (Sky News: live coverage)

📣 Eleven people - many were nurses - were killed when their skydiving plan crashed just after takeoff in northeastern France. (Independent)

📣 France has recorded around 1,000 additional deaths during the record-breaking heatwave suffered across Europe. (AP)

📣 The Princess of Wales has told of how cancer affects every aspect of life after she completed the Three Peaks Challenge to raise money for the hospital in which she was treated. (Mirror)

📣 An interesting read from Blaenau Gwent in Wales: an area that voted for Brexit despite getting lots of funding from the EU. One person there now says: “We was hoodwinked”. (Independent)

⚽️ Steve Clarke gave up a “hefty, six-figure sum” to step down as Scotland manager only weeks after signing a new, four-year deal. (Daily Record)

⚽️ It was a busy Sunday at the World Cup as the final group games settled who was staying and who was going home.

⚽️ Tonight’s fixtures, as we continue the knock-out phase of the World Cup:

🏉 Subhead in bold before writing the rest of the paragraph in like this.

🎾 Emma Raducanu will not play at Wimbledon, which starts today: she has a stress fracture of her leg. (BBC) (Coverage starts today at 11am on BBC One).

🗣️ Want to sound knowledgeable and not-too-hysterical about why Scotland tumbled out of the World Cup?

A lot of ink will be spilt in the days ahead on what happened, from tub-thumping appeals to emotion through to long essays about tactics (God help us all).

But what you need is an explanation that is both simple and alludes to the complexity of getting it right.

Step up Roger Bonet: a professional footballer who also has a UEFA Pro coaching license. He’s played around the world. And he’s delivered a simple explanation for what went wrong with Steve Clarke’s side.

To paraphrase: Clarke wanted to play one way - building from the back, through defence into midfield. But he didn’t have players capable of doing it.

Roger explains why the (injured) Billy Gilmour is so central to this Scotland side, and what needs to happen if we’re to do better next time (we urgently need to find more athletic centre-backs). And I suspect he’s broadly right.

Commit this to memory, and you’ll sound like a sage around the water cooler this morning. (Roger Bonet on Twitter)

🗣️ Scottish High Court Judge Lord Mulholland didn’t hold back in an “astonishing” memo leaked to the Sunday Mail, in which he said the Rangers football club administrators were not, in his view, maliciously prosecuted, and should never have been awarded £21 million of taxpayers’ cash in compensation.

Mulholland got stuck into the decision by his successor as Lord Advocate, James Wolffe, to settle out of court, saying he was left “incredulous” by the decision to admit wrongdoing. It raises further questions about the conduct of a case that has, over the years, become one of Scotland’s biggest-ever legal scandals. (Sunday Mail)

🗣️ Germany’s industrial heart is in real trouble, and if you didn’t believe it until now, Volkswagen’s plan to shed as many as 100,000 jobs in Germany - one in six of its employees - may convince you.

The news, revealed in Manager Magazin over the weekend, has sent shockwaves through the country’s industrial heartlands: entire plants will close.

Even more remarkably, it comes despite the German model of worker representation on company supervisory boards - at VW, nearly half the seats are taken by worker reps - and despite a promise not to force redundancies until 2030.

As Matthew Bishop writes in the Observer, the company lost its halo with the Dieselgate emissions fraud, which distracted it for a decade. It should have been plotting how to respond to the dawn of the EV.

Now it is having its lunch eaten by Chinese competitors who offer cars that are not only cheaper, but better.

It’s a deep hole to dig out of, both for VW and for Germany: companies, nations and the EU itself have yet to figure out what a response might look like. (Manager magazin (German)(£)) (Observer)

🗣️ Britain’s long-awaited Defence Investment Plan will see plans for new warships scrapped in favour of drones, in the face of the rising threat from Russia, the Sunday Times reported. The plan - which has been signed off by putative PM Andy Burnham - will be backed by more than £1 billion extra funding, secured by the new defence secreatry Dan Jarvis, with the whole thing now worth up to £15 billion. That’s still far short of the estimated £28 billion some say is required. (Sunday Times)

🗣️ Speaking of defence… Keir Starmer is interested in the Nato General Secretary role that’s coming up in 2028. That revelation was delivered in a slightly throwaway line in Tom Baldwin’s analysis of what Andy Burnham is walking into: a world which is far from ordinary, and which will change his life forever. (Observer)

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