In your briefing today:

📣 The City of Glasgow’s finances are in dire trouble, auditors have warned, with its finances rated “red” and emergency funds likely to run dry within months.

They say Scotland’s largest local authority faces a £109.7 million funding gap over the next two years. Rising homelessness, fuelled by a refugee crisis, is core to the financial problem, alongside poverty, settling an equal pay claim and rising demand for services.

Aid for homeless people cost £38 million in 25/26, and this will rise to £56 million this year and then to £75 million.

Council chiefs believe UK government policy on clearing the backlog of asylum seeker cases is fuelling the problem, with asylum seekers - thousands of whom are placed in Glasgow - able to declare themselves homeless, and thus eligible for support, when their asylum cases are approved. (Daily Record)

📣 First Minister John Swinney says there won’t be any compulsory redundancies as the Scottish Government reduces the number of health boards from 14 to two. He said the government would “work collaboratively” with unions on a reform programme that would, nevertheless, reduce the number of public sector jobs. (BBC)

📣 Prime Minister Andy Burnham has tried to calm bond markets as surging borrowing costs threaten to derail plans for his government’s first budget.

Burnham told his first session of Prime Minister’s Questions that budget decisions would be “grounded in fiscal responsibility” - seen as deliberate phrasing to cool investors after days of sell-offs of government debt. (Guardian)

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📣 A survivor of domestic violence says proposals to tackle abuse and misogyny are a “tick-box exercise” and has called for wider reform of Scotland’s criminal justice system. (STV)

📣 Hundreds of North Sea workers will have to shed some weight fast: new rules, arriving in November, say they must not weigh more than 124.7kg (19.5st) in their full kit; 800 of them are still over the limit. (BBC)

📣 The Cairngorms are still a “tinderbox” and another wildfire could yet break out this year, a Highlands and Islands MP has warned. (Scotsman)

📣 DIY chain B&Q and expensive burger chain Five Guys are among hundreds of UK businesses named and shamed by the government for paying staff below the minimum wage. They were ordered to pay workers the outstanding wages, and fined. (BBC)

📣 Italy’s government, under Premier Giorgia Meloni, has set a record: it’s the longest-lived since the Second World War, having managed 1,413 consecutive days in power. (AP)

📣 Tourists feared missing in Nepal are contacting authorities: 324 foreigners have now said they survived last month’s flash floods. But at least 1,204 people have been killed, and more than 4,200 are still missing. (AP)

📣 The King has hailed the Bayeux tapestry loan to the British Museum as a symbol of the “entente amicale” between France and the UK. (Guardian)

📣 TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp was airlifted to hospital after falling on a Devon beach during her birthday celebrations. (Independent)

⚽️ Happy Scottish transfer deadline day, to those who celebrate. Expect plenty of action as Scottish sides look to get final bits of business done before 5pm, in what’s been an impressively busy window. (Live coverage: Daily Record)

⚽️ Celtic powered past Aberdeen, with Camilo Duran continuing his hot streak to net an impressive opener in a 3-0 win. (BBC report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Rangers weren’t as convincing in their 2-1 victory away to Falkirk, but two goals from open play for Lawrence Shankland will give them hope their new striker is finding form. (BBC report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Motherwell dismantled Dundee United 3-0, aided by the visitor’s Emmanuel Agyei getting a red card after only 14 minutes. (BBC report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ In the other top-flight games, St Mirren beat Kilmarnock 1-0 and Dundee and St Johnstone shared the points after two late, late goals.

⚽️ We have an Edinburgh derby to look forward to this evening: Hibs meet Hearts at 7.45pm (Premier Sports 1)

The return of Holyrood politics - and particularly the Programme for Government - is obvious column fodder, and we’ll doubtless see more analysis emerge in the days ahead. Here are a few of the more noteworthy opinion pieces out so far.

🗣️Alex Massie may surprise regular readers by writing warmly about the Programme for Government. The reasons for that become clear: the SNP and its leader have made their peace, he says, “with the way of the world as it currently stands in the latter months of 2026”, a world in which “Scottish independence is neither likely nor even possible for the foreseeable future,” he says.

Of the plan for sweeping public sector reform, he also offers a welcome. “Scotland’s public sector is bloated, coddled and miserably inefficient,” he writes. “Nearly one in four workers are employed by the state and the SNP has spent two decades appeasing producer interests across the public sector.” Plans - which will need to rock the boat - wouldn’t be there if independence was anywhere close, he suggests.

And there’s plenty to do, he says, with councils as well as the NHS. “Swinney’s observation that many councils are too small to function effectively is unarguably correct.

“Councils such as Argyll and Bute cannot, at present, deliver the services expected of them. Elsewhere, it is reasonable to ask if Ayrshire really requires three councils or Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire and Lanarkshire two apiece.

“The question haunting all this is whether Swinney and Ivan McKee, the cabinet secretary for axe-swinging, are serious.” (The Times)

🗣️John MacLeod wonders aloud if the Scottish Government’s plans for supermarket price controls are, in fact, all a “Nationalist wheeze”.

“There is more than a whiff of the performative in his cunning plan,” he writes.

“John Swinney has deliberately bigged up his food price cap wheeze – and, still more cynically, as a public health measure – because he knows it is odds-on somehow to be snookered by the United Kingdom Government and, in the mean horizon of the Nats, there is little they love more than a constitutional fight with Westminster,” he suggests.

“‘It is a sad state of affairs when trying to create division between the north and south of this island is the only real motivating factor behind Scottish Government action,’ writer John Ferry has mused (£). ‘But that is where we are.’”

🗣️David Clegg offers a glimpse of the bunfight ahead over the two big new Scottish health boards being planned to replace today’s 14 authorities. What, exactly, will replace them “remains frustratingly unclear,” writes Clegg.

“What we do know is that ministers are acutely aware of the danger that this enormous exercise in centralisation is perceived as exactly that.”

Clegg, The Dundee Courier’s editor, says the city should start fighting to be the HQ for the new strategic body overseeing healthcare on the east coast. Lessons should be learned from the centralisation of Scottish police forces when Police Scotland was created.

“There is a running joke in The Courier newsroom that we now deal with Greater Strathclyde Police,” says Clegg. “A bigger organisation does not automatically become a better one.” (The Courier)

🗣️ The National is annoyed the BBC didn’t have anyone on to defend the plans for supermarket price caps, except John Swinney himself.

“BBC Radio Scotland’s Breakfast programme on Wednesday morning gave business leaders and an opposition politician the chance to tear into the policy, while host Laura Maciver asked what some critics have suggested was ‘the most crass question ever asked by a BBC presenter’, the title says in the anonymous “Jouker” column.

The question the National took particular exception to? “Maciver asked the First Minister: ‘Who else likes this policy and why are you pursuing it, given all the opposition that you have been hearing about it for months?’”

Elsewhere in The National, columnist Paul Kavanagh asserts: “The bias of the BBC against Scottish independence is well known and widely acknowledged by just about everyone except the BBC itself. (The National)

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