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In your briefing today:

• The UK government is to spend £120 million to “save” the Grangemouth industrial complex, and its 500 jobs.

• Today’s columns of note: On the ‘progressive’ left and anti-semitism | Why Farage isn’t harmed by racism claims | The private school disadvantage?

• Wilfried Nancy: “My ass is burning”, says the Celtic manager

📣 The UK government is to spend £120 million to “save” the Grangemouth industrial complex, with owners Ineos putting in a further £30 million. The site, Britain’s biggest chemical plant, makes a range of plastics and directly employs 500 people. More are employed in the supply chain which feeds the plant. (BBC) (Scotsman)

📣 The BBC plans to fight Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit, arguing it should be dismissed. They say there is no case to answer because the BBC did not have rights to air a Panorama episode, which contained a misleading edit of a Trump speech, in the US. (Guardian)

📣 The UK is set to rejoin the Erasmus scheme, five years after leaving as part of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. The scheme allows people to study, train or volunteer in other European countries for up to a year: an announcement is expected later today. (The BBC has the exclusive)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Scottish Justice Secretary Angela Constance survived a vote of no confidence at Holyrood yesterday, but there are now demands for an investigation into whether she broke the Scottish Government’s ministerial code. (Mail)

📣 An 87-year-old great-grandfather spent seven hours lying on the floor of a North Lanarkshire garden centre while waiting for an ambulance. The Scottish Ambulance Service has apologised to Mr Craig and said it was under "significant pressure" on the day he fell. (BBC)

📣 People in Coatbridge are fearing for their heath because of an underground fire that’s been smouldering nearby for months. (STV)

📣 A bittersweet Christmas tale: a terminally ill Scottish dad has been reunited with his young daughter for his “last Christmas”, after red tape had threatened to keep them apart. (Daily Record)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 The alleged Bondi Beach attacker has been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder, after waking from his coma yesterday. Police have charged Naveed Akram, 24, after he was arrested at the scene of the incident and taken to a Sydney hospital with critical injuries on Sunday night. (Guardian)

📣 Doctors in England have started their five-day strike with NHS bosses saying they will look to keep as many services as they can running. But non-urgent services are likely to be hit by the strike, which started at 7am today. (BBC)

📣 The man who ploughed his car into crowds of Liverpool fans celebrating their title win last summer has been jailed for 21 years and six months. Paul Doyle, 54, left more than 100 men, women and children injured and with lasting psychological harm. (Liverpool Echo)

📣 Donald Trump has escalated his campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro: he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela. The move will put an even tighter chokehold on the South American country’s economy. (AP)

📣 OpenAI has hired former UK chancellor George Osborne to lead its work building “democratic” artificial intelligence for the world. Osborne will be the company’s “head of Open AI for Countries.” (The FT (£) has the exclusive)

• OpenAI is in talks over a $10 billion or more investment from Amazon (CNBC)

SPORT

⚽️ Celtic manager Wilfried Nancy may have suffered a nightmare introduction to Scottish football, but he has a handy turn of phrase: he’s admitted “my ass is burning” after losing his first three games - including Sunday’s cup final. (Daily Record)

🏉 Glasgow Warriors and Edinburgh are preparing for the first leg of their 1872 Cup clash this weekend: Jamie Dobie has been hailed as “world class” by Franco Smith as the Glasgow coach prepares to move from scrum-half to wing for the game. (The Scotsman)

⚽️ A small number of Scotland fans will get cheaper World Cup tickets after an outcry over ticket pricing erupted last week. A small number will cost £45 - versus up to £521 a seat for the rest. (BBC)

IDEAS
Columns of note: ‘Progressive’ left and anti-semitism | Why Farage isn’t harmed by racism claims | The private school disadvantage?

🗣️Euan McColm reflects on what he sees as a muddled response here to the Islamist terror attack in Sydney, targeted at Jews celebrating Hanukkah. For, he writes, “it is now clear that a great many mainstream political figures on the self-styled ‘progressive’ left feel uncomfortable identifying anti-Semitism wherever it occurs.”

He cites a message of condolence sent by First Minister John Swinney, which did not mention the attack was aimed at Jews, as an example. Swinney updated his response after his oversight was pointed out, “but his failure to identify the problem in the first instance was hardly surprising,” writes McColm.

“This, I’m afraid, is because mainstream parties of the left – the SNP, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – have many members who not only harbour hatred of Jews but see themselves as righteous for doing so.”

Similar sentiments surface more subtly elsewhere, he says. He points to a moment on BBC Radio Scotland when Jewish journalist Noa Hoffman was quizzed on Israeli policy as part of a discussion of the massacre. Writes McColm: “To Ms Hoffman’s great credit, she composed herself quickly enough to state that she did not understand how that was relevant to people being murdered in Sydney.” (Mail)

🗣️Nesrine Malik tackles a question that’s been nagging me for weeks: why aren’t claims of Nigel Farage’s schoolboy racism - which he denies vehemently - having a bigger impact on Reform UK’s popularity?

Because, let’s be clear: things are going well for Farage and Reform. He’s second in the betting market to succeed Keir Starmer as Prime Minister (Wes Streeting is first, presumably only by dint of being in the current government). Reform UK now sits second in constituency voting intention in Scotland, ahead of Labour.

“Nigel Farage is in his fourth week of revelations about alleged racist behaviour at school, and yet, here we are,” she writes. “This is one of those twilight-zone moments in British politics, where it seems something is going to ‘cut through’ any minute now.

“Calls for Farage’s resignation or for him to consider his position are broadly absent. Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer and a group of Holocaust survivors have made demands for apology. But even that entirely reasonable demand has not been picked up and repeated by either his party members or, most notably, large swathes of the press.

“Farage feels more sinister and malevolent than ever, an expression not just of his own politics, but the enabling of prejudices that cannot be named because they now hide under all sorts of ducks and dives – security, taxes, integration! – that come as a result of hanging it all on immigration,” she writes. (Guardian)

🗣️ Kenny Farquharson voices an incendiary idea for the Edinburgh Christmas party circuit: don't ask which (private) school your fellow guests send their kids to, because it could be they’re greatly disadvantaging their offspring. It’ll only get awkward.

His theory is that private schools, by optimising for the good exam results parents want, leave some children hopelessly ill-equipped for life after school. And he’s got some data to back up that claim. He points to a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the University of Warwick, conducted for David Cameron’s government in 2014.

“It found that among students of a similar background and similar qualifications, those from selective independent schools were 2.6 percentage points more likely to drop out, 6.4 percentage points less likely to complete their degree, and 10.3 percentage points less likely to graduate with a first or a 2.1 compared with students from non-selective community schools,” he writes.

“I feel deeply sorry for students from private schools who find themselves overwhelmed at university. They might appear to have all the advantages a young person could hope for. In fact, in some cases, they are being set up to fail,” he concludes. (The Times £)

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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