TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️ Warm today in Glasgow, reaching 20 degrees, and although early cloud in Edinburgh and Aberdeen will clear for another sunny day it’ll not be quite as warm. London is (just) included in a weather warning ⚠️ for thunderstorms from midday, and should expect rain through the afternoon. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Protests ramp up ahead of assisted dying vote | Starmer’s immigration clampdown | BAFTAs fallout

📣 MSPs will vote tomorrow on a controversial assisted dying bill, one of the most consequential votes it will undertake this term.

The proposals have sparked concerns and protests, which will reach a crescendo today and tomorrow, but supporters say the latest proposals are gaining more support than previous attempts. Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur, who developed the bill, told the BBC yesterday he expects the vote to be “close”. (BBC)

• Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar says he’ll be voting against Scotland’s assisted dying bill. First Minister John Swinney has previously said he’ll also vote against. (The Record has the exclusive on Sarwar)

• Silent Witness star Liz Carr will be among those speaking against the bill at a rally at Holyrood tomorrow. (Daily Mail)

• A health charity has warned anorexia patients might use the legislation to end their lives (The Times £)

• Euan McColm: If the “dark benevolence” of the assisted dying bill needs more work, why are MSPs voting on it now? (Scotland on Sunday)

📣 Keir Starmer will unveil measures to “tighten up” the immigration system today, including English tests for immigrants and a ban on care homes recruiting staff from overseas. Foreign workers will also lose the right to automatically apply for settlement in the UK after five years, seeing the threshold extend to 10 years. (Guardian)

• The Mail has produced a map that shows Britain’s “asylum seeker hotspots”. It illustrates a big, recent spike in the proportion of asylum seekers - and some surprising hotspots in Scotland. But even “hotspots” in Scotland equate to only 0.6% of the population. (Daily Mail)

📣 The Mail wraps up all the bits you didn’t see in the broadcast of last night’s BAFTA TV awards, including Danny Dyer’s “expletive-laden” speech. (Mail)

• Stuart Heritage: There’s no way Danny Dyer should have won (Guardian)

• Ed Power: Alan Cumming turned the Festival Hall into a laugh-free zone (Telegraph)

WHAT WE LEARNED OVER THE WEEKEND
What Reform really wants… and what that might mean

🗣️ Reform, Nigel Farage’s insurgent party, made big gains in English local elections on May 1. Polls say it’ll do well in Scotland next year. But, despite releasing a manifesto last year, it’s been claimed few know what its policies are on key issues - amplified by Farage’s reluctance to talk much about Russia and Trump, two topics which have dominated 2025’s news agenda.

But a big essay in Saturday’s Daily Mail (£) allowed Farage to set out the party’s stance on economic and social issues - and others the chance to offer a critique. What would he do if, as some suggest is now a possibility, he became Prime Minister? In brief…

• He’d lift the starting threshold of income tax to £20,000.

• He’d cut taxes and regulations for small businesses.

• He’d “back farmers” by getting rid of the inheritance tax change made by Labour last year, and also by “ensuring that supermarkets pay a fair price” for food. Inheritance tax would go for all estates under £2 million.

• On the NHS, he doesn’t promise more money - but a cutting of bureaucracy and waste to find more money for doctors and nurses.

• On immigration - a defining issue - immigration would be “frozen” and the UK would leave the European Convention on Human rights so illegal immigrants arriving on small boats could not make asylum claims.

• He’s a little vague on what “frozen” immigration means for foreign students at Universities, but says they are “aiming for 0 per cent population increase through immigration” and that “the universities will scream blue murder” over that. That implies few, or no, foreign students.

• He’ll “abolish net zero”, “revive our North Sea oil and gas industry” and install small nuclear reactors around the UK.

• He’d abolish the 2010 Equalities Act.

🗣️The reaction? The Economist (£) has won a lot of social media attention for its verdict, although it was published two days before Farage’s piece in the Mail, and so isn’t really a direct reaction. But it works off last year’s election manifesto, and the Reform website. And it’s safe to say it’s not warm on either.

“Reform’s policies add up to an agenda of fiscal recklessness that rivals, and may well exceed, the disastrous 49-day, hair-raising, market-tanking premiership of Liz Truss in 2022,” the newspaper says.

“The manifesto puts Reform’s giveaways at £140bn ($190bn, 5% of GDP) per year, but claims to offset them with savings worth £160bn. Even on a generous-but-realistic accounting, The Economist estimates that the annual costs are in the region of £200bn and savings around £100bn (see chart). The gap between the two would amount to a colossal fiscal shock.”

It warns of near 2010-levels of austerity to achieve savings, and “unfathomably vast” savings being claimed from the scrapping of Net Zero. It also claims a contradiction between Reform’s Thatcherite talk, and its big-stater walk: it supported what The Economist calls “an unnecessary subsidy to richer pensioners” in the shape of winter fuel payments. “Reform now has four years to choose between a serious rethink or the risk of a fiscal calamity if it wins,” it says.

🗣️Safe, then, to dismiss Reform as all a bit stupid? Not so fast. Janice Turner in The Times takes a powerful swipe at what she calls “the lanyard class” - the professional cadre who dismiss working-class people as stupid and racist. Amid a lot of noise, it’s one of the more incisive bits of commentary on Reform I’ve seen this year.

Her piece is not a direct assessment of Farage’s manifesto, but certainly an attack on the conditions that have made Reform attractive to some. Nicola Sturgeon is among those lanyard class leaders she flags as having “won plaudits for signifying liberal values while neglecting material concerns such as education, housing and the cost of living, until eventually voters found them out.”

“Like a national HR department, the government cares only about ‘compliance’” with its views and rules, writes Turner. “So people are turning to a party, as makeshift as a flat-pack bookshelf, simply because it doesn’t shut them down. It is not Reform voters who are stupid.”

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Weather forecaster Sean Batty is concerned about a drought in Scotland after the UK’s driest start to a year since 1956. (Express)

📣 A body has been found in the search for a missing swimmer in Aberfoyle. (STV)

📣 Former Scotland head coach Sir Ian McGeechan says he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Donald Trump doesn’t see the problem in being gifted a jumbo jet by Qatar to use as Air Force One (and then keep using even after he leaves office). (AP)

📣 A young boy was rushed to hospital and 73 other people fell ill after an outbreak of illness linked to a petting zoo last month. (Independent)

📣 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zeleknsky challenged his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to meet him personally in Turkey on Thursday. (AP)

📣 Weight-loss jabs could half the risk of some cancers, according to researchers in Israel. (Guardian)

SPORT

⚽️ Hearts are expected to make a move for Kilmarnock manager Derek McInnes. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Scott McTominay played a starring role again but Napoli could only draw on a dramatic night in Italy’s Serie A race (Scotsman)

⚽️ Rangers thumped Aberdeen yesterday at Ibrox… but their ultras are upset after the row over their controversial display last week. (The Sun)