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Tuesday 27 January 2026
In your briefing today:
Labour MPs are demanding a U-turn on Andy Burnham, who’s not being allowed to run for a vacant Westminster seat
Reform UK says it would cut Scottish taxes by reducing funding for quangos and green initiatives
The menopause is being linked to Alzheimer’s-like changes in women’s brains
TODAY’S WEATHER
THE BIG STORIES
Labour MPs demand U-turn on Burnham | Reform will cut Scottish tax, claims Offord | Trump changes course
📣 Fifty Labour MPs have signed a letter demanding Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is allowed to stand in a parliamentary by-election. The MPs have written to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, warning the decision to block Burnham is a “real gift” to Reform UK, with polling suggesting Burnham is best placed to defend the Gorton and Denton seat.
Starmer, defending the move, has said allowing Burnham to contest the seat would have diverted Labour’s resources away from other elections this year, as it would have to fight both the by-election and the Manchester mayoralty. (BBC)
Burnham’s chances of getting back into parliament appear remote: relations between him and Starmer are said to be at “a low ebb”. (Guardian)
📣 Reform UK’s new Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, says the party would bring income tax bands back into line with those in England if it won power at Holyrood. The plan would cost £2 billion - funded by cuts to quangos and green policies. (Guardian) (BBC)
The Conservatives have been forced to retract suggestions Suella Braverman, the former home secretary who defected to Reform yesterday, had mental health issues. (Independent)
Peter Walker: Braverman’s predictable defection is Farage’s biggest political gamble yet: she’s “not a team player” and may limit his party’s appeal. (Guardian)
📣 US President Donald Trump appears to be changing course in Minnesota - something “he’s generally avoided in his second term, " suggests Semafor. After fellow Republicans were critical of the killing of US citizen Alex Pretti by an ICE agent, he has made changes to immigration enforcement in the state and is now talking about working more with local officials (Semafor)
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AROUND SCOTLAND
📣 Further court hearings may determine the fate of the captain and first officer of the Russian-flagged oil tanker, the Marinera, which was seized by the US Coast Guard earlier this month and now lies moored off the coast of Moray. (BBC)
📣 The family of former Manchester United and Scotland star Gordon McQueen have urged football’s governing bodies to do more to protect players after an inquest found that heading the ball contributed to his death. McQueen died, aged 70, having been diagnosed with dementia two years earlier. (Mail)
📣 The Scottish Government has begun a search for banks and lawyers to run its first-ever bond sale, with plans to raise £1.5 billion over five years should the SNP win this May’s parliamentary elections. (🎁 Bloomberg - gift link)
📣 The planned new ferry link between Scotland and France is at the heart of plans to regenerate the port of Dunkirk, with plans for a vast £3.5 billion green-tech and maritime hub. (Guardian)
📣 A grieving father is calling for stricter regulations for young people who have just passed their driving test. (BBC)
AROUND THE UK & WORLD
📣 The menopause is being linked to Alzheimer’s-like changes in the brain, according to a large UK study. The finding might explain why women are at greater risk of dementia than men. (BBC)
📣 Nato’s secretary general has warned Ukraine faces its “harshest winter” in more than a decade, as Russian attacks disrupt its energy grid. (Independent)
📣 It pays to persist: Airlines are paying out millions in compensation to passengers after initially saying no, consumer groups say. (BBC)
SPORT
⚽️ Celtic captain Callum McGregor says he has no intention of moving to the Middle East to join former boss Brendan Rodgers in Saudi Arabia. (Daily Record)
🏉 The Six Nations were launched in Edinburgh: Graham Bean enjoyed the fact the event wasn’t at a swanky London club this year, but closer to home with a “roll and sausage vibe”. (Scotsman)
Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend is planning a fast start to the Six Nations, with fit-again Sione Tuipulotu key (🎁 Times - gift link)
IDEAS
Why has Trump targeted Minnesota?
"Minnesota is a microcosm of a lot of the tensions we have in our society," said David Schultz, a political scientist at Hamline University in St. Paul. "We're a country that's hugely polarized, Democrats-Republicans, urban-rural.
🗣️ Watching the grim chaos unfold in Minneapolis, you could be forgiven for asking: why are federal forces rampaging there and (not so much) elsewhere? Why now?
The answer is rooted in local politics, personal enmity, and claims of vast fraud being committed within the state’s large Somali community - a group from a “garbage country”, according to President Trump.
Trump has targeted a number of Democrat-administered states across the US in his immigration enforcement campaign. But resistance to federal agents has been particularly strong in Minnesota, and especially in Minneapolis, where memories of the death of George Floyd in 2020, at the hands of a police officer, remain strong.
Trump remains “publicly bitter about the unrest” which followed that shooting and marred his first term in office. He thinks it should have been met with a stronger show of force: a view that’s likely informing his approach now.
But there are other factors, too.
The local politics: Minnesota is, famously, a lefty island in the traditionally conservative Midwest. According to the Star Tribune, a newspaper in the state, that’s partly down to it being “settled largely by churchgoing Scandinavians and Germans, who were ‘moralistic and public regarding’ and tended to agree with the notion that government had a role to play when it's in the best interest of everyone.”
More recently (in 1944), a merger between the Democratic Party and the more left-wing Farmer-Labour Party created the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party (DFL) in 1944, uniting the labour movement, from urban trade workers to rural miners.
Lately, demographic change means the bulk of the state’s population (around 60%) lives in urban areas: generally, urban voters are more liberal than their rural counterparts. Building on that, Governor Tim Walz has made the state a beacon for the left, expanding welfare support even as the rest of the US swung to the right. (The Star Tribune)Personal enmity: You’ll recall that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was Vice President Kamala Harris’s “attack dog” during her run for the top job against Trump. He called Trump a “wannabe dictator” and said “At heart, this is a weak, cruel man”. There are suggestions that Trump has been slow to forget those slights.
That might be changing: it appears that, yesterday, Walz and Trump held a “productive” telephone call: “we, actually, appear to be on the same wavelength,” wrote Trump.Claims of fraud: the vital sparks for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge, however, are allegations of widespread fraud in Minnesota’s “Scandinavian-style” benefits system.
It’s complex, but this explainer from last year (🎁 New York Times - gift link) sets out what’s being claimed. “Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating,” reports the Times.
On top of those claims, which appear to have substance, one right-wing YouTuber has also made baseless claims about car day fraud, which, nonetheless, have had a huge impact.
Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old self-described “independent YouTube journalist”, posted a video on Boxing Day which went viral, aided by reshares from top administration figures, including Vice President JD Vance.As NPR reports, “[Shirley] and an older man — identified only as "David" — visit various seemingly empty day care centers, bombarding Somali employees with questions and accusing them of not providing services to any children despite receiving public funds. The pair claim to have exposed over $110 million in fraud.”
It prompted the Trump administration to freeze child care funding to the entire state.
Yet his “revelations” appear flimsy: one commentator accuses him of basic mistakes in reporting on various federal programmes, while others say he simply filmed centres when they were closed.
All a bit flimsy, then. And, of course, nothing can explain - or excuse - what we see in those videos of protestors being shot. But, at least, we can understand - somewhat - why it’s Minnesota.
👍 That’s your Early Line for the day
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