In your briefing today:

📣 Scottish women are suffering avoidable deaths because doctors don’t take them seriously, a health charity has claimed.

Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland says Scottish women are 50 per cent more likely than men to receive an initial misdiagnosis after a heart attack, and face a 20-week wait on average for a heart failure diagnosis compared to just 3.6 weeks for men.

Women are twice as likely to die from asthma as men, and less likely to get testing and medication to prevent another heart attack after an initial illness. (Scotsman) (Herald)

📣 Earl Spencer has claimed Prince Charles told him, days after Princess Diana’s death, “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”.

But Buckingham Palace has issued a rare rebuttal, accusing the Earl of “grief-clouded reasoning”, saying the King “is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.” (Mail has the exclusive on the Earl’s book)

📣 The Scottish Government must be more transparent about how it plans to use the £755 million being raised by the leasing of offshore wind farm options, the Auditor General for Scotland has said.

Opposition parties say the government is using the cash to plug holes in the nation’s finances - instead of setting up a “ScotWind wealth fund” as originally mooted. £96 million has already been spent. (BBC)

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📣 What to do about “balaclava boys” on electric bikes? They’re becoming a scourge across the country but, as Calum Watson points out, dealing with the problem is tricky. (BBC)

📣 Police are hunting four men after confirming a 35-year-old man who died at the weekend in West Lothian was shot dead. (STV)

📣 A former Police Scotland officer has been found guilty of a catalogue of sex crimes, including two counts of rape, over a 17-year period. (BBC)

📣 ScotRail’s troubled new app will continue to frustrate its users into next year, MSPs have been told. (BBC)

📣 A furious Donald Trump hit out at the Federal Reserve after its decision to increase its benchmark rate for the first time in more than three years. (Independent)

📣 A body has been found in the search for missing three-year-old Noah Woods. The Suffolk village of Brantham, united in a search for the little boy for hours before, is now united in grief. (Mail)

📣 Prime Minister Andy Burnham hosted Canada’s Mark Carney last night… at Everton’s game versus Wolverhampton Wanderers. Carney shared that he, too, had lost his father to Alzheimer’s. (Mirror)

📣 OpenAI has disclosed six reports of “unexpected or concerning” behaviour by its AI models. (AP)

📣 AM Radio isn’t dead yet… the US Congress has just passed a bill mandating the century-old technology in every new car for reasons of safety. Carmakers aren’t happy at all. (WSJ)

⚽️ Hibs’ Head Coach David Gray has become the Scottish Premiership’s first managerial casualty of the season, the club legend getting the chop after a miserable run of form which has seen six defeats in a row at Easter Road. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Martin O’Neill has promised Celtic “will get ourselves right” after their 3-0 Old Firm thumping on Sunday, as they host Ferencvaros in the Europa League tonight. (Scotsman)

⚽️ Sunderland’s win over AZ Alkmaar was a hugely atmospheric occasion: the first time that oft-troubled club has been in Europe in 53 years. (🎥 See the highlights)

⚽️ I’m afraid, Manchester United fans, the club’s banter club years appear not to be over: boos echoed round Old Trafford after the home side threw away a 2-0 lead to lose 3-2 to Brighton in the League Cup. (BBC) (🎥 Highlights)

🗣️ Should we worry about the price of our government’s debt? Across the rich world, people are asking the same question, as they watch the faintly esoteric discussion of bond yields - what countries pay for debt - soar.

The yields don’t sound like much - earlier this week, the yield on ten-year American Treasuries hit 5%. But when you bear in mind it was close to zero during Covid, and that it hasn’t been at 5% in years, you begin to see the problem.

Add in the fact that rich nations are in greater debt today than ever before, and are running big deficits (meaning they’ll have to borrow more) and the picture begins to fill itself in.

Yes, we probably should be concerned.

As The Economist (£) points out, “Governments have dealt both with high yields and with high borrowing in the past. But, at least in recent decades, not at the same time.”

And that threatens to have a profound impact on government policy - and especially on the content of Chancellor John Healey’s budget, to be delivered on 28 October, and which is already being described as “tricky”.

The mood music is building. The former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane revealed a talent for a soundbite on Tuesday, warning that markets’ view of this government was turning. “We've gone from the cautious optimism of the summer months to the studied scepticism of September,” he told LBC. “The market now suspects that this is a traditional tax-and-spend socialist government with better TikTok videos."

Ouch. And that’s from someone who has, informally, advised Andy Burnham.

The Prime Minister says he has already taken big decisions on spending, “reprioritising” spending to pay for his early cost of living announcements by abandoning plans for a digital ID card (although you’ll recall that sacked minister Darren Jones immediately said that programme was unfunded, so it wasn’t a reprioritisation at all).

A root cause of it all, reports the FT (£) today, are the wars raging in the Middle East and Ukraine. They’re pushing up prices, which pushes up inflation, pushes up interest rates (to try and control inflation) and ultimately dampens growth. That makes it harder to raise tax revenue, which means countries need to borrow more to pay for services.

And, as anyone who’s struggled with debt knows, the more you need a loan, the more it’s going to cost you.

A paper from Chatham House reviews the options for the UK to escape this “public debt trap”. “Brave” choices from the Chancellor could help curtail the UK’s spending. But any fan of Yes, Minister, knows the term “brave” is an immediate red flag for any politician seeking to keep their job.

Cutting working-age welfare spending, for instance, would save tens of billions, but would be unpopular among those losing their benefits - and could weaken economic demand.

Meanwhile, the cost of the “triple lock” on pensions is vast - around £17 billion a year - but pensioners tend to vote. (Andy Haldane, he of the soundbite, suggests pensioners could be persuaded if the money saved by ditching the triple-lock went on supporting their children and grandchildren. You may harbour doubts.)

Growth, writes Creon Butler of Chatham House, is the way to solve all this - and that’s a concept that enjoys widespread political consensus. But there’s far less agreement on how to achieve it.

One option might be to invest in the sort of infrastructure projects that the private sector is unwilling to support, because the returns are too low. “According to one analysis,” he writes, “public financial institutions could invest an additional £16 billion in public infrastructure over the next five years, while remaining within the fiscal rules.

“Other government policies, such as regional devolution of some taxes and spending, or taking control of railways and failed utilities, could support the increased scale and effectiveness of infrastructure investment.”

But even that path isn’t simple. As Butler points out, public infrastructure can be a fast way to blow vast sums. “The government must avoid mistakes like the escalation in cost of the HS2 high-speed railway,” he writes, “which now looks set to cost £100 billion for just 140 miles of track.”

Chancellor Healey has little more than a month to sort it all out: he’ll need an answer that doesn’t involve bat tunnels. We may all wish him good luck.

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