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In your briefing today:

• All the analysis and reaction (some of it furious, and a little of it in praise) after Rachel Reeves’ Budget

• An inferno in Hong Kong has claimed at least 44 lives, with hundreds missing

• Scotland’s football teams take to Europe once more: brace, brace

📣 Chancellor Rachel Reeves finally delivered her Budget yesterday, unveiling a tax-and-spend package which promised to lift tens of thousands of children out of poverty, but also increased taxation to levels unprecedented in recent British history and sought to build a greater fiscal buffer against global uncertainty.

The announcement was partially overshadowed by a error at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which saw its analysis of her plans published by accident 45 minutes before she announced them.

• Analysis: Reeves’ Budget wins the day, but stores up future problems (🎁 Bloomberg - gift link)

• Summary: 10 things Scots need to know from the Budget (Daily Record)

• Tax, benefits and minimum wage: what does the Budget mean for Scotland? (BBC)

• Paul Hutcheon: Labour scrapped two child benefit cap after “personal campaign” by Anas Sarwar (Daily Record)

• Alistair Grant: Chaotic budget nevertheless sparks optimism for Scottish Labour (Scotsman)

• The Irn Bru recipe could be changed again becauaes of the sugar tax. (Herald)

• More budget analysis and reaction below ⬇️

📣 North Sea jobs will be “lost within days” according to one commentator, after the Chancellor decided against lifting the North Sea oil and gas energy profits levy.

“By sticking rigidly to a cliff-edge end to UK production and maintaining the EPL in its current form, ministers have chosen ideology over economic sense,” writes Ryan Crighton of the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce (Scotsman)

• North Sea oil and gas firms “left reeling” after Chancellor snubs calls to end windfall tax (Herald) (BBC)

📣 At least 44 people have died in an inferno that has consumed much of an eight-tower housing complex in Hong Kong. That terrible toll seems certain to rise: hundreds of people remain missing, with the latest video from the scene showing the towers still smouldering almost 24 hours on. (BBC)

• Devastating fire must spell the end of bamboo scaffolding (Independent)

• Photos from Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades (AP)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 NHS Tayside destroyed around 40 theatre logbooks which may have contained vital evidence about disgraced surgeon Sam Eljamel, despite being ordered not to do so, an inquiry has heard. (Mail)

📣 The UK’s largest timber firm has gone into administration with 169 jobs lost across Scotland. (STV)

📣 Scottish fashion designer Pam Hogg, who created looks for stars including Rihanna and Kate Moss, has died. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Two national guard members were shot in an ambush near the White House yesterday afternoon, in what was described by authorities as a targeted attack. Both are in a critical condition, while a suspect - also shot - has wounds that are not life-threatening. (AP)

📣 A man has admitted driving his car into the Liverpool league victory party earlier this year, injuring 134 people including babies, children and the elderly. His day, the BBC says in a profile, started with some gardening and a friendly chat with neighbours. (BBC)

📣 Is Donald Trump exhausted? The 79-year-old is the oldest person to be elected president, and analysis shows he’s appearing in public 40% less than in his first term, with his days starting - on average - later. (Independent)

SPORT

⚽️ If you feel a little tense this morning, it’s because you’re subliminally aware that Scotland’s clubs return to European action tonight. It’s not gone well so far.

• Celtic travel to Robin van Persie’s Feyenoord for an early (5.45pm) kick off: a tough tie, but with a chance given their host’s tricky form. (Daily Record) (BBC)

• Rangers, having lost all four Europa League games this term, have a(nother) difficult home tie against Braga, and sit 36th of 36 teams. They need a win: most pundits don’t see it happening. (Daily Record) (BBC)

• Aberdeen also seek their first win of the campaign tonight, albeit off the back of an encouraging point in Arnica last time. They host Noah, of Armenia, tonight: boss Jimmy Thelin says they have to win. (Daily Record) (BBC)

⚽️ Liverpool manager Arne Slot was left distraught last night after his side’s thrashing at the hands of PSV in the Champions League. His future is now under deep scrutiny. (🎥 See highlights)

• “We’re in the s***” - Liverpool’s Curtis Jones summed it up succinctly. (Mail)

⚽️ No such worries at Arsenal: they swept to the top of the Champions League table with a brilliant 3-1 win against Bayern Munich. (Sun) (🎥 See highlights)

• How this win confirms Arsenal as the best team in Europe (Independent)

IDEAS
Commentators greet Reeves’ budget with disdain, despair and (only a little) delight

🗣️ Chancellor Rachel Reeves unveiled a budget yesterday that brings significantly higher taxes, somewhat higher spending and a much bigger financial buffer against global uncertainty. What commentators are saying about all that depends on their political outlook.

We’ll get to the praise, such as it is, a little later. But most of Fleet Street is condemnatory.

Few put it more stridently than Allister Heath in The Telegraph (🎁 gift link). “This is it, the day we all dreaded, a milestone in Britain’s descent into collectivism of the most repugnant kind,” he writes.

“We have just witnessed a monstrous Budget delivered by the worst Chancellor in living memory, an obscene mix of untruths and delusion, a farrago of bile, envy and nastiness that will vandalise our economy and ruin our society.”

Heath’s colleague, Janet Daley, takes a similarly dim view (🎁 gift link). Taking aim at the increase in the minimum wage, saying it “seems not to have occurred to her that if it costs more to employ people, businesses will hire fewer of them”, she adds: “In the sub-Marxist conceptual world which the party inhabits, business may create wealth but it has no moral right to own it or to choose how to invest it. It must be coerced into sharing more and more of that wealth with the workers.”

At the Daily Mail, Andrew Neil (£) says “With a smirk that says if you work hard and save prudently I’m coming for you, Reeves launches 43 tax rises in spiteful raids on strivers”. He says the budget “baked in” all the tax and spending rises of the pandemic, then added more. It leaves Britain a very different place, he says.

“It is a watershed in our economic history. The overall tax burden, which used to be just above 30 per cent of GDP, is now heading for over 38 per cent – and destined to stay at that level for the foreseeable future.”

In The Times, Juliet Samuel (£) harks back two years, when Reeves made a speech promising to focus government firepower on fostering new investment and improving competitiveness. It was dubbed “Securonomics”, an echo of Joe Biden’s massive green tech and science stimulus packages.

“We have now seen two budgets delivered by the chancellor and should therefore be able to see exactly what her “Securonomics” means in practice,” she writes. “And it looks very unlike Biden’s chips and science acts, or even his green subsidy bonanza.

“What it looks like is a massive Brownite tax-and-spend programme, only without the booming City tax receipts to pay for it all.”

Praise for Reeves? There is some. In its budget “panel”, the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee says it reminds us “there can be a better Britain” by getting rid of the “monstrous two-child benefit cap”.

“After four months of tortured U-turns, dithering and leaking that spooked markets and paralysed spending, here is a far better budget than doomster predictions,” she says.

In the Mirror, Kevin Maguire said Reeves “transformed herself from Scrooge to Mother Christmas”.

“In one short Budget intervention, thundered Labour lay preacher Gordon Brown, Rachel Reeves did more to transform the lives of 450,000 of Britain’s poorest children than any of seven Conservative predecessors who, over 14 grim years, did nothing but harm to the lives of vulnerable kids,” he writes.

“Boosting at a stroke so many young lives was the glittering jewel in an otherwise largely tough Budget from Reeves, a Chancellor of the Exchequer who finally played a bad hand decently.”

And in The Scotsman, praise came from a perhaps unexpected quarter - former Scottish Conservative staffer Adam Morris, who writes: “The reality is Labour’s tough decisions were made in last year’s Budget, taking the sting out of anything negative this time around. It will improve the prospects for good news in future Budgets, putting the party on a clever footing in time for the next UK election in 2029.”

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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