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In your briefing today:

• The Home Secretary’s proposals to curb immigration are likely to split the Labour Party. Read reaction from across the political spectrum.

• Scotland has its biggest game this century tonight against Denmark, with a World Cup spot for the winner.

• Watch out for weather warnings across the country today, as temperatures drop

📣 Tough new proposals to curb immigration are the latest test for beleaguered Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with significant divisions within the Labour Party exposed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposals. (Guardian)

Mahmood has defended the sweeping changes to the UK’s asylum system, telling MPs the current system is “out of control and unfair”. Some Labour MPs have expressed unease over the proposals, but Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said the proposals were “positive baby steps”. (BBC)

• Mutiny in the Labour ranks over Home Secretary’s “cruel” new rules (Mail)

• Home Secretary warns fellow MPs - and tells Farage to “sod off” (Sky News)

• Dominic Casciani: Asylum plan sees government walk tightrope (BBC)

• Bishop says he’s “shaken to the core” by Mahmood’s comments (Guardian)

• Opinion: Mahmood’s “moral mission” divides party and nation - see below ⬇️

📣 Aberdeen-based Wood plc is closer to being taken over after shareholders backed a £216 million deal with Sidara, an international engineering and design firm based in Dubai.

The long-mooted, cut-price purchase demonstrates Wood’s fall from industrial giant - with a market valuation of more than £5 billion and 50,000 staff around the world - to a troubled company that has had to sell several subsidiaries to raise funds amid problems with its accounting practices and an FCA investigation. (BBC)

But the deal is not expected to complete yet: the company must meet “outstanding conditions” which need to be agreed in court next year. In the meantime, the company will get a cash injection, and access to a debt facility. (Energy Voice)

• Previously: What went wrong with Wood Group? (Press & Journal)

📣 It’s an enormous game of football for Scotland tonight: the game of the century, indeed, as we haven’t qualified for a World Cup since the 20th century, and find ourselves only 90 minutes from that milestone tonight.

In the way lie Denmark: an excellent side, but one which slipped up against Belarus at the weekend and who are suffering a sickness bug in their camp. Hampden will be cold, packed and noisy… anything can happen, right?.

• Scotland’s World Cup legends tell Steve Clarke’s men to make history (Record)

• Steve Clarke was an unused substitute in a crunch qualifier in 1989, and never made it to a World Cup as a player. He admitted he’d been thinking about it all as he lay awake in the wee hours yesterday morning. (Scotsman)

• Legendary status awaits Steve Clarke and his players if they can end 27-year wait (Mail)

• Denmark fans don homemade red kilts for trip to big game (Record)

• Bug won’t harm Denmark, says boss (Herald)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 NHS Fife chief executive Carol Potter has announced plans to retire early, the announcement coming ahead of an expected ruling on the high-profile Sandie Peggie employment tribunal. She’ll leave her role next summer. (BBC) (Mail)

📣 UHI Perth missed out £700,000 in catering costs when drawing up its budget for the year, the blunder coming only a year after the institution failed to set any budget at all. It was forced to ask the Scottish Funding Council for £1 million extra funding in June. (The Courier has the exclusive)

📣 A man has died following an incident aboard a North Sea drilling rig. The nature of the incident is not known, although there are suggestions he fell from a crane. An investigation has been launched. (STV) (Sun)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 The resale of live event tickets for profit will be banned, in an aggressive UK government move against ticket touts and resellers who often scoop up vast numbers of event tickets and resell them at huge markups. (FT (£) had the exclusive) (Guardian)

• Dua Lipa and Coldplay urge action on ticket touts (BBC)

📣 The UN has approved the Trump plan to secure and administer Gaza, endorsing a ceasefire plan and the establishment of a “Board of Peace” as a transitional authority, headed by Trump himself. (Reuters)

📣 Football fans travelling to next year’s World Cup will be able to take up a “FIFA pass” to get prioritised interviews at US embassies, President Trump has announced. (Independent)

📣 An Australian prisoner is suing for his right to eat Vegemite in prison, saying that witholding the yeast-based spread breaches his human rights. (AP)

SPORT

⚽️ Celtic’s search for a new manager goes on: Wilfried Nancy remains the frontrunner, but he’ll need a work permit which could take days to secure. Martin O’Neill is likely to continue in charge for at least another game. (BBC) (Sun)

🥊 Former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua will fight YouTube star Jake Paul in a bout next month, to be screened on Netflix. (BBC)

IDEAS
Mahmood’s “moral mission” divides party and nation

🗣️ Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled sweeping changes to the UK’s asylum system yesterday, telling the House of Commons: “If we fail to deal with this crisis, we will draw more people down a path that starts with anger and ends in hatred.”

The reforms will mean refugee status becomes temporary, guaranteed housing support for asylum seekers will end, and “safe and legal routes” into the UK will be created - with capped numbers.

They have divided the political world - even Mahmoud’s own party, and today’s leader columns, sketches and columns reflect that divide.

“Putting your own people first isn’t racist or xenophobic,” says Melanie Phillips in The Times. “Keeping them safe and protecting your country and its culture are the first duty of a nation, the irreducible bargain between the state and its citizens,” she writes.

Mahmood has understood, says Phillips, that Britain’s problem is not just human rights law, but the law on refugees. The latter, created in the wake of the Holocaust “when virtually every country denied entry to Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany”, it was later broadened.

“The world has changed,” says Phillips, “and hundreds of millions could now claim asylum under the convention’s criteria. So Mahmood has brought forward proposals to make claiming asylum and permanent settlement in Britain a more onerous and uncertain process.”

Mahmood’s “ostensibly robust approach” is undermined, however, “by a basic conceptual flaw”, because it’s not only illegal migration “tearing the country apart”:" it’s mass immigration, legal and illegal, which is now “totally unsustainable” and “threatens to capsize Britain’s public services”.

“This is driving a wave of boiling public rage. Most people want to live in a country they can recognise as home, which they love and share as a common national project rooted in its particular history and principles,” she writes.

If Phillips is - at least partially - supportive of the Home Secretary’s changes, John Crace in the Guardian invokes some dark, surrealist images in his parliamentary sketch, painting a picture of Shabana Mahmood deporting herself in the name of being tough on immigrants. (His imaginings acknowledge, correctly, that Mahmood is British and was born in this country).

Crace’s colleague Diane Taylor brands Labour’s plans “horribly cruel” and also “a mix of hype, old policy and unachievable promises”. She notes that “Tommy Robinson” - far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon - welcomed the prospect of the changes.

“Meanwhile, asylum seekers and refugees I have spoken to are panicked, trembling and crying at the prospect of having to be uprooted once again after feeling safe in the UK.”

Over at the Telegraph, Patrick Kidd (£) notes Mahmood used the f-word for only the 28th time in the Commons chamber, when responding in exasperation “thanks to a sanctimonious Lib Dem”.

No matter her language, however, the paper is approving of her proposals (£) - “a step in the right direction,” it says, but also one likely to be foiled by Labour MPs.

Sean Grady at the Independent is less sure: he notes that she is talking about sanctions against specific countries - Angola, Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo - who are reluctant to accept returned citizens. And he also notes that Mahmood is stuck in damned-if-she-does, damned-if-she-doesn’t, territory: “Whatever she does to the asylum system will never be enough for some in society,” he writes.

“But it would be wrong to dismiss the government’s plans out of hand,” writes Grady. “If it does not find an effective way to restore control of the UK’s borders – a challenge that was spectacularly mishandled by the last Tory administration – its prospects of winning the next election are zero. Worse, it could well result in a victory by Nigel Farage and Reform UK.”

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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