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In your briefing today:

• Keir Starmer has defended his government’s budget, and Rachel Reeves, as anger grows over how the ground was prepared for its tax rises

• What we learned this weekend: Rachel Reeves’ tough weekend becomes a tough week | Trump’s business plan for Ukraine | BBC star’s cancer diagnosis | What makes some people lazy | Stoppard remembered

• An intriguing Scottish Cup draw, and F1’s season goes down to the wire

📣 Keir Starmer comes out swinging today after a difficult weekend in which his Chancellor has been accused of lying over the motivations for £26 billion of tax rises in the budget.

• In an op-ed, he says Labour’s economic plan will take years to deliver, and is part of a broader “national renewal”. He also says economic renewal demands Labour reform the welfare state to break cycles of wordlessness and dependency. (Guardian) (FT £)

• Meanwhile, it’s being claimed cabinet ministers are accusing Starmer and Reeves of misleading them by claiming there was a hole in public finances, to justify big tax increases. “The handling of this budget has been a disaster from start to finish,” one cabinet minister said. (The Times £) (Express)

• Nigel Farage has also complained about Reeves, to the independent adviser on ministerial standards, saying her actions in the run-up to the budget “plainly meet the threshold for investigation”. (Mail)

📣 The Wall Street Journal turns its eye to Scotland’s plans to issue its own bonds, noting that “the last time Scotland went to the captial markets, it didn’t work out too well.”

It was 1695, that was the Darien Scheme, thousands died and the failure forced an economically-wrecked Scotland into union with England only years later.

But Scotland is back with its first bond issue in over 300 years, the title says. And “Moody’s and S&P Global gave Scotland the same investment-grade rating as the U.K., and a better one than Spain, Italy and Japan,” the title notes.

“The problem is both Moody’s and S&P have made it clear that Scotland’s ratings are contingent on it remaining in the U.K.” (🎁 WSJ - gift link)

📣 BBC Scotland Breakfast fell off-air this morning. The station resorted to playing music at around 6.30am, with messages saying the channel was “working to get your programme back”. The channel moved to output from Radio 5Live at 7am.

The technical problems come only a week after the programme replaced Good Morning Scotland after its 50-year run.

• Thousands back call for BBC Radio Scotland to reverse late-night schedule changes (STV)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 The Scottish Government has been urged to launch an investigation into the huge increase in school pupils with additional support needs - from less than 33,000 in 2004 to more than 284,000 today, or 40% of the school population. (Scotsman)

📣 Laws protecting girls from genital mutilation are not being implemented in Scotland, with 1,200 women “cut” in Glasgow alone over the last five years. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Female employees of Mohamed Al Fayed have urged police to include his Ross-shire estate - a “castle of horrors”, they say - as they investigate claims of sexual abuse. (Times £)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Your Party, the new political party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, has decided to make its name permanent at a “tense” first conference. (Guardian)

• Strengths and weaknesses on display at Your Party’s founding conference (Morning Star)

📣 More than 900 people have been killed in floods across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia in less than a week, with more storms due to hit the region today. (Al Jazeera live coverage)

📣 The death toll in Hong Kong’s tower blocks fire has risen to 146, as the city mourns. (AP)

📣 The British journalist Andreas Whitman Smith, groundbreaking founder of the Independent newspaper, has died, aged 88. (Independent)

📣 “Rage bait” is Oxford University Press’s word of the year. (BBC)

SPORT

⚽️ Rangers head coach Danny Rohl says he has a “clearer” picture of his side as they stumbled to a 0-0 draw with Falkirk at Ibrox. (Scotsman)

• Another game, another win for Martin O’Neill’s Celtic - and he’s staying on for at least one more. But Keith Jackson smells something off about the Wilfried Nancy saga. (Daily Record)

• Aberdeen beat Livingston 1-0 thanks to a late Nicky Devlin header (BBC)

• See highlights from the weekend’s games (BBC)

⚽️ A busy Premier League Sunday saw Chelsea and Arsenal draw, and Liverpool bag a much-needed win - without Mo Salah in the line-up.

• Talking points and highlights from Sunday’s games - including consistently inconsistent United (Sky Sports)

⚽️ The Scottish Cup has thrown up some intriguing fourth round ties - not least Celtic’s visit to sixth-tier Auchinleck Talbot. Cup holders Aberdeen will start their defence at home against Raith Rovers. Ties are played on 17-18 January. (BBC)

🏎️ Formula 1’s season will go down to the wire after a tactical blunder by McLaren aided Max Verstappen to a win in Qatar. The F1 circus now moves on to Abu Dhabi next weekend for a winner-takes-all showdown between Verstappen, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. (Sky Sports)

IDEAS
What we learned this weekend: Rachel Reeves’ tough weekend becomes a tough week | Trump’s peace business plan for Ukraine | BBC star’s cancer diagnosis | What makes some people lazy | Stoppard remembered

🗣️On Saturday morning I wrote that Rachel Reeves would be having a tough weekend. Now it’s going to be a tough week. Some will say she’s toast, now, but you could say it was always thus - all political careers end in failure, as Enoch Powell noted (although John Rentoul has argued otherwise).

But Rachel Reeves’ levels of trust are her big, immediate problem, with a Tory attack built around claims she lied about the UK’s economic situation, in the run-up to last week’s budget, landing some punches.

Reeves’ retort, made yesterday on the BBC, was that her £26 billion of tax rises were intended to build a buffer, reduce the risk of future tax rises, and protect spending.

The trouble is, that’s not what she said before. As the Guardian puts it: “Her messaging contrasted […] with what she said before the budget, when she said tax rises would be necessary because of an expected decision by economic forecasters to reduce their growth expectations.”

“Contrasted” is a delicate way of putting it. The Mail was calling it “budget lie chaos”. The Telegraph was calling it “black hole lies”.

Either way, this much will cut through: she invoked talk of crisis to justify the tax rises beforehand. Now, with the spending side of the ledger revealed - with a third of the new money raised going on welfare - the story changes.

What you make of the policy depends on your politics. What people make of the political tactics may cross party lines.

🗣️Trump’s plan for peace in Ukraine is really a business plan. Or, as The Wall Street Journal puts it atop a staggering piece of reporting, “Make Money Not War”.

That may not be a huge surprise to those of us who have listened to what Trump has been saying, both about Ukraine but also about Gaza (remember the Gaza Riviera plan?) But seeing it set out like this, with “billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff” cutting a deal with Russia, is quite something.

A core revelation: Witkoff, and Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, have other plans for the $300 billion of Russian assets frozen in European bank accounts, which European leaders have been talking about using to arm or rebuild Ukraine. Witkoff sees it being used “for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine.”

The piece is also full of little details: for instance: “On Aug. 6, Witkoff flew to Moscow, at Putin’s invitation, for a meeting prepared only a few days in advance. […] He gave Witkoff a medal, the Order of Lenin, to pass to a CIA deputy director whose mentally unwell son was killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.” (WSJ - 🎁 gift link)

🗣️ Laziness starts in the brain. A fascinating piece suggests that people aren’t just inherently lazy. It tells of a man who went from high-flyer to effective layabout, until it was discovered he’d had two tiny strokes, impacting the part of the brain that registers reward for carrying out tasks. (He’s much better now). (Guardian)

🗣️ BBC Sports presenter Kenny Macintyre has prostate cancer. Speaking to Radio Scotland’s Off The Ball, he urged men to get PSA tests regularly.

Just a shame then that, last week, the National Screening Committee advised against universal blood testing on the NHS for men over 45, on the basis that - somehow - it could cause more harm than good. (See the clip from Off The Ball)

🗣️ There was much remembrance of playwright Tom Stoppard, who died. The Observer asked his biographer Hermione Lee for something: it’s a fine read about someone who, says Lee, “really was, and is, universally loved and admired”. Few biographers say that of their subjects. (The Observer)

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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