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In your briefing today:

• It’s being touted as “Trump’s worst nightmare”: socialist Zohran Mamdani has won the mayoral race in New York

• Rachel Reeves’ budget warn speech draws harsh reviews, even from friendly commentators.

• A wonder goal in the Champions League, and a damning verdict on a big-money flop

📣 Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has taken New York. It’s a huge win for the Democrats in the city’s mayoral race, and will open a fascinating new chapter in US politics, with a man described as a “communist” by Donald Trump taking power in January.

Mamdani, 34, will be New York City’s first Muslim mayor. He won by offering policies focussed on the cost of living, sold through deft use of social media and a lot of face-to-face campaigning. It was a stark contrast with the staid and crime-focussed campaigns of his rivals.

• “Trump’s worst nightmare” - Sky News live coverage | BBC | Guardian

• How Zohran Mamdani beat New York’s elite (🎁 New York Times - gift link)

• Wall Street couldn’t stop Mamdani. Now it has to work with him. (🎁 WSJ - gift link)

• Tuesday’s races were a quiet rebuke for Trump, poll finds (AP)

• Democrats start their comeback - “a warning for the GOP on affordability and Trump’s unpopularity” (🎁 WSJ editorial board - gift link)

• Adam Gabbatt: Mamdani faces a daunting task: making New York affordable (Guardian)

📣 At least seven people have died in a plane crash at Louisville, as a UPS cargo plane bound for Hawaii crashed. Video showed the plane taking off with an apparent fire around one of its engines, before it crashed and erupted into a huge fireball.

The pilot and crew are among those dead: there are concerns that there may be further victims in buildings around where the plane went down. (Mirror - live coverage) (BBC)

• What to know about the deadly crash (AP)

📣 Scotland’s emergency services are braced for disorder tonight as Bonfire Night is celebrated. There are firework control zones active in Edinburgh and Glasgow in an attempt to avoid the disorder of previous years, with police expected to enforce “dispersal zones” to avoid crowds forming. Officers have already seized more than a tonne of fireworks. (BBC) (STV)

• While some major firework and bonfire events have been cancelled, there are still many running across the country. The Daily Record has a guide.

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 There’s further coverage of yesterday’s story that tax hikes by Rachel Reeves could lead to spending cuts - or tax rises - in Scotland too, even though income tax is devolved to Holyrood. (Mail) (Scotsman)

• Kenny Farquharson: What if John Swinney refused to raise Scotland’s taxes? (Times £) (tl;dr: he'd take a politically useful, but fiscally difficult, £1 billion hit)

📣 The Scottish Government says “unanswered questions” remain after meeting UK ministers to discuss plans to house asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks in the Highlands. (Scotsman)

• The plan presents Highland Council with “new and complex challenges” (BBC)

📣 The West Coast Main Line has reopened after Monday’s derailment near Shap. (BBC)

📣 Serial sex attacker Nicholas Rossi, the fugitive who faked his own death and fled to Scotland, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping another woman in Utah. (Daily Record)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Fixing Britain’s worklessness crisis will cost employers £6 billion a year in additional occupational health support from staff, tackling a rising tide of ill-health that’s pushing people out of work. (Guardian)

📣 The US Government shutdown has become the longest on record. (AP)

📣 Russian and Ukrainian troops have been fighting running battles in the ruins of Pokrovsk, a transport and logistics hub in Eastern Ukraine. (Reuters)

📣 David Beckham got his knighthood yesterday: it took 25 trophies, 115 England caps, five international tournaments and countless goals to win the gong he has long coveted. (Mail)

SPORT

⚽️ The Champions League match between Liverpool and Real Madrid produced all the technical excellence, high tempo and Anfield passion you could hope for. Liverpool won 1-0 with an excellent Alexis Mac Allister goal: it needed to be a fine header to beat Thibaut Courtois in the Madrid goal, who’d been in outstanding form. (BBC) (Guardian) (🎥 See highlights)

• Micky van de Ven scored an absurd solo goal as Spurs eased to a win over FC Copenhagen. (🎥 See the goal)

• Arsenal managed a straightforward 3-0 win over Slavia Prague. (🎥 See highlights)

• Bayern held on with 10 men to beat PSG 2-1 in Paris. Luis Diaz scored a double for Bayern - but also saw red. (🎥 See highlights)

⚽️ Rangers legend Gordon Smith says he wouldn’t have signed £8m flat Youssef Chermiti, even on a free transfer. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Celtic are scrambling to add Callum Osmond to their Europa League squad ahead of their game against Midtjylland, after his goal against Rangers on Sunday. (Sun)

⚽️ Marko Lazetic says he’s determined to repay Aberdeen fans’ support with a much-needed Europa Conference win tomorrow, against AEK Larnaca. (Daily Record)

IDEAS
Harsh words: Reeves under fire, even from the left, over her warning on her tax-raising Budget

🗣️ You would expect the right-leaning press to have a field day with Rachel Reeves’ unusual late breakfast-time speech to the nation yesterday, delivered from Downing Street by the Chancellor. And they did - we’ll come to that a little later.

But you’ll wince reading even the left-leaning titles’ commentary. It’s all the worse for being slightly less expected, notionally coming from a place of political love.

John Rentoul in the Independent - biographer of Tony Blair, ex New Statesman, has written a book on inequality in the 1980s - is quietly, methodically, coruscating in the Independent (£). Reeves’ speech “combined an admirable clarity about the problems facing her with a wilful refusal to accept responsibility for the position she finds herself in.”

She took half of the right advice, he writes: faced with difficult decisions, she is doing what’s right for the country, and explaining herself.

“But instead of accepting that she had been reckless in last year’s Budget – leaving no margin for error in the face of foreseeable problems – she tried to blame others.

“The second half of the speech was a torturously delivered assembly of slogans: dealing with the world as we find it, not as we would want it to be; real progress takes time; country before party; doing not what is popular, but what is right.

“The chancellor said she was not going to “choose the road to ruin” that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng chose. Instead, she was going to choose a different road – to a different, and slower, ruin.”

If Rentoul was damning, he was only the warm-up act for Marina Hyde in the Guardian, who turned her deadly wit up to full power - and aimed it directly at a weary-looking Chancellor. “This would actually have been quite an understandable day for Rachel Reeves to cry at work,” writes Hyde.

“‘I’m really clear,’ the chancellor told the CBI less than a year ago, ‘I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes.’ Can I shock you …?”

Continues Hyde: “Reeves’s delivery is more wooden than the panelling behind her today, and has all the verve of being informed that we’re experiencing higher than normal call volumes. Your estimated wait time to the budget is 22 days. There were moments in this outing where it felt like the chancellor’s job had already been automated. She must have been absolutely unplayable on the complaints line at HBOS.”

And then you come to the actual right-leaning press. The Mail goes in as hard as you’d expect, warning of a £60 billion “bombshell income tax increase”, a “fiscal doom loop” fear and her own “Liz Truss moment” - a bond market sell-off reminiscent of the aftermath of the former PM’s budget of 2022.

The Telegraph warns of “the beginning of the end for both Reeves and Starmer’s government” as trust is lost: “Lose it and you are doomed,” says Philip Johnston (£). “The Government had already squandered the little it had accumulated. Rachel Reeves has just jettisoned anything that was left.”

Even the Morning Star doesn’t think raising income tax is a good idea: “This would break an election pledge, but that is nothing new for the serially dishonest Starmer.

“More seriously, it would double down on the Prime Minister’s peculiar genius for landing on policies that both depress living standards and do so in a way that benefits the right […] This is politically suicidal, and it is the consequence of Labour’s refusal to act in the working-class interest.”

This is, remember, just the “rolling of the turf”: the prelude to what could be a very hard budget indeed. When even the friendly fire is this deadly ahead of the event, it’s clear there’s little love left for this government. Don’t bet on it surviving long.

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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