In your briefing today:

📣 The UK Government is to adopt a tougher stance on Israel, imposing a trade ban on illegal settlements and adopting a more active approach in supporting the Palestinian cause. The move comes after Israel announced controversial plans to build 1,200 homes in the occupied West Bank.

Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, is expected to outline the new restrictions in the House of Commons later today. The move, which is likely to draw fierce criticism from the US and Israel, comes after Miliband promised a “comprehensive reset” of the UK government’s policy on Israel.

It will be seen as a move beyond Britain’s long-standing support for a two-state solution in the Middle East towards an active opposition to illegal settlements in the West Bank. (BBC)

📣 There are claims that asylum seeker “disinformation” led to a block of flats in Glasgow, which was undergoing renovation before being offered as affordable homes, being targeted by anti-immigration protestors. (BBC)

📣 Police are searching for two women and a man after a fatal car crash on the A8 near Edinburgh Airport yesterday.

The smash took place around 9.25am yesterday and closed the road for much of the day, causing long delays for people trying to reach Scotland’s busiest airport. It’s now open once more.

It only emerged later that a driver in one of the four cars involved had died - and that a police helicopter and dog unit was hunting the three people who had left the scene. (BBC)

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📣 ScotRail’s new ticket app continues to frustrate users - and prompted more than 360 formal complaints in just two days after launch. (Mail)

📣 The UK government will invest £30 million in SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland as part of a new national space strategy. (BBC)

📣 A driver appeared to mistake a footbridge for a road in Glasgow. The car was forced to turn back in a “15-point turn”, according to onlookers. (STV)

📣 Police Scotland has been hit by a “send to all” blunder by the Chief Inspector which ended up shutting down its email system. (Sun has the exclusive)

📣 Police are looking to identify protestors after several officers were injured, and vehicles damaged, in anti-migrant protests in Portsmouth. (BBC)

📣 Two people have been killed in an overnight missile attack on Kyiv. (Independent)

📣 European security forces are warning of “nihilistic violent extremism” - violence for the sake of violence - that raises a new terrorism threat across the continent. (AP)

📣 King Charles has made clear in a letter that Prince Harry and Meghan will remain private citizens despite their move back to the UK. (Mirror)

⚽️ The Champions League returns to our TV screens tonight. No Scottish clubs are involved, alas, but there are still some mouthwatering clashes. The BBC runs the rule over the sides in this year’s competition to find the favourites, and the players to watch. (BBC)

Of tonight’s games, the Early Line’s picks are…

⚽️ Former Newcastle star Philippe Albert reckons compatriot Nico Raskin is “wasting his time” at Rangers (Daily Record)

⚽️ Jota could make a Celtic return ahead of schedule… (Sun)

⚽️ … But Rangers’ Lawrence Shankland may not kick a competitive ball again this year. (Daily Record)

🗣️ In the end, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came through the middle.

As Jim Tankersley explains in the New York Times this morning, for nearly eight decades Germany’s political establishment has tried to freeze the fascists out: refuse to work with the extreme hard-right by maintaining a “firewall” between it and the rest.

On Sunday, voters poked a hole in that firewall in what Tankersley calls “a fundamental disagreement […] about what constitutes a risk to democracy. Voters were asked by pollsters on Sunday if they considered the AfD a danger to democracy, as Germany’s mainstream parties do. About half saw the AfD as a threat, according to exit polling released by a public television network. They voted almost exclusively for its rivals, from the far left to the centre right.

“The other half of voters said there was no threat. Nearly all backed the AfD.”

And the AfD marched to power.

To be sure, the AfD’s ascent is not to an especially lofty height: they’ve won in a small state of 2.1 million people in the country’s east. But a win is a win, and it is being taken seriously as a sign that voters in Germany - as elsewhere in Europe - have become weary of mainstream politics, and sceptical that it can do anything about their problems.

Jörg Lau of the German weekly Die Zeit writes in the Guardian that this is “a political earthquake with consequences far beyond a little state in the centre of Germany.”

First, it’s not clear how long Friedrich Merz can hold his coalition together and remain Chancellor. He’s not a popular man. But what really shakes Lau is the loss of that “never again” anti-fascist consensus, “established over decades in many heated debates on the Holocaust and the crimes of the Wehrmacht.”

And if that swing to the fascist far-right can happen in Germany, despite all its history, then could it happen anywhere - including here?

In the Telegraph, Tom Harris offers a domestic focus by pulling together “separate but related” threads. First, there were last weekend’s organised protests by masked men at Portsmouth, angry at the latest arrivals of small boats. Second, revelations by a whistleblower that just 1% of asylum claims in the UK are genuine. Third, the AfD’s win.

“That public tolerance of mass immigration across Europe is running out is hardly disputed. The problem has been in the political establishment’s response,” he writes.

“Weirdly, for a group of people whose very status depends on their own popularity, they have managed, by one contrivance after another, to avoid doing the one thing that might attract voters’ support: a major clampdown on net legal immigration to reduce it to tens of thousands per year, and a massive national effort to remove those living here illegally, whether to their home countries or to a third country.”

In the UK, net migration is already collapsing: from a high of 944,000 people (including British citizens) in the year to March 2023 to 171,000 in 2025. The pattern here is less pronounced than in Germany, which saw a spike of 981,552 in 2022 that fell to -334,072 - that is, the population shrank - last year.

But that won’t stop the leaders of far-right protests in the UK - we’ve seen plenty in Glasgow, before the ones on the south coast that caught the attention of the London media - from doing their thing.

Yesterday, in the Daily Record, we ran profiles of the men - they’re all men - who are leading the far-right in Scotland. Today, the Daily Mail adds its own work on “Danny Tommo” - Daniel Thomas, the privately educated convicted kidnapper it places at the head of an army of protestors.

Joe Mulhall in the Guardian notes “Tommo” is leading a new type of threat: a “more clandestine and confrontational threat” that unites a web of smaller, localised anti-migrant groups into a single body.

Could this rabble of protests grow into a vote-winning political movement?

Reform UK still has to decide the extent to which it offers its support to the protestors, who would threaten its attempt to woo the more centre-right votes it needs to win a general election. Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain is even further to the right, and could yet be the political vehicle to carry these protests into political power - although it has a very long way to travel.

But, even if protest remains led from the streets by convicted criminals, it’s clear the UK is also having to confront the rise of the far-right in its own politics in a way it hasn’t faced in a long time. The question the Mail poses today is a pertinent one: “Is 'Danny Tommo' merely another rabble-rouser – or the figurehead of a new, and increasingly organised, form of anti-migrant street politics?”

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