Chancellor axes two-child benefit cap and cuts energy bills paid for by mansion tax and freezing tax thresholds Analysis: ‘Tax-raising budget crash-lands on struggling economy’ Budget 2025: key points at a glance Budget 2025: what it means for you Rachel Reeves targeted Britain’s wealthiest households with a £26bn tax-raising budget, to fund scrapping the two-child benefit policy and cutting energy bills. On a chaotic day that involved key details of her budget accidentally released early by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the chancellor defended the measures, saying she was “asking everyone to make a contribution to repair the public finances”, but that she wanted the wealthiest to pay the most. Continue reading...

Reform UK leader has again denied allegations about his behaviour as a schoolboy but what are the facts? Nigel Farage has again denied the allegations of racism as a schoolboy and repeated his claim that some had been concocted because people disliked his politics. During a press conference, he snapped at one reporter who asked about the issue, saying: “I think we’ve gone quite a long way towards answering all this, don’t you?” Continue reading...

Conditions of two soldiers isn’t immediately known after incident, and emergency vehicles were seen responding in the area US politics live – latest updates Two US national guard soldiers were shot on Wednesday near the White House and their conditions aren’t immediately known, according to a law enforcement official not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. The incident happened near the Farragut metro station and comes amid a controversial deployment of troops to the US capital city ordered by the Trump administration. Continue reading...

By the time the chancellor reached the dispatch box, the OBR had accidentally published its verdict in full online At a glance: the key points from the budget Shortly before midday on Wednesday, a series of headlines about Rachel Reeves’s budget began appearing on the Reuters newswire, sending instant ripples though financial markets. The details were jaw-dropping: they appeared to spell out the key policies of the chancellor’s budget more than 40 minutes before she was due to deliver them to a crowded Commons chamber. Continue reading...

Rachel Reeves’s interventions will ease the cost of living and suggest a desire to revive growth and protect public services Rachel Reeves’s budget contains many measures to make any social democrat cheer. Scrapping the two‑child benefit cap, putting up gambling taxes, freezing rail fares and implementing a mansion tax are not just sensible moves – they are long overdue. As is a “managed transition” for the North Sea that supports workers while pivoting to clean energy, without abruptly ditching oil and gas. The country will be a better, fairer place for these measures. They should also assuage backbench anger over self-inflicted damage by the chancellor’s proposed welfare cuts and secure Ms Reeves’s position – for now. The dilemma at the heart of Ms Reeves’s fiscal strategy is that while individual policies may be progressive, the economic framework they sit inside is not. This is exposed by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Behind the signature policies lies a deeply conservative macro strategy. The budget will see £26bn in tax rises borne heavily by workers, falling investment, stagnant growth, flat wages and a fiscal debt rule met on a coin toss. The OBR warns that under Ms Reeves’s spending plans, unprotected services – councils, courts and police – will face Osborne-style cuts of 3.3% a year from 2029 to 2031 unless the Treasury finds £21bn extra. Her fiscal rule makes those cuts inevitable. Continue reading...

Although some appointees make valuable contributions, the absurd archaism of the second chamber of parliament has to be addressed Not much about the House of Lords is defensible on principles of democratic representation. One plausible merit of an appointed chamber is that specialists might be recruited to apply non-political expertise in legislative scrutiny. Appointees are certainly not supposed to use their privileged position to advance the interests of paying clients. After a Guardian investigation, two peers were disciplined this week for breaking lobbying rules. Lord Dannatt, a former head of the British army who served as a crossbencher, and Lord Evans of Watford, a businessman and Labour peer, have been suspended for four and five months respectively. Both men were recorded by undercover Guardian reporters posing as property developers, discussing ways in which their Westminster contacts might be useful to advance potential clients’ access. Continue reading...

Maintaining existing drilling sites for longer is sensible but doesn’t square with plans to keep the energy profits levy Labour’s manifesto commitment on North Sea oil and gas production was a fudge. On one hand, it said no new licences “to explore new fields” would be granted. On the other, it said existing fields would be managed “for the entirety of their lifespan” in a way “that does not jeopardise jobs”. The formulation raised many questions. Where, exactly, would the line be drawn between a new field and an existing field? What would be the approach to protecting workers when, as now, North Sea jobs are estimated to be going at a rate of 1,000 a month according to analysis by Robert Gordon University? Continue reading...

Black Friday isn’t all about pricey electronics. Here are all our favourite 2025 deals under £50 • How to shop smart this Black Friday • The best Black Friday deals on the products we love Garmin watches and iPhones whose prices fall from insanely unaffordable to merely very expensive may be the headline-grabbers of Black Friday, but they’re not exactly cheap. In a cost-of-living crisis, the true bargains of the sales season are those useful and joy-giving items discounted to genuinely affordable prices. Here we’ve assembled the best sub-£50 bargains we’ve found so far, with prices falling even further as you scroll down the page. These deals span the Christmas gifting gamut from premium vodka to Sealskinz socks, plus the Filter’s top-rated household items and tech – all now for less than the price of a takeaway. Continue reading...

A record 39,000 birds are overwintering on Wallasea island wetlands thanks to soil transported from London tunnels Almost 40,000 birds have made their home on a nature reserve created using soil from tunnel excavations for the Elizabeth line. Three million tonnes of earth were transported from London to Wallasea island in Essex and used to lift the ground level and make wetlands. Continue reading...

Reeves told MPs she had stuck to her pledges. Responding, Kemi Badenoch said the opposite. Who is right? Budget 2025: key points at a glance Rachel Reeves told MPs in the Commons on Wednesday: “I have cut the cost of living – with money off bills and prices frozen – all while keeping every single one of our manifesto commitments.” The claim was a bold one, given that the chancellor had promised not to raise national insurance, VAT or income tax, and has arguably raised two of them. Continue reading...

Fashion designer and ‘100% party girl’ who was part of the 1980s London club scene and designed for Rihanna, Björk and Kylie Minogue Pam Hogg, the fashion designer who brought a club kid look to the catwalk in the 1980s, has died. Hogg was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, and began making her clothes at the age of six. First studying painting and printed textiles at the Glasgow School of Art, she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. It was here, as part of the club scene, that she began designing proper: initially making notice-me outfits to guarantee her entry into Steve Strange’s Blitz club, and then moving to the catwalk in 1981. By 1989, i-D magazine called her “the most consistently inventive British fashion designer (alongside Vivienne Westwood)”. Hogg, it wrote, “has been described as ‘100% party girl’ and has designed the clothes to match”. Other party girls wore her clothes: Paula Yates, Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux. Continue reading...

Only 20% of tax rises will go towards making people better off. The vast majority will be spent meeting Labour’s fiscal rules and paying for U-turns Imagine it: you are the chancellor of a government in mortal peril. Poll ratings are down the U-bend; backbenchers are mutinous and colleagues are circling around the prime minister, readying themselves to land the fatal blow. You have a budget, which may be your last chance to avert the inevitable. What do you do? If you’re Rachel Reeves, you use it to buy time. Time for Keir Starmer and you to carry on in office for a while longer, so perhaps your luck will change. Extra time for this unfortunate, empty, placeholder of a PM costs more than olive oil, but the chancellor still splashed out. This afternoon, she delivered a budget that was a £26bn attempt to buy her government some time. Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

How Rachel Reeves’s measures on tax, NI and benefits affect single people, couples, families and those receiving pensions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland Luke can’t get a graduate role and works 35 hours a week in a cafe. He is paid the national living wage (NLW) of £12.21 for workers aged 21 and over. He pays £1,930 in income tax and £772 in national insurance (NI) contributions. This results in a monthly take-home pay of £1,627 after tax, or £19,520 a year. On 1 April 2026 the NLW rate will increase 50p – 4.1% – to £12.71 an hour. His annual income tax bill will rise to £2,112 and NI to £845, leaving him with £1,681 a month, an increase of £54. Continue reading...

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⚽ Champions League updates from the 8pm GMT kick-off ⚽ Live scoreboard | Latest table | And you can mail Michael Speaking of Eze v Olise, who can forget the famous table tennis and chess matches (both won by Olise) of 2023?! At 4/1 and 5/1 respectively, Arsenal and Bayern Munich are the favourites to win this season’s Champions League outright, and it’s not really a surprise. Both are top of their domestic leagues by six points. Both retain a 100% record in Europe going into this match – come the end of it, that obviously won’t be the case. Continue reading...

⚽ Goals, updates and news from the 8pm GMT kick-offs ⚽ Live scoreboard | Latest table | And you can email Scott Good evening and welcome to another evening of living high on the Champions League hog. We have nine games for you, all of which kick off at 8pm GMT unless stated. We’ll concentrate on the bleeding obvious but keep an eye on the cognoscenti’s choice as well. It’s on! Arsenal v Bayern Munich Atletico Madrid v Internazionale Copenhagen v Kairat (5.45pm) Eintracht Frankfurt v Atalanta Liverpool v PSV Olympiacos v Real Madrid Pafos v Monaco (5.45pm) PSG v Tottenham Hotspur Sporting v Club Brugge Continue reading...

The chancellor tried a different approach to this budget, revealing her plans and causing chaos before she delivered it Just maybe Rachel Reeves had a cunning plan all along. Most budgets have a tendency to be moderately well received on the day, only to fall apart when the economist wonks have had a chance to go through the small print 24 hours later. Rachel has tried a rather different approach. The budget of dialectics. Her mission has been to get her budget to fall apart in the weeks and months before she delivered it. Own goal after own goal. It was a thing of Hegelian beauty. All in the hope that everything would be all right on the day and in the weeks after. She is keeping her fingers firmly crossed. Desperate measures for desperate times. You certainly can’t fault Reeves for effort. A pre-budget shambles on this scale doesn’t happen of its own accord. It takes a lot of hard work to create this much chaos. Imagine going to the trouble of calling an early morning press conference to signal you were planning to increase income tax by 2p, only to decide against it the following week. You’ve shown you can’t be entirely trusted to keep your word while getting none of the fiscal benefits. A headless chicken is more sentient than that. Continue reading...

After initial chaos caused by OBR leak, London financial traders say markets do not appear to have been upset Budget 2025 – live updates Budget 2025: key points at a glance As financial traders milled around 26 floors up in a tower in the Canary Wharf district of London, there was little sign of nerves ahead of Rachel Reeves’s second budget – until the surprise accidental early release of the government’s official economic analysis started to move markets. Headline numbers from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) flashed through on banks of computer screens, followed shortly by the detailed analysis itself. Continue reading...

In a Truth Social post, the president lashed out at journalist Katie Rogers after a Times article questioned whether he was slowing down Donald Trump lashed out on Wednesday against a New York Times reporter, calling her “ugly inside and out” in his latest personal insult against female members of the media after last week calling another “piggy”. In a Truth Social post, Trump criticitized the newspaper for an article suggesting he was running low on energy in his 80th year, insisting he has “never worked so hard in my life”. Continue reading...

Mark Damazer said the resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness were due to a ‘toxic mix’ of factors A “toxic mix” of over-assertive BBC board members and executives feeling under siege contributed to the resignations of its two most senior editorial leaders, an influential former BBC figure has warned. A bitter row is still raging over the events that led up to the resignations of director general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News. Continue reading...

Co-founder’s lawyer says group is part of an ‘honourable tradition’ of direct action and civil disobedience The proscription of Palestine Action is a repugnant, unprecedented and disproportionate interference with the right to protest, the high court has heard. On the first day of a legal challenge to the ban brought by co-founder Huda Ammori, her lawyer said the group had been engaged in an “honourable tradition” of direct action and civil disobedience prior to proscription. Continue reading...

Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, who had mental health problems, absconded from a ward and killed herself shortly afterwards A girl who killed herself when she absconded from 24-hour clinical supervision was failed by a system that was meant to protect her, her parents have said, after the NHS trust involved was fined over the avoidable death. Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, who suffered with severe mental health problems, died on 20 March 2022, minutes after leaving the Bluefin acute children’s ward in Worthing hospital, part of University hospitals Sussex NHS trust (UHSussex). Continue reading...

Many of the 30 people taking part in the protest are scheduled to be forcibly returned to France on Thursday Thirty asylum seekers currently in detention in the UK have gone on hunger strike in protest against their imminent removal to France under the Home Office’s controversial “one in, one out” scheme. The Guardian understands that the group began their hunger strike on Monday and many are due to be forcibly removed to France on Thursday. Continue reading...

Versatile actor, director and playwright who found television fame in the detective series Wycliffe The actor Jack Shepherd, who has died aged 85, was, in his own quiet and modest way, a Renaissance man who not only acted beautifully on stage and screen for 60 years, but also wrote a dozen plays, directed at Shakespeare’s Globe, painted in oils, played jazz piano and saxophone, and loved singing. His innumerable credits are testament to a pathological creative energy, and he was drawn most energetically of all to the contemporary writing of Trevor Griffiths and the National Theatre company of the director Bill Bryden in the Peter Hall era of the 1970s. Continue reading...

Tuilagi free to switch allegiances for 2027 World Cup Marchant available for England after signing for Sale Manu Tuilagi has refused to rule out playing for Samoa at the 2027 Rugby World Cup, leaving open the possibility of him facing Steve Borthwick’s England in Australia. The 34-year-old, who spearheaded the Red Rose midfield for more than a decade, would qualify for the Pacific Island nation in 2027 under eligibility rules introduced four years ago. Continue reading...