Keir Starmer will tell the Labour conference today that Britain is at a “fork in the road” between decency and division, in a speech aimed squarely at Reform UK, says Politico. Alluding to migration and welfare, the PM will say that to beat Nigel Farage Labour must make decisions that “will not be comfortable for our party”. Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel supports Donald Trump’s new plan to end the war in Gaza. The 20-point deal, which the US president says will achieve “eternal peace in the Middle East”, includes an immediate end to fighting and the exchange of all remaining Israeli hostages for 2,000 Palestinian detainees within 72 hours of the agreement’s acceptance. A Chinese fraudster known as the BitQueen has admitted to laundering cryptocurrency worth more than £5bn in one of the largest seizures of criminal assets in UK history. The British and Chinese governments are now negotiating over who gets to keep the fortune, which has increased 20-fold since Scotland Yard seized it in 2018.

Call me crazy, but I’m joining the Tories

Call me mad, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, but last week “I joined the Conservative Party”. I now believe – no, seriously – that the Tory party matters more than ever before. Those complaining British politics has lurched to the right have it backwards. The past decade and a half has been an “experiment in socialism that would make Michael Foot blush”. David Cameron added to the public debt every year while presiding over mass immigration that turned into “open borders” under Boris Johnson. Johnson jacked up spending even more, rocketing debt towards 100% of GDP. Rishi Sunak’s Covid furlough scheme was necessary but excessive, and Liz Truss continued the spending spree with a £100bn energy bailout. “Had she been waving a little red book, it would have been called Marxism.”

The state is now bloated to an almost unprecedented degree. Taxes are the highest since the 1940s; government spending at the highest sustained level since the 1950s; regulation and compliance costs have spiralled; and our tax code has ballooned under successive meddlesome chancellors to a ludicrous 20,000 pages, “the longest in the world”. I wish I could believe in Labour – who I stood for in 2001 – but they’re only making things worse. And Nigel Farage isn’t going to help. Far from being a “right-wing” party, Reform UK represents “socialism on steroids” – their policies are miles to the left of Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto, including: nationalising big chunks of the economy, removing the two-child benefit cap and other “giveaways of stunning profligacy”. Kemi Badenoch is the only leader who seems to glimpse the truth. She wants to simplify the tax code, slim the welfare state and cut debt. And remember: four years is plenty of time for Reform to implode and Labour to descend into civil war. Playing the long game, I’m betting on the Tories.