Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is unveiling her sweeping asylum reforms this afternoon. The changes will include UK visa bans for countries such as Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo if their governments don’t start taking back illegal migrants; making refugee status temporary, with regular reviews to see if the applicant’s home country is safe for them to be returned; and allowing rejected asylum seekers only one appeal in the courts. Donald Trump has urged Republicans in Congress to vote for the release of the so-called Epstein files, in a sharp reversal of his previous position. Posting on social media ahead of tomorrow’s planned vote in the House, the US president said he had “nothing to hide”. A re-run of a landmark study which found that men have an unfair advantage in scientific careers has found the opposite is now true. In 2012, when science professors were sent identical CVs from either “John” or “Jennifer”, “John” was routinely deemed more hireable; in the new research, “Jennifer” came out on top.

Changing leader won’t help Labour

It’s easy to make the case for deposing Keir Starmer, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. He’s “a victim of his own bungling”, and Wes Streeting, the favourite to succeed him, “radiates the qualities” the PM lacks. But unlike the Tories, “for whom regicide is a form of relaxation”, Labour has always been reluctant to depose a bad leader. Besides, a change in leadership seldom works. Anyone installed after a “putsch” lacks the authority provided by an election win: cabinet rifts are harder to control; backbenchers harder to tame. And whoever’s in charge would face the same problem that has ensnared Starmer: “a structural inability to govern”.

Part of the issue is that the state has “grown out of all proportion to its usefulness” – the UK government spends twice what it did when Tony Blair entered No 10. But the bigger problem is the inability to change the system. Governments used to be held back by trade unions; “now, it’s lawyers”. The mountain of regulations and laws that need adhering to means pretty much any state project can be halted or delayed by activists seeking judicial reviews. This clogs everything up, from increasing our energy capacity to building more houses. Starmer thought the government’s “sclerosis” was down to Tory incompetence but he has instead discovered that “the system genuinely doesn’t work”. As long as that remains the case, it won’t matter who’s in charge. “Starmer or Streeting; Labour or Tory.” They’ll make as little progress as Reform UK has managed at the local authorities under its control. Unless Labour can find a way to reclaim power from the regulators and the courts, “no reshuffle or reboot or replacement will be able to save it”.