Rachel Reeves is facing accusations that she misled the cabinet and the public about the state of the public finances ahead of last week’s Budget. The chancellor was told by the Office for Budget Responsibility on 31 October that she was on course to adhere to her fiscal rule of balancing the current budget in 2029-30, with a £4.2bn surplus, but went on selling tax rises on the basis that she needed a bigger fiscal buffer. Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new left-wing party, temporarily named Your Party, has voted to call itself… Your Party. At its “hugely chaotic, confusing but unforgettable conference”, says Politico, party members also voted for a “collective leadership” model, meaning there’ll be no explosive race between Corbyn and Sultana. The average cost of raising a child has hit £249,000, up £46,000 since 2022. The most expensive period is between 15 and 18 years old, largely thanks to spending on skincare and beauty which has reached a whopping £1,182 a year for kids in this age group – double what it was in 2023.

Rachel Reeves’s “economic suicide note”

The first meeting of the joint No 10 and Treasury “Budget board” took place in late September, says Rachel Sylvester in The Observer. Minouche Shafik, the prime minister’s newly appointed chief economic adviser, asked Treasury minister Torsten Bell to set the scene – whereupon Bell embarked on a furious, foul-mouthed tirade about the economic and political challenges. Says one source: “It was ‘f*** this, f*** that, we’ve got to f*** them all and then we’ve got to f*** them some more’.” Shafik, the well-spoken former deputy governor of the Bank of England, was “completely shocked”. And that meeting set the tone for the “fractious, fraught and frenetic” two months that followed.

It goes without saying that last week’s Budget was about politics not economics. Or, as one Blair-era cabinet minister put it: “it was a budget for the few – Keir and Rachel – not the many”. Shafik suggested several big-picture policies, such as rejoining the EU customs union and enacting “sweeping changes” to property taxes. They were “quickly knocked back”. The problem, explains one Whitehall source, is “envy”: lots of bright and capable people working in the Treasury see what their contemporaries earn in the private sector and resent it. When the Tories were in power they pushed back against the department’s “hostility to wealth”, but Labour’s “ideologues” can’t get enough of it. Hence a Budget that raises taxes to fund additional welfare spending. Backbenchers loved this, of course. But as one Labour grandee says, they’ll quickly change their tune when they return to their constituencies and hear how voters feel about it. That’s the irony of all this: a Budget designed almost solely to strengthen the PM’s position may end up doing the exact opposite.

🤖📈 The Budget may look like a “kind of economic suicide note”, says Fraser Nelson in The Times, with massive tax rises coming in just before the next general election. The chancellor’s big hope is artificial intelligence. If Silicon Valley’s rosy predictions come true and productivity surges, there could be enough extra tax revenue to cancel the tax hikes. This isn’t out of the question at all – the Trump administration is basically making the same bet. But no one really knows how revolutionary AI will be. So the government’s strategy essentially amounts to a “coin flip”.

Mick Jagger pioneered streaming sport online, says Nick Miller in The Athletic. “Specifically, cricket.” When the Rolling Stones front man discovered that nobody was planning to air the 1997 Akai-Singer Champions trophy – a relatively minor one-day tournament held in the UAE, featuring England, Pakistan, India and West Indies – he did the only logical thing: “formed a company and broadcast it himself”. He bought the rights for peanuts, hired a team of “bleeding-edge” techies to do the coding and persuaded the cricket website Cricinfo to host the stream. It was a hit: traffic during the India-Pakistan game was so vast it “took down the server”.

Do juries belong in the past?

In 2020, says James Price in The Critic, a wise and noble scholar of jurisprudence wrote: “Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.” That was the “sage of Tottenham” David Lammy, who last week decided to ignore his own advice and propose abolishing jury trials in England and Wales for all but the most heinous crimes. This “wicked and irrational” idea upends a fundamental right that has guarded the liberty of Englishmen for more than a thousand years – it was introduced under Æthelred the Unready in 997 and codified in magna carta. It’s no coincidence that every “mad, bad and evil regime” ditches the practice to consolidate power: the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Chinese Communist Party, Cuba under Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. That’s not a list we should join.

On the contrary, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, juries are an “archaic and inefficient” feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system and Lammy is right to bin them. Britain has a backlog of almost 80,000 cases, some postponed to 2029. A fifth of our 100,000-strong prison population is awaiting trial. “This is a parody of justice.” Most European countries shun juries in favour of judges and examining magistrates. Trials are not theatrical rituals in which “extreme guilt” is argued against “extreme innocence”. They are short, serious discussions establishing contested facts. And the difference in outcomes is astonishing: in England and Wales, we imprison 145 citizens for every 100,000. Jury-free Germany imprisons 71, while Holland locks up just 54 (the jury-loving US imprisons 541). The British are not three times as criminal as the Dutch. The people fighting hardest to keep juries are barristers, for obvious reasons. We can’t let this “professional freemasonry” stand in the way of reform.

To mark 70 years of the World Press Photography competition, The Guardian has compiled a selection of some of the best winners, including the American writer James Baldwin during a book signing session in Hamburg in 1966; the USS Constellation caught between New York’s Twin Towers in 1976; a teacher walking home with a gun after her car broke down in 1978 Rhodesia; divers at the World Swimming Championships in Shanghai in 2011; and African migrants on the Djibouti City coast trying to catch cheap signal from neighbouring Somalia in 2013. Click here to see more.

The “Horsey Horseless” was an early automobile invented in 1899 to avoid frightening skittish horses on the road, says Messy Nessy. The vehicle essentially comprised a hollow wooden horse head – which also served as the fuel tank – stuck to the front of a normal carriage. It’s unclear whether the equine engine was ever built, but it made Time Magazine’s 2007 list of the “50 Worst Cars of All Time”.

It’s a jellyfish that never dies, says Moss & Fog, at least not from natural causes. The turritopsis dohrnii begins life like any other jellyfish, “drifting and pulsing through the sea”. But when it faces stress, or the natural decline of ageing, it performs a “biological magic trick” – reverting its cells and transforming back to its youthful “polyp” stage. Boffins call this shapeshifting “cellular transdifferentiation”, a process that essentially allows the animal to “rebuild itself from the ground up”.