Rachel Reeves said this morning that “each of us must do our bit” to build a stronger economy, in the clearest sign yet that she is planning a manifesto-breaking income tax rise in the forthcoming budget. The chancellor said her goal was to tame debt and bring down government borrowing costs to free up more cash for public services. The BBC misrepresented a speech made by Donald Trump on the day of the January 6 riots, according to an internal whistleblowing memo. A Panorama broadcast a week before the US election last year showed Trump telling supporters he would walk to the Capitol with them to “fight like hell”, when in fact he said he would walk with them to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. John Lewis has kicked off the festive season with the release of its Christmas advert. The two-minute ad, which is set to Alison Limerick’s 1990s club hit Where Love Lives, concerns a father-and-son relationship. “They’ve stripped away the loveable fictional characters,” says The Independent, “and gone full Adolescence.” Watch it here.

Our politics is becoming “less British”

There’s something strange happening in British politics, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg: it is “becoming less British”. The pride we’ve long felt in our distinctive parliamentary system – a peaceful, democratic one packed full of “weird rituals” and replicated by 35 other countries – has all but disappeared and the long-established two-party system is fragmenting. In its place, we’re seeing something more like the “distinctive symbols of Ulster”: flags of rival communities fluttering from lampposts, young men protesting in the streets, “no surrender” banners consciously imitating Ulster unionists. And our politics is being shaped by the same forces that shape the Irish province: “ethnic loyalties”.

In Ulster, Catholics vote for Catholics, Protestants vote for Protestants and politicians are primarily “ethnic bosses”. In England, Muslim-dominated areas are increasingly voting for Muslim leaders. We now have four independent MPs who were elected in Muslim-majority communities specifically because of their stance on the Middle East – when Shockat Adam defeated Labour in Leicester South, he held up a keffiyeh and declared “this is for the people of Gaza”. Dozens of Labour MPs worry they’ll be unseated in similar circumstances at the next election. The safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, for example, won her seat in Birmingham Yardley with a greatly reduced majority last year because of a strong challenge from the pro-Palestinian Workers Party. And all this is taking place against a broader landscape of ethnic voting. The Scottish National Party continues to dominate Scottish politics; the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, won a thumping victory in the Caerphilly by-election last month. The Liberal-Conservative system wasn’t perfect by any stretch. But the Ulsterisation of our politics risks “replacing consensus-making with conflict”.

Nicolás Maduro has never been popular in Venezuela, says Javier Corrales in The New York Times. But he’s always been canny. Soon after he was elected as Hugo Chávez’s chosen successor in 2012, Maduro set about insulating himself from the threat of usurpation by letting high-powered members of the military and judiciary enrich themselves – legally or otherwise – through private firms that sell services back to the government agencies the honchos themselves run. He also co-opted the so-called colectivos that run local neighbourhoods, making them the shock-troops in his war against low-level dissent. Today, those powerful enough to depose him are the ones with the most to lose from his demise.

A decade ago, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT, forecasters were certain the “digital and virtual” spelled the end for the “analogue and physical”. E-books would kill off print; online shopping would hollow out bricks-and-mortar stores; and fleets of self-driving electric taxis were going to push combustion engines off the road (one analyst predicted US sales of petrol cars would fall to zero – “by 2024”). But the “old is holding up surprisingly well against the new”. Physical book sales are strongly up, as are sales of petrol cars. And after an online shopping spike in lockdown, physical shops are back: since 2021, openings in the US have outnumbered closings by around 2,000 stores a year.

Let’s be radical about social media – like Australia

“You’ve just got to bloody do something about this.” That’s what Annabel West told her husband, says Rohan Silva in The Times, after she finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, about the “devastatingly negative” effect of social media on teenagers. Her husband, the premier of South Australia, sensibly opted to follow his wife’s advice, drafting legislation to ban under-16s from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Snapchat. The proposal was so massively popular – especially with parents – that the Australian federal government decided to make it national policy, becoming the first country in the world to approve a social media ban for kids, with fines of up to £28m for tech firms that fail to implement it.

The measure, which comes into force next month, is supported by a whopping 77% of Australians. And the rationale for it is overwhelming: teenage boys who spend five hours a day on social media are twice as likely to be depressed compared to their peers who don’t use these platforms. “For girls, depression rates triple.” Across the developed world, teenage anxiety and depression have rocketed since the dawn of social networks in 2010: in the decade to 2019, “major depressive episodes” among adolescents increased by 95% in the US; “probable mental disorders” are up 66% in the UK in recent years. Haidt calls it the “largest epidemic of teen mental illness on record”. It’s incredibly hard for mums and dads to keep their kids off these sites if all their friends are there, but bans (though imperfect – see fags and booze) mostly work. You don’t often come across a government initiative that’s “wildly popular, grounded in scientific evidence – and doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny”. Keir Starmer should take note.

There was once a court case in Massachusetts, says Joanna Lumley in her new collection of writing, My Book of Treasures, where a lawyer asked a pathologist if they had checked the corpse for signs of life. “No,” the pathologist replied. Breathing? No. A pulse? Again, no. “So how could you be sure the patient was in fact dead?” the lawyer asked. “Because,” the doctor replied, “his brain was in a jar.” When the lawyer, attempting a climbdown, asked if there were any way the patient could have been alive, the pathologist suggested that if he was, he was “probably practising law in Massachusetts”.

Britain’s government data has become “dangerously unreliable”, says Michael Simmons in The Spectator. Last month, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) essentially “discovered a spare £3bn down the back of the sofa” – VAT receipts had been under-reported by £1bn last year and £2bn this year. There are five million more people registered with England’s GPs than the ONS says are alive. Depending on which official figures you use, foreigners are either more likely or less likely than natives to commit crime, Liz Truss either shrank or grew the economy, and there have either never been more Brits in employment or Rachel Reeves has destroyed 100,000 jobs. “Which is it?”

It’s an 18-carat gold loo which is going up for auction later this month with a starting price of around $10m, says Zachary Small in The New York Times. Made by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose duct-taped banana sold for $6.2m last year, the fully functioning 100kg solid-gold khazi is the “twin toilet” of the one that was stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019. “I would reject the idea that this is just pure spectacle,” said David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, while somehow keeping a straight face. “Cattelan for me is one of the greatest artists of our generation and this is one of his most iconic works.” Register to put in a bid here.