Keir Starmer has warned that Wednesday’s budget will “embrace the harsh light of fiscal reality”, amid growing criticism that planned tax rises will hit the “working people” he has pledged to protect. The budget is expected to contain up to £40bn of spending cuts and tax rises, along with extra borrowing of around £20bn a year to fund investment in the NHS, schools, green energy and transport projects. A Labour MP has been suspended by his party after CCTV footage emerged of him punching a man to the ground. Mike Amesbury, who says he felt “threatened” before the incident in the early hours of Saturday morning in Frodsham, Cheshire, has been interviewed by police. Neal’s Yard Dairy is the victim of a “Grate Cheese Robbery”, says the Daily Mail. The fancy cheesemongers sent 22 tonnes of cheddar worth £300,000 to fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers. “If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap,” said Jamie Oliver on Instagram, “it’s probably some wrong’uns.”

The reparations arguments just don’t stack up

There is often a good case for a nation providing reparations for past injustices, says Tomiwa Owolade in The Times. Since 1951, Germany has paid more than $92bn to survivors of the Holocaust – the Germans call it Wiedergutmachung, or “making good again”. The US provided Japanese-Americans who had been held in internment camps during World War Two with $1.6bn in compensation, or around $20,000 each. The UK agreed in 2013 to pay £20m to the Kenyans who had been abused and tortured during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s. These were clear examples of “justice being served”. The arguments for reparations over transatlantic slavery, by contrast, are total rubbish.

Campaigners claim Britain owes £18trn to its former colonies for two reasons: the victims were never compensated, so their descendants should be; and the slave trade stymied the economic development of the Caribbean territories affected. The former goes against the “moral intuitions of every civilised society” – that the sins of one person shouldn’t be passed on to his or her descendants. The latter doesn’t pass the sniff test: the GDP per capita in Barbados is $23,600, higher than in Bulgaria and Romania; in the Bahamas, it’s more than $34,000. Besides, where do you draw the line? Do the descendants of the Jews persecuted in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century deserve payments? How about the descendants of Jews in medieval England? The reparations crowd are clearly targeting guilty Western consciences – nobody hectors the Arab states over their own slave trade. We shouldn’t let the “noble desire to compensate for injustice” be poisoned by the “cynical exploitation of guilt”.

🦠💷 If people really want to talk about reparations, says Isabel Oakeshott in The Daily Telegraph, “how about we ask the Chinese for compensation for Covid”? If, as many now believe, the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, “it is only fair that they pay the price”. For Britain, we could start with the $400bn we spent on furlough and other Covid-specific measures. Then a few more hundred billion to clear up the mess the pandemic made of the NHS. Time for Keir Starmer to “get his calculator out”.

Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has prompted outrage among liberal journalists by personally intervening to blocl the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris, says Axios. The Post’s publisher said the decision not to formally back a candidate for the first time in 36 years would take the title – slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness” – back to its “roots”. But critics say Bezos just doesn’t want to upset Donald Trump in case the Republican wins and takes revenge by stymying his other business interests. If so, he may not be the only one: the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, made an identical intervention at his paper earlier last week.

Here’s a game for the real political nerds, says Helen Lewis on Substack: you have to guess the location in Britain from a satellite picture, overlaid with the outline of the local authority (described as “not exactly easy”), parliamentary constituency (“a bit harder”), electoral ward (“rather hard”) or built-up area (“impossible”). Give it a go here.

Why the West will triumph over the “axis against democracy”

“Countries do not lightly send their own citizens to fight in another country’s war,” says David Leonhardt in The New York Times. That’s why the news that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to help Russia battle Ukraine is so significant – it’s the latest sign of growing cooperation between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Tehran has already given Moscow munitions, drones and ballistic missiles; Beijing has provided weapons tech and stepped up its purchases of sanctioned Russian oil. It’s a similar story in the Middle East. Hamas, which is funded by Iran, used North Korean grenade launchers in its October 7 attack on Israel. Russia has reportedly helped the Houthis, another Iranian proxy, attack Western ships in the Red Sea. This “axis against democracy” isn’t ideologically aligned: Iran is an Islamist theocracy; China and Russia oppress their Muslim minorities. But they share the “common goal” of weakening the US-led western order.

It’s not just those four, says Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. Last week 36 countries attended the Brics bloc of non-aligned nations in Kazan, Russia. Vladimir Putin’s face was a picture of “uncharacteristic bliss” – he clearly thinks the anti-West reformation is unstoppable. But if that’s the case, why are “hordes of desperate people” still willing to risk their lives to migrate to the West, and not flocking to Russia, China and North Korea? It’s because the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping haven’t yet grasped “what it is that makes life worth living for real people”. The simple truth is that the combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics is an “unbeatable, absolutely irresistible formula” for mass prosperity. And as long as the West keeps providing that, the rest will always be playing catch-up.

Oriental hornets are the alcohol heavyweights of the animal kingdom, says The Economist. When researchers in Israel ran an experiment to test the critters’ tolerance levels, they found that the boozy bugs can subsist entirely on an 80% ABV sugar solution – with no signs of impairment and no side effects. The bug boffins say it’s because the hornets have multiple copies of the gene responsible for creating enzymes that break down ethanol.

To The Times

If the chancellor is searching for additional taxation options I would suggest podcasts, of which there seem to be a proliferation. The tax could be based on the length of the production, thus providing income and perhaps curtailing some of the more long-winded offerings.

Carolyn Booth-Jones
Beverley, East Yorkshire

It’s actress Katharina Thalbach playing Angela Merkel in a bizarre new German TV show, in which the former chancellor has retired from politics and taken to solving small-town homicides in her spare time. The impeccably named Miss Merkel suffers from a “Teutonic propensity to deliver even sharply written laugh lines with as little expression as possible”, says The New York Times. But it’s still an “attention-grabbing twist on the cosy-village mystery”. Midsomer Murders with Liz Truss, anyone?