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British bank shares surged this morning after a Supreme Court ruling on Friday reduced the amount of compensation lenders would have to pay to motorists who were mis-sold car finance. The Financial Conduct Authority has proposed a redress scheme that will cost banks between £9bn and £18bn, rather than the £44bn they were expecting before the ruling. An international team of doctors and scientists has warned that plastic pollution is a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human health. More than 170 countries will attend a UN conference in Switzerland this week aimed at finalising a global plastics treaty to tackle the threat. Early dinner bookings are booming, with 6pm reservations up 11% in London and 6% across the UK year-on-year. The trend is thought to be the result of people with long commutes not wanting to travel home too late, and health-focused Gen Zs preferring an early night.

“If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will”

I love immigration, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. I’m the son of an immigrant, and my Indian-born dad was “one of the greatest patriots I know”. But I’m afraid JD Vance was right when he said last week that Europe is committing “civilisational suicide” through mass migration. In Boris Johnson’s final two years in No 10, annual net migration averaged more than 850,000 – not far off the combined total between 1066 and 1945. Migrants do valuable work, help the NHS and so on. But it is surely beyond doubt that this “unprecedented influx” is behind many of our contemporary pathologies: the rise of sectarian politics, most visible in the “Gaza MPs”; the strain on housing and infrastructure.

Where I depart from the US vice president, and indeed his boss, is on how to address this issue. The Trump administration has strengthened America’s borders in part by running roughshod over the country’s laws: attacking judges; detaining US citizens; deporting immigrants without due process. But the rule of law is the West’s “foundational ideal” – to breach it in defence of Western values is a “contradiction in terms”. The Tories went down a similar route over their Rwanda scheme, legislating that the policy was compatible with our international treaty obligations even after the courts had said it wasn’t. And that’s the big danger here: mass migration is corroding Western values through the scale of the influx; populists are corroding them by breaching the rule of law to stop it. This is a grave mistake. Our politicians need to change laws – redrafting the Refugee Convention and human rights framework, for a start – rather than break them. In the words of American pundit David Frum: “If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.”