Net migration in the UK almost halved in 2025, down to 171,000, its lowest level in five years and a massive drop from the record 944,000 in 2023. The Office for National Statistics said the 47% year-on-year drop was thanks to a crackdown on the number of foreign workers from outside the EU, begun by the Conservatives and pushed forward by Shabana Mahmood. The UK has signed a trade deal with the Gulf states that could eventually boost the British economy by £3.7bn a year. The agreement, which will remove 93% of Gulf tariffs on UK exports including food, medical equipment and advanced technology, is the first struck between the Gulf Cooperation Council and a member of the G7. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has filed for an initial public offering, paving the way for the largest stock market float in history. The company, which will debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, is expected to try to raise $75bn, which would value the firm at $1.75trn.

Contrary to myth, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, “it is obvious what Keir Starmer believes”. He raised taxes in a slow-growing economy, “then he did it again”. He added to the regulatory burden on employers, increased borrowing when debt was already high and removed a popular cap on child benefit. He raced to end the VAT exemption on private school fees and gave up welfare reform at the first sign of dissent. Now he wants to ban new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. If you can’t see the “plan” you are being obtuse: “This is a government of the left.”

The government’s problem is not a lack of vision. “It just has the wrong one.” In the eternal tussle between market and state, it wants to tilt things in favour of state. It is preoccupied with distributing, not creating, wealth. This is the opposite of what Britain needs, but that isn’t Labour’s fault – the party is merely acting according to its nature. The fault is with the business leaders, commentators and voters credulous enough to expect a pro-growth government from a leader who served Jeremy Corbyn to the end and says he wouldn’t want a sick relative to use private healthcare. This is not a hard government to read. But all this humbug about “what is Starmerism” will go on, and if he goes, expect “Will the real Andy Burnham please stand up”. It’s obvious what vision Britain needs to pursue: deep cuts to welfare and the freed-up money spent incentivising the working population. The challenge with this is that it would create real losers and possible civil unrest. So much easier to get lost in airy waffle about what different leaders “stand for”.

The Trump administration has settled the president’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over his leaked tax returns by creating a $1.8bn fund to compensate alleged victims of politically motivated government actions. It’s a “dystopian” scheme, says Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. The recipients of the taxpayer-funded hand-outs, which will be personally overseen by Trump, are likely to include, most prominently, January 6 rioters. And to ensure it will never be used for a genuinely “deserving victim”, the “slush fund” is scheduled for termination shortly before Trump leaves office.

High-net-worth singles suffering from dating app fatigue are turning to elite professional matchmakers to secure the partner of their dreams, says Megan Lloyd Davies in The Independent. Fees for one agency start at £15,000 for a year of unlimited, UK-based matches, and rise to £40,000 for global introductions. Elite members can pay extra for a “private search” service, which will offer them hand-picked matches – a vegetarian barrister who lives in Chelsea, say – for around £70,000. Apparently demand has increased 200% since the pandemic.

If you heard a man was planning to sell his seven-year-old daughter as a child bride, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, who would you feel sorry for? The father treating a young girl as property to be traded for cash? Or the innocent child? “All normal people would say the daughter.” But not BBC News, which this week ran precisely this horror story, with the morality insanely reversed. Meet the poor “Afghan fathers” who are “forced to make impossible choices” – struggling to find work, one had already sold his five-year-old daughter (the sons are never sold); another was considering selling his seven-year-old twins. The piece majors on the “weary faces” of these terrible dads. The girls are barely an afterthought. Afghanistan’s under-age marriages “have their problems”, one father admits. “Call off the hunt for the grossest understatement of the year.”

Only those who have “fully vacated the realm of morality” could report so tamely and flatly on the trafficking of little girls into a life of “rape dolled up as marriage”. The BBC could easily have told this story the right way: focusing on the hellish trials of girls and women in the “misogynist tyranny” of Afghanistan. It could have said no excuse – not hunger, not unemployment – could ever justify looking at your sweet daughter and wondering what she might fetch on the black market. Why didn’t it do that? Because of the baleful ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that it is unacceptable to say some cultures are morally inferior to others. Please. Forcing very young girls to marry grown men is, simply, “immoral, wicked, alien to everything we in the civilised West hold dear”. The BBC should be able to say so.

Robert Jenrick was on the receiving end of a decent heckle in the Commons this week, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. The Reform MP, who defected from the Conservatives in January, was talking about the “complete shambles” of the government. “Labour said it would put country before party,” he said. “And where are we, less than two years later?” At which point Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson piped up: “You’re in a different party.”

Until now, says Martin Wolf in the FT, the commodities shortages caused by the Iran war have been “mostly imaginary”: the ships that left the Strait of Hormuz before it was blockaded were in transit, and most countries still had stockpiles to fall back on. No longer. Pretty much all the vessels that got out in time have now arrived, and inventories are fast being drawn down. Shortages of oil, liquefied natural gas, urea, hydrogen, helium and other essentials are about to get very real indeed. In the words of former BP executive Nick Butler, we are at “the end of the beginning”.

It’s 54, says Tom McArdle in The Daily Telegraph. And if you got it, you can feel rather smug, because analysis of nearly 250 million times tables answers given by hundreds of thousands of primary school children shows that it’s the hardest sum to get right, with a 27.1% error rate. All four of the trickiest multiplications involved the number nine – 9x6, 6x9, 9x7 and 3x9 – while the seven and eight times tables also proved challenging. The easiest, with an error rate of just 4.2%, was 11x8. To see a full breakdown, click here.