“We are discussing with the British the terms of exiting the agreement,” the French Interior Ministry told Le Monde. Signed in 2025, the deal created a novel exchange: for every person sent back to France after arriving in Britain by small boat, London would admit an asylum seeker from France through a legal route.

Photograph: Nilfanion, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The decision is a blow to Downing Street. Andy Burnham personally urged Emmanuel Macron to continue the programme during their early-September meeting in London, his first bilateral with the French president as prime minister, and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has been pressing to make the arrangement permanent and increase the number of returns.

Paris had made its position clear months ago. Interior minister Laurent Nuñez told a French parliamentary inquiry in June: “For our part, we want to move away from this bilateral relationship with the UK. We consider that France should not have to carry it alone, and that it would be better to integrate it into an agreement between the EU and UK. So I have already clearly told my counterpart that this pilot agreement, which we signed in August 2025, was not intended to be renewed beyond October 1, 2026.”

What Paris wants instead is an EU-wide scheme: Britain could still return Channel migrants to the bloc, but would be expected to take asylum seekers with legitimate claims from across all 27 member states. Nuñez conceded that there was no replacement ready, saying: “It would be naive of me to tell you there will be a mechanism to bridge the gap.”

The pilot’s deterrent effect has been limited. Britain has returned 1,400 small-boat migrants to France, just 4 per cent of the more than 32,000 who have crossed the Channel since the treaty came into force, according to The Times. Crossings overall have fallen 40 per cent since early 2026, though two boats landing undetected in Kent this month embarrassed the Government.

Photograph: kallerna, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Home Office declined to comment beyond saying discussions were ongoing. A spokesperson said: “The government’s agreement with France has been extended until autumn. This will ensure we will continue to remove migrants who arrive on small boats over the summer.”

The deal was a first: it established, for the first time, the principle of returning to France migrants turned away from Britain, after France had repeatedly refused such deals until Bruno Retailleau became interior minister in September 2024. Fifteen non-profit organisations challenged the scheme in court, calling it “a system of bargaining that sacrifices access to international protection”, but failed to block it. Ending it also removes a legal route into Britain, however limited it was.

“We could stay as we are. That’s definitely an option, if people think this is the right place to stay,” Burnham told the broadcaster. “We could look at what George Osborne has said about a customs union. We could look at what the Liberal Democrats said at their conference about single market, or we could go all the way.”

Photograph: Thijs ter Haar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The intervention followed his address to Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, where he declared that “Brexit has done more harm than good” and promised to use a UK-EU summit in November to lay out the long-term options for the relationship and seek a consensus around one.

“We will not give Britain the clear path we need into the rest of the century until we decide on a long-term relationship with what is still our largest market,” he told delegates. “I cannot say to you truthfully that where we are is good enough.”

Speaking to the BBC after the speech, he was blunter still: “I am very clear, and I will say this bluntly: Brexit has caused more harm than good. So the question is, what do we do about that?” He said the options should be assessed on “what is doable” and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Photograph: Cbliu, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The move risks reopening a debate many in Westminster had hoped was settled. Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, ending more than four decades of membership, and successive governments have wrestled with the economic and diplomatic fallout. Labour’s 2024 manifesto red lines, which rule out a customs union, the single market or freedom of movement, stand for the rest of this parliament, so any closer arrangement would have to come later.

Polling suggests the public may be ahead of the parties. A YouGov survey in June found 55 per cent of voters supported rejoining the EU and 34 per cent opposed it, while 59 per cent backed closer ties short of full membership, the single market or a customs union.

Burnham, who replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister in July, has previously said he would like Britain to rejoin the EU in his lifetime, and has argued the country cannot afford another decade of uncertainty over the question. In Liverpool he also hinted he would sign up to a new migration pact with the EU to cut small-boat crossings, saying control over immigration had been “weakened when we lost collaboration with our European partners”.

The November summit is now the staging post. Burnham promised the conference he would “take the opportunity around the summit to lay out to the country what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners”, adding: “I will see if we can find consensus around one which will give us clarity about our position, and the future of the continent we live in.”

The headline index dropped 12 points to 41 per cent, below its 47 per cent average over the past year. Optimism about the wider economy took the bigger hit, down 18 points to 31 per cent, six points below its 12-month average, while firms’ view of their own trading prospects fell eight points to 50 per cent.

Photograph: Steve Daniels, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“September’s fall in business confidence was driven primarily by a significant decline in economic optimism, with businesses responding to a combination of higher global energy prices and increased global uncertainty,” said Hann-Ju Ho, senior economist at Lloyds Commercial Banking. “(The) trading outlook also fell, suggesting that firms are becoming more cautious about the outlook for demand and activity over the coming year.”

One figure will worry rate-setters more than the gloom: the share of firms planning to raise prices in the next 12 months ticked up slightly, suggesting cost pressures have not fully faded even as optimism ebbs. Lloyds’ figures are based on an Ipsos survey of 1,200 British businesses with annual sales of at least £250,000, conducted between 2 and 16 September.

Photograph: London Stock Exchange, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Reuters reported that executives’ view of the global economic outlook darkened as the Iran war pushed up costs. Not every region followed the national mood: in the West Midlands, business confidence jumped 22 points to 69 per cent in September, its highest reading of the year, according to Lloyds.

The gloom caps a difficult month for the economy. The Bank of England held rates at 3.75 per cent earlier in September, with three policymakers voting for a rise, and inflation climbed to 3.1 per cent in August as fuel and transport costs bit. With the autumn Budget still to come, the pressure on firms is unlikely to lift soon.

Diesel has risen by 56.8p a litre since 28 February, the start of the US-Iran war, when it averaged 142.38p. The RAC said filling an average family diesel car now costs almost £110, about £31 more than it did at the start of the conflict.

Photograph: Geograph Britain and Ireland contributor, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Unleaded petrol has also climbed sharply, reaching an average of 174.13p a litre on Monday, up 41.3p since February. The RAC’s data covers supermarkets, motorway service stations and independent retailers.

“The average price of a litre of diesel has now reached the highest level in UK history, in what will be a financial blow to households and businesses that use their vehicles regularly,” said Simon Williams, the RAC’s head of policy.

The Chancellor, John Healey, told the BBC that diesel prices were “extreme” and confirmed Britain was discussing a possible American ban on diesel exports with Washington. “We’re also making the provision that we may need to, and we have our own stocks in the UK,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of the Labour conference in Liverpool.

Photograph: Geograph Britain and Ireland contributor, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

President Donald Trump has threatened to restrict diesel exports in an effort to bring down prices for American motorists, telling reporters at the weekend: “We’re thinking about it very seriously.” He is under pressure from Republican politicians to act before November’s midterm elections.

Britain imports around a third of its diesel from the United States, so an export ban could push pump prices higher still. Healey said Britain was working with the Americans to ease pressure on fuel markets and, ultimately, to secure a diplomatic settlement to end the fighting with Iran.

The Type 23 frigate’s firing was the centrepiece of a coordinated strike on the former USS Klakring, a decommissioned US Navy frigate used as the target vessel. A Wildcat helicopter of 815 Naval Air Squadron also fired a Sea Venom missile at the hulk during the serial.

Photograph: PO(Phot) Si Ethell, Ministry of Defence (Open Government Licence), via Wikimedia Commons

“The successful firing of NSM marks a significant milestone for the Royal Navy, demonstrating our ability to deliver credible, modern maritime strike capability,” said Lieutenant Commander Louise Kirkaldy.

The exercise, which concluded on 25 September, brought together Royal Navy warships, helicopters and allied units for high-end warfighting serials in waters off the Scottish coast.

The final blow to the target was delivered from beneath the waves: the submarine USS Massachusetts fired a Mk 48 torpedo that sank the former Klakring, completing the destruction of the hulk.

Photograph: US Navy (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons

The Naval Strike Missile is the Royal Navy’s new ship-busting weapon, and the firing marks a step change in the lethality available to the fleet’s frigates and destroyers.

Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said the men, who had been travelling in three vehicles, were freed subject to stringent conditions on their movement and contact with others. “To be very clear, this does not mean the investigation is over,” he said. “They absolutely remain under investigation as we explore multiple lines of enquiry.”

Photograph: Senior Airman Mary Bowers, US Air Force (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons

Armed officers from Gloucestershire Police made the arrests in the Whelford area, about a mile from the base, after a call at 12.45am on Sunday reporting three suspicious vehicles apparently heading towards the airfield. The men were initially arrested on suspicion of offences under the Explosives Act and later further arrested on suspicion of preparation of a terrorist act under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006.

Police established a 400-metre cordon around the vehicles, which were examined by British Army explosive ordnance disposal personnel with forensic experts. About 85 households were evacuated from properties near where the vehicles were found, and residents were told to expect an emergency services presence in the area for some time.

All five suspects are British nationals from London, in their early 20s. Counter Terrorism Policing said multiple lines of inquiry had emerged after investigators worked at the scene overnight, and officers are working to establish the full circumstances of the activity of those arrested, their knowledge, and any motivation behind the incident.

Photograph: Senior Airman Eugene Oliver, US Air Force (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons

The case has taken on an international dimension. The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, told the Fox News programme Hannity late on Monday that the incident involved “the hands of a foreign actor”, without giving evidence or specific details. President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that the incident “might be” connected to Iran, and said he would not have released the suspects on bail: “I wouldn’t have done that.” Iran has categorically denied any involvement.

RAF Fairford hosts US Air Force units including heavy bombers, and Britain has authorised the US to use bombers based there for strikes on Iranian missile sites. Security at the base had been increased in recent weeks, with heavy vehicles and concrete blocks positioned across some airfield gates.

Counter Terrorism Policing said a cordon remained in place on Monday while investigators continued their work, and thanked residents for their patience after what it called a hugely disruptive incident.

Start with the name of the place. Great Britain is the island: England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom is the sovereign state: Great Britain plus Northern Ireland. The British Isles is the archipelago, a geographical term that includes the Republic of Ireland, which is a separate country and does not appreciate being claimed. Get this right early; it matters to people.

Photograph: George Washington Wilson (restored by Adam Cuerden), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The weather is not a topic of conversation here so much as a condition of life. It changes fast, it rains sideways, and a bright morning is no promise about the afternoon. Dress in layers, keep something waterproof within reach, and accept that discussing the weather with strangers is not small talk but a genuine social bond. The forecast is consulted the way other countries consult horoscopes: frequently, sceptically, and with feeling.

The queue is the national institution. It forms at bus stops, at bars, at cash machines, in shops, everywhere. Join the back of it. Do not push in, do not hover ambiguously near the front, do not attempt to argue that you were here first. The queue is how Britain does fairness, and queue-jumping is one of the few things that will make an entire room of English people speak to you directly.

The calendar has traps for the newcomer. Bank holidays, the days on which banks and many businesses close, are not the same across the country: England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own lists, and the dates move from year to year. The government's official lists are the authority; check them before you book travel or plan around a long weekend.

Photograph: Francois Thomas, via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The television licence surprises almost everyone. You need one, by law, to watch or record live television on any channel, on any device, and to use BBC iPlayer. It is not optional, it is not folded into another bill, and the licensing authority writes to addresses it has no licence recorded for. The details, including the current fee, are on the official site; the principle is simple enough to state here: if it is live TV, or iPlayer, you need the licence.

Apologise constantly. In Britain, 'sorry' means excuse me, pardon me, I didn't catch that, after you, my fault, your fault but let's move on, and sometimes nothing at all. It is punctuation as much as apology. Saying it costs nothing and buys a great deal.

The pub is the community living room. Order at the bar, not at the table; pay as you go or start a tab; and understand the round, in which each person in turn buys drinks for the group. Leaving before your round comes up is noticed. The pub is also where you will learn more about Britain in an evening than in a month of guidebooks.

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London is not Britain. The capital is a world city with its own rhythms, prices and assumptions, and the rest of the country knows it. The nations have their own parliaments and their own politics; the regions have their own accents, industries and grievances. Travel. The train network will take you most places worth going, and the view from the window is the point.

Britain will not tell you its rules. It will simply queue, apologise, and expect you to notice. Welcome.

Parliament has three parts: the Commons, the Lords and the Monarch. In practice almost everything that matters happens in the first two, and almost everything that is decided is decided in the Commons.

The House of Commons is the elected chamber. It has 650 members, one for each parliamentary constituency, elected by the first-past-the-post system in which the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins the seat. General elections are ordinarily held every five years; the last one, in which all 650 constituencies voted, was held on 4 July 2024.

Photograph: UK Parliament, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The House of Lords is the unelected upper chamber. Most of its members are life peers, appointed for their expertise, experience or public service; they sit alongside 26 bishops of the Church of England and the 92 hereditary peers who remained after the reforms of 1999. The Lords revises, delays and amends legislation, and its members bring a concentration of specialist knowledge that the Commons, full of career politicians, often lacks.

Photograph: UK Government, via Wikimedia Commons (Open Government Licence)

The Monarch's part is formal but essential: no bill becomes law until it receives Royal Assent. The three parts together make up what is called the Crown-in-Parliament, the constitutional authority from which British law flows.

Parliament and government are not the same thing, and the confusion between them is where most misunderstandings of Westminster begin. The government is formed by whichever party, or coalition of parties, can command the confidence of the Commons. Its leader becomes Prime Minister. Ministers are drawn overwhelmingly from the Commons, which means the executive and the legislature overlap: the same people who run the country also sit in the chamber that holds them to account.

Laws begin as bills. A bill is introduced, debated and amended, moving through readings and committee stages in both Houses, where MPs and peers examine it line by line. Bills concerning taxation and spending begin in the Commons. When both Houses have agreed the final text, the bill goes to the Monarch for Royal Assent and becomes an Act of Parliament.

The balance between the two chambers was settled, in essence, by the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949. They established that the elected Commons prevails: the Lords can delay most legislation, but it cannot block it indefinitely, and the 1949 Act reduced the maximum delay from two years to one. The Acts have been used seven times since 1911, a reminder that the ultimate power in the system belongs to the chamber the voters choose.

Photograph: Julian Herzog, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Scrutiny is the other half of Westminster's work, and it never stops. Ministers answer questions in the chamber, including the regular set-piece of Prime Minister's Questions. Select committees of MPs examine departments, policies and spending in detail, taking evidence from experts, officials and ministers. Much of what is actually wrong with a government policy is found here, in committee rooms, long before it becomes a headline.

The shape of the Commons changes with each boundary review, as the electoral map is redrawn to keep constituencies roughly equal in population. The 2023 review changed the boundaries across the United Kingdom, with England gaining ten seats, Wales losing eight and Scotland losing two. The map you vote on is never quite the map of last time.

Westminster can look arcane, and some of it is. But its logic is simple: an elected chamber that has the last word, a revising chamber that slows it down, a government drawn from the first and answerable to it, and a sovereign in whose name it all happens. That is the machine. The Journal's job is to tell you what it is doing.

Scotland has the most powerful of the devolved institutions. The Scottish Parliament sits at Holyrood, at the foot of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, and its 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament make laws on devolved matters: areas such as health, education, justice, transport and the environment. Reserved matters, including foreign policy, immigration, defence and the constitution itself, stay with Westminster. The Parliament's business, its committees and its bills are all published by the Parliament itself.

Wales is governed from the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament, in its glass-fronted building at Cardiff Bay. Its 60 Members pass Senedd Acts, the Welsh equivalent of Acts of Parliament. The institution began life as an assembly with limited powers and has grown, through referendums and new legislation, into a parliament with primary lawmaking authority. Its plenary sessions, committees and records are public, in Welsh and English.

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Northern Ireland's Assembly sits in the great white bulk of Parliament Buildings at Stormont, outside Belfast. Its 90 Members are elected under a system designed to ensure that power is shared between unionists and nationalists, and its executive can only function with ministers from both traditions. The Assembly is the product of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, and its history since has been one of suspensions and restorations as often as of steady government.

Photograph: Albert Bridge, via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

England is the exception that proves the shape of the system: it has no devolved parliament of its own. England is governed directly by the Westminster Parliament, in which English MPs sit alongside MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The one devolution England does have is in London, where the Greater London Authority pairs an elected Mayor with the London Assembly, the body that scrutinises the Mayor's decisions, holds hearings and publishes its reports and minutes.

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The point to grasp is that devolution is not federalism. In a federation, the division of power is uniform and constitutional; in Britain, it is four different settlements, negotiated at different times, for different reasons, each with its own scope and its own history. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not have the same powers, because they were not given them for the same reasons.

The effects are practical, not abstract. Because health and education are devolved, a policy made in Edinburgh need not match the one made in London or Cardiff: prescriptions, tuition and school curricula can all differ across internal borders. Anyone who lives, works or studies in more than one nation of the UK learns this quickly.

Devolution is also unfinished business, and it is argued about constantly. Westminster retains the power to legislate on reserved matters and, in principle, on devolved ones too; the devolved governments guard their competences; and the question of where one ends and the other begins is settled, when it is settled, in courts and in politics rather than in any single tidy document.

For the reader, the practical consequence is simple: British politics has four stages, not one. A story that begins in Westminster may end in Holyrood, Cardiff Bay or Stormont, and the Journal covers all four. The official record of each legislature is the place to start: the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly all publish their business, their debates and their legislation in full.

The union survives, in part, because it bends. Devolution is the bending: an admission that one parliament, however sovereign, cannot comfortably speak for four nations at once.

The first thing to understand is what does not exist: there is no state licensing of the press. No minister signs off a newspaper before it prints, and no government department grants permission to publish. What Britain has instead is a system of regulation that the press built, in large part, for itself, under pressure from Parliament, the courts and public outrage.

Image: Sue Clark, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The largest part of that system is IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. It regulates most of the national and local newspapers and many magazines: its members agree to be bound by the Editors' Code of Practice, it handles complaints from the public, and it publishes its rulings. If you believe a newspaper has behaved unfairly or inaccurately, IPSO is, for most titles, where the complaint goes.

Alongside it sits IMPRESS, a smaller regulator with a different constitutional basis. IMPRESS is the only press regulator approved under the Royal Charter on self-regulation of the press, and it regulates independent and smaller publishers. Its status is reviewed every three years by the Press Recognition Panel, the body Parliament created to judge whether regulators meet the Charter's criteria; the Panel's 2025 cyclical review confirmed that IMPRESS continues to do so.

Behind both regulators stands the Leveson Inquiry, the judicial investigation into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. Its recommendations led to the Royal Charter and to the recognition system that the Press Recognition Panel administers. Whatever one thinks of Leveson, it is the reason the current arrangements look the way they do: self-regulation, but self-regulation conducted in the shadow of a judge's report.

Broadcasting is a different world, with a different regulator. Ofcom is the statutory regulator for communications in the UK: its codes and rules cover television, radio and video-on-demand, and it investigates breaches and publishes its findings in its broadcast bulletins. A newspaper answers to IPSO or IMPRESS; a broadcaster answers to Ofcom; the two regimes reflect the historic difference between print, which no one licenses, and the airwaves, which the state always has.

Photograph: Richard Cooke, via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

None of this displaces the law. Defamation, contempt of court, privacy and the criminal law all bind journalists as they bind everyone else, and the courts on the Strand still hear the cases that test where reporting ends and wrongdoing begins. Regulation handles standards; the law handles legality; the two overlap constantly.

Photograph: Robin Webster, via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For the reader, the system is practical. A complaint about a newspaper goes to its regulator; a complaint about a broadcast goes to Ofcom; and the rulings of both are public, which means the press is judged, week by week, in the open. It is an imperfect system, and the press and its critics argue about it endlessly. That argument is itself part of the tradition.

This guide is descriptive, not a legal opinion, and the arrangements it describes will keep evolving. But the principle underneath them has held for three centuries: the British press is free to publish, and it answers for what it publishes afterwards.

“There’s nothing progressive about losing control,” he told the hall. “Because it’s working people who pay for it.” It is a line designed to do two jobs at once: to reassure the markets that Labour has learned the lessons of the Truss era, and to tell the party’s left that restraint is not betrayal but solidarity.

Photograph: DaveLevy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The gamble is in the sequencing. Healey is asking the country to accept discipline now on the promise of hope later, with the Budget he delivers a month from today as the first instalment. The conference speech was heavy on creed and light on detail, which means the Budget must carry the weight the speech declined to lift.

There were shrewd politics in the packaging. The tribute to Rachel Reeves as the first female Chancellor, the invocation of Gordon Brown’s red tie, the miners’ lamp from Cortonwood: each was a signal to a different Labour tribe that the new Chancellor understands the party’s history even as he asks it to trust his judgment.

The attack lines were chosen with equal care. Calling Nigel Farage “Liz Truss with a Bitcoin account” ties Reform’s economic credibility to the most toxic recent memory in British economic management. It is the kind of line that writes its own headlines, which was rather the point.

Photograph: DaveLevy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

But speeches do not move inflation, which stands at 3.1 per cent, or cut waiting lists, which stand at 7.33 million treatments. The test of Healey’s doctrine is not whether conference applauded it, they did, but whether the Budget a month from now makes the country feel the breathing space he promised.

For Andy Burnham, watching from the front row of his first conference as Prime Minister, the speech was also a transfer of risk. The Chancellor now owns the economy. If the Budget lands, they share the credit. If it does not, the Prime Minister has a Chancellor to blame, and the Chancellor has nowhere to hide.

Opening with a tribute to his predecessor, Healey said Rachel Reeves had brought “financial discipline” to the country and would “always be recognised as this country’s first-ever female Chancellor”. He also paid tribute to Keir Starmer, who he said had taken the party “from one of our worst-ever defeats to one of our biggest-ever victories”.

Photograph: Rodhullandemu, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The central argument of the speech was that hope for the economy must be earned. “There’s nothing progressive about losing control,” Healey said. “Because it’s working people who pay for it.” He told the hall that he and the Prime Minister were “in lockstep” on meeting the fiscal rules, balancing the books with a buffer against uncertainty and bringing down borrowing to control inflation.

Healey set out what he called a Plan for Britain, built, he said, “on the rock of fiscal discipline”, on a growing economy with good work and jobs in more places, and on the new age of industrialisation. He pointed to the Government’s record in its first two years: railways coming back into public hands, new rights for renters and at work, and British Steel saved.

He also listed the cost-of-living measures taken in what he called Andy Burnham’s first week as Prime Minister: VAT cut from electricity bills, bus fares capped at £2, and business rates reduced on pubs, clubs and music venues, “to give people just a bit of breathing space”.

Photograph: DaveLevy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

On young people, the Chancellor said the number not in employment, education or training had risen to nearly one million before the election, and said benefits should be a bridge to work, not a trap: “for everyone else, benefits should be a bridge to work, to wider participation, to a better life”.

The speech took direct aim at the opposition. Healey attacked the Conservatives’ economic record under Liz Truss’s mini-Budget and turned on Reform UK, saying of Nigel Farage: “when it comes to the economy, he’s Liz Truss with a Bitcoin account.”

There were personal notes too. Healey recalled his first Labour conference, in Blackpool in 1986, forty years ago, and told the story of lending Gordon Brown his red tie before the then-Chancellor’s 1999 conference speech in Bournemouth. “I did get it back, he signed it and I’ve never worn it since,” he said. “Until today.”

He closed by returning to the miners’ lamp he keeps at home in Rotherham, from Cortonwood Colliery, as a symbol of solidarity and hope: “no matter the darkness, there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.”

The triple lock, a commitment the Government has said it will keep for this Parliament, raises the state pension each April by the highest of three figures: growth in average earnings, consumer price inflation, or 2.5 per cent.

Photograph: Tilemahos Efthimiadis, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The final number is not yet known. September’s inflation figure, published next month, could yet overtake the earnings figure and become the binding measure. Only when both are in can the exact uprating be calculated.

Applied to this year’s full new State Pension rate of £241.30 a week, confirmed by the DWP for 2026/27, the 3.9 per cent earnings figure points to around £250.70 a week, or roughly £13,036 a year, from April 2027. That projection will move if September inflation comes in higher.

The politics of the lock are as fixed as its arithmetic. Pensioners vote in large numbers, and no party in recent years has dared to touch the mechanism, whatever Treasury officials think of its cost. With a Budget due within weeks, the Chancellor will have noted the figure with care: every extra tenth of a point on the uprating is tens of millions in committed spending.

Photograph: Mike Peel, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What is certain is that pensioners will get at least 3.9 per cent. What is not is whether inflation will hand them more.

The backdrop is unforgiving. Inflation stood at 3.1 per cent in August, unemployment at 4.9 per cent, and the Bank of England has held interest rates at 3.75 per cent. More than 18,500 people have crossed the Channel in small boats so far this year, including 781 on a single day last week, the highest daily figure of 2026.

Photograph: Dietmar Rabich, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Burnham has also used his first outings in the Commons to argue that Brexit caused “a decade of low growth”, a line that sets up a difficult week on the economy for his Government as John Healey prepares his first Budget.

The Prime Minister’s political challenge is twofold. He must reassure a party that changed leaders only in July that the Government has a plan for growth, and he must give the country a reason to believe that plan before John Healey delivers his first Budget as Chancellor a month from now.

Healey’s conference speech on Monday was designed to do exactly that, promising “a new age of industrialisation” built on fiscal discipline. The Chancellor’s performance was watched closely by delegates as the first full statement of the economic direction of the Burnham Government.

Photograph: Rodhullandemu, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For Burnham himself, the conference is an exercise in authority. His allies point to the cost-of-living measures of the summer policy blitz, including the VAT cut on electricity bills and caps on bus fares, as evidence of a Government that acts. His critics, inside and outside the party, will be watching for any sign that the leadership change of the summer has not settled the question of who runs Labour.

The week will close with the leader’s speech, the moment by which every new prime minister is judged. Burnham’s predecessors used theirs to define an era. He has five days in Liverpool to show he can define his.

The shortlisted artists are Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau and Tanoa Sasraku. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony in December, on 10 December, when one of the four will take British contemporary art’s best-known prize.

Photograph: Stinglehammer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The staging at MIMA, which is part of Teesside University, continues the prize’s recent habit of travelling beyond the capital. Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson called the exhibition “a fascinating cross-section of the visual arts in Britain today”, noting the artists’ engagement with “ecological thought, human precarity, the geopolitics of oil, and the lived experience of deindustrialisation in the North of England”.

For visitors, the exhibition is the first chance to see the four practices side by side and to weigh the judges’ choice before December’s announcement. Entry details and opening hours are published by the gallery.

Photograph: Robert Eva, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Turner Prize has a long record of argument, which is rather the point. Middlesbrough now gets three months of it.

The figure is 42 per cent below the same point in 2025, when 32,188 people had arrived, and 26 per cent below the figure at this stage in 2024. A Government spokesperson said progress this year was “indisputable”, with crossings down by 42 per cent and the lowest recorded over the summer months since 2020.

Photograph: kallerna, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

But the record day came in a difficult week for the Government. Two boats reached British shores undetected within two days: one at Samphire Hoe near Dover, where 21 people were detained, and one at Folkestone on Monday morning, the first unauthorised landings in a year.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who has ordered an urgent review by the Border Security Command, said the failure to intercept the two boats was “not acceptable”.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell said that “you can’t stop everything all of the time”, a remark seized on by the Conservatives.

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The three-day total from Monday to Wednesday reached 1,085 arrivals: 150 on Monday, 154 on Tuesday and 781 on Wednesday, an average of about 78 people per boat on the record day.

The figures will dominate the immigration debate at Labour’s conference in Liverpool this week. Ministers insist the year-on-year fall shows enforcement is working; critics say a single calm week can still produce numbers that overwhelm the system.

The six novels are The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and John of John by Douglas Stuart. They were chosen from 163 submissions written in English and published in the UK and Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

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Marlon James, who won in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, returns with The Disappearers, set in Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1980s. Douglas Stuart, who won in 2020 with Shuggie Bain, is shortlisted for John of John, set on the Isle of Harris in the 1990s. Only four authors have ever won the Booker twice.

The chair of judges, Mary Beard, said: “These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated.” The panel also included Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood.

At one end of the career scale, M. John Harrison, 81, would become the prize’s oldest-ever winner should The End of Everything, his dystopian novel set on a post-apocalyptic Kent coast, take the prize. At the other, Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King, a debut set between an unnamed medieval court and the present day, is the list’s single first novel; it won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize in July.

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The list also reaches across the Atlantic. Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer-winning American author shortlisted previously for Oh William!, is nominated for The Things We Never Say, set in coastal Massachusetts in the run-up to the 2024 US election.

Two independent publishers have a book each on the shortlist, Serpent’s Tail with The End of Everything and Granta with May We Feed the King, while the big houses account for the other four titles across their imprints.

The Court of Directors is the Bank’s governing body, responsible for managing its affairs outside monetary policy and financial stability decisions, which sit with the Monetary Policy Committee and the Financial Policy Committee respectively.

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Nowak’s appointment brings a trade union voice to the Court’s table at a moment when the Bank is watching pay growth closely for signs of persistent inflation. The TUC general secretary, a former call-centre worker who took over the union body in 2022, has recently led its calls for higher taxes on banks’ profits, arguing that “taxing bank profits to cut bills is plain common sense”.

Craig, the founder of the financial data company Refinitiv, led its data and analytics division after its sale to the London Stock Exchange Group. Smits, a former global head of BNY Investment Management, succeeds Sabine Chalmers and attends her first Court meeting on 11 February 2027.

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The Chancellor said the appointments would strengthen the Court “at a critical moment for the UK economy, providing deep and varied experience to support the Bank in delivering its core missions of monetary and financial stability”. Lord Jitesh Gadhia and Tom Shropshire were reappointed for second four-year terms.

The appointments fill seats on a body whose membership is periodically refreshed by the Chancellor of the day, and they arrive as the Bank navigates one of its more finely balanced periods, with its rate-setters split 6-3 in September on whether borrowing costs should rise.

The decision leaves borrowing costs unchanged as the Bank weighs inflation, which the ONS measured at 3.1 per cent in August, against a labour market that has been softening for months.

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The split is the story. A 6-3 vote with the minority favouring a rise suggests the committee’s hawks are increasingly uneasy about price pressures, even as the majority judges that holding is the right call for now. The Bank’s staff now expect CPI inflation to reach slightly over 4 per cent in early 2027, up from 3.2 per cent in the July forecast.

Governor Andrew Bailey warned that the longer the conflict in the Middle East persists, the more likely the Bank would need to raise rates: “The longer this volatility persists, the bigger the impact it will have on inflation, and the more likely it is we will need to raise Bank Rate to ensure that inflation falls back to our 2% target.”

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For households, the hold means no immediate change to the cost of variable-rate mortgages or to the savings rates banks choose to offer. For the Government, it means the Chancellor’s first Budget, due on 28 October, will be framed by borrowing costs that markets still expect to fall only slowly.

The Bank publishes its full reasoning in the minutes of the September meeting. Its next scheduled decision on Bank Rate is due in November.

Prices rose 0.5 per cent on the month. Transport inflation reached 4.6 per cent, while services inflation, the measure the Bank of England watches most closely for signs of persistent price pressure, stood at 3.4 per cent. Core CPI, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, was 2.6 per cent.

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The figures, published by the ONS in its August consumer price inflation bulletin, confirm that the path back to the Bank’s 2 per cent target remains uneven. Fuel prices, which feed into both household budgets and business costs, were the single largest driver of the monthly increase.

For the Monetary Policy Committee, which held Bank Rate at 3.75 per cent in September with three members voting for a rise to 4 per cent, the August data vindicates the hawks’ unease. Markets will now look to the September inflation figures, due next month, for evidence of whether the August rise was a blip or a trend.

For households, the practical effect is at the till and the pump. With regular earnings growing at 3.5 per cent, pay is still outpacing prices on average, but the margin is narrowing, and it is narrowing fastest for those who drive to work.

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Vacancies fell to 702,000 in June to August, continuing a long slide from the record highs of the post-pandemic hiring boom. Regular earnings growth, excluding bonuses, slowed to 3.5 per cent, barely ahead of inflation at 3.1 per cent.

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One of the more striking features of the current data is the divergence between the two main measures of employment. Payroll data from HMRC and the Labour Force Survey have been telling increasingly different stories, a reminder that the headline numbers come with unusual uncertainty attached.

The House of Commons Library’s briefing on the figures notes the softening in hiring alongside pay growth that, while still positive in real terms, is losing momentum.

For the Bank of England, the labour market is the other half of the rates puzzle. Cooling vacancies and slowing pay growth argue for patience; persistent services inflation argues for caution. The September minutes showed the committee split 6-3 on exactly that judgment.

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For the Government, the figures land a month before the Chancellor’s first Budget. A labour market that is cooling without collapsing gives John Healey room to argue that discipline is working, but little room to claim that growth has arrived.

The soloists were the pianist Yuja Wang and the tenor Nicky Spence, who headed a programme that balanced the ceremonial with the celebratory in the usual Last Night fashion. Wang gave the first Proms performance of Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto, and also delivered a Proms premiere, Alexander Tsfasman’s Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra.

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The evening’s most talked-about moment was its tribute to Dolly Parton, who had died three weeks earlier. The second half began with To Dolly, with Love, a seven-minute medley of three of her songs arranged by Fiona Brice: Sheridan Smith, dressed as Parton, sang “9 to 5”, Ward Thomas delivered “Jolene” and Beverley Knight sang “I Will Always Love You” as audience members lit the hall with their mobile phones.

Spence, the evening’s tenor soloist, sang Dvořák’s Rusalka in the first half and led a medley of Scots songs, Scotch Snap, created this year by Stuart Calvert. Later, dressed as Nicely-Nicely Johnson from Guys and Dolls, he sang “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” with the BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC Singers.

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The 2026 season presented 86 concerts over eight weeks, from 17 July to 12 September, with more than 70,000 tickets at £8 and 24 programmes on BBC television. On this evidence, the argument about the Last Night will run a while yet.

The figures, published in September as accredited official statistics, show the list up from 7.27 million treatments and 6.15 million patients at the end of June, and the highest since October 2025. The list remains below its record high of 7.77 million treatments in September 2023.

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Some 65.4 per cent of patients began treatment within 18 weeks of referral in July, down from 65.8 per cent in June but above the interim target of 65 per cent that the Government and NHS England had set for March. The new target is 70 per cent by March 2027, on the way to the pledge that 92 per cent of patients will begin treatment within 18 weeks by the end of this Parliament in 2029.

Long waits grew. An estimated 111,379 people had been waiting more than a year to start routine treatment at the end of July, up from 105,711 at the end of June. The number waiting more than 65 weeks rose from 7,831 to 9,095.

The waiting-list figures came alongside the busiest summer the NHS has recorded. A&E attendances in June, July and August topped a record 7.2 million, 240,000 more than the same period last year, while ambulance services dealt with a record 2.4 million callouts, up more than 130,000 on last year. NHS England said that despite the record demand, staff had treated, admitted or discharged the highest ever number of A&E patients within four hours: 5,462,182.

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There were brighter spots. A record 308,200 people were seen in July following an urgent suspected cancer referral, and more than 5 million people had a diagnostic test or check across June and July, the highest number ever over those months.

But pressure on emergency care remains acute. There were 92,177 instances of so-called corridor care in England in August, an average of 2,973 patients a day. Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of The King’s Fund, said the NHS was “now facing a twin crisis, with summer joining winter as a major pressure on services and leaving little room for staff and the system to recover between peak periods”.

Nicola Ranger, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said the summer’s five heatwaves had “supercharged” the corridor-care crisis and demonstrated the “extraordinary pace at which corridor care has become completely normalised in the NHS”. The Government has made £1.5 billion available for building and maintenance work, alongside measures to build resilience to hotter weather.

Data from Lloyds showed house prices falling 0.4 per cent on the year in August, the first annual decline since November 2023, with prices down 0.2 per cent on the month. Nationwide, by contrast, reported prices up 1.6 per cent on the year and 0.2 per cent on the month.

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The divergence is largely methodological: the two lenders sample different buyers at different stages of the purchase process. But both indices agree on the bigger picture, which is of a market going sideways, constrained by borrowing costs that remain far above the lows of the last decade.

With Bank Rate at 3.75 per cent and the Bank of England’s committee split on whether rates should rise further, mortgage pricing is unlikely to fall far or fast. Lloyds’ mortgages director Andrew Asaam said the market had faced “a more difficult backdrop”, with sellers choosing to sit tight rather than cut prices and some buyers waiting to see how conditions develop.

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The Lloyds index, the successor to the old Halifax measure, put the average property at £298,468 in August. Northern Ireland recorded the strongest annual growth, at 6.9 per cent, with the average property value at a record high of £231,245; Scotland grew 3.5 per cent and Wales 0.6 per cent, while price growth remained under pressure across much of southern England.