Tom Swarbrick

The US President says Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead.

EXC: Far more voters than expected will have elections cancelled this year as ministers to grant delay to Tory-controlled Essex and Norfolk after private requests from leaders In total 5.6 million in 30 areas to have vote delayed - for 3.6 million it's the second year in a row

Keir Starmer’s argument seems to be: We DID have a blackhole b/c we wanted to spend more on things like welfare and the NHS. But that’s not a blackhole. A blackhole is when you don’t have the cash to pay for current commitments - not deciding to spend more on new commitments.

BREAKING The OBR says it informed Rachel Reeves as far back as ***September 17*** that the downgrade in productivity forecasts was offset by 'increases in real wages and inflation'. The deficit was in fact just £2.5billion By October 31 that deficit had turned into net positive of £4.2billion. That basic forecast did not change from that point So from what the OBR is saying it looks like Rachel Reeves and the Treasury were briefing ahead of the Budget that there was a £20billion black hole in the public finances that didn't actually exist The £30billion worth of tax rises in the Budget are predominantly a consequence of her decisions to increase public spending, particularly on welfare, and have £21.7billion worth of headroom As @Peston @PippaCrerar @hzeffman have all pointed out, it makes the Budget build up - and the narrative that big tax rises were coming because of a deterioration in the public finances - look frankly surreal in hindsight

NEWS: The Chancellor @RachelReevesMP confirmed to me tonight in @itvMLshow that those whose only income is the State Pension will NOT PAY INCOME TAX - not just they won't do self assessment, there will be no tax to pay during this parliament. This is important as the pension triple lock means the State Pension must rise by at least 2.5% each year. So from 2027 someone whose only income is the full new state pension will earn more than the personal allowance (the amount earnable each year before you pay tax) - so tax would be due. Here is a transcript. ML: Rebecca, says ‘does my 85 year old father, who's living with dementia now have to complete a tax return as his state pension will take him over the personal allowance?’ RR: So if you just have a state pension and you don't have any other pension, we are not going to make you fill in a tax return. ML: Of any type or? RR: Yes. And so I make that commitment for that, for this Parliament. You're right. 2027 looks like the time that it will, cross over. We are working on a solution, as we speak, to ensure that we're not going after tiny amounts of money. ML: but people will have to pay the tax. They just won't have to do a return or will they not have to pay the tax? RR: in this Parliament they won't have to pay the tax. You know, further out about to make any commitments, on that. But we're looking at a simple workaround at the moment. ML: Okay. So I hadn't actually got that from budget. So that's really good to have clarity that they won't be paying the tax. This is far more than was said in the budget speech which was just about not doing an assessment. I went on to ask about edge cases "those who have £50/yr of income" and she said she couldn't make the same promise in those cases, it was only for people with no other income.

The triple lock has cost around 3x more than expected. In our central projection, the triple lock explains 1.6pts of the 2.7% of GDP rise in state pension spending. If recent volatility persists, it could add a further 1.5pts; a steadier path could reduce it by 1.3pts.