What’s the Chancellor’s rabbit going to be? A hare-brained scheme or a genuinely hopping good surprise? 🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇🐇 The most fevered Budget speculation centres on the personal allowance. From next April, the full new state pension is expected to rise to about £13,036 a year, above the personal allowance of £12,570 for the first time. The allowance is frozen until 2031. Ministers have promised that people living on the state pension alone will not pay tax on it, but have not said how. Raising the personal allowance to just over £13,000 would cost about £4bn. There is also speculation that Healey could reverse Reeves’s freeze of the Plan 2 student loan repayment threshold at £29,385 for three years from April 2027, following lobbying by Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary. The Treasury committee has called for the freeze to be reversed. The Department for Education has warned that doing so would reverse a £5.9bn saving. However, the Treasury has previously been cool on the idea. Another potentially popular move would be to ease the pressure on family farms by raising the inheritance-tax threshold, potentially taking “a whole slug of farmers” out of the tax. Other measures being discussed include a time-limited cut in national insurance for under-25s and an extension of the Great British Summer Savings scheme into the winter holidays. The summer scheme cut VAT on children’s restaurant meals and family attractions from 20 per cent to 5 per cent, at a cost of about £300m. From today’s weekend long read with @whazell Story 👇 inews.co.uk/news/politics/in…

Regardless of any tweaks made to the ILR proposals in the home office consultation (the broad thrust of which are popular). Recent cabinet interventions mean any weakening is now more easily portrayed to public as climb down on immigration control/capitulation to one wing of party who are less keen on control.

Some chatter on social media would have you believe that crime is out of control. The facts tell a different story. As @frasernelson has shown in his Substack today: Violence is at its lowest level since the crime survey began in 1981. Robbery is at a record low. Crime, excluding fraud, is 78% down on its peak in 1995. And the stats show this Government is delivering on its promises too: Knife crime is down 11%. Knife murders are at their lowest level in 35 years. Thefts including phone snatching have fallen by 20% in the last year alone. But I know there is more that we must do, and we will: We’ve put more than 3,800 extra neighbourhood officers into roles, with named, contactable officers for every neighbourhood. We’re introducing the most significant reforms to policing in a generation. We are tackling rising rates of violence against women and girls through our landmark strategy. And we are tackling crimes like fraud, more prevalent in our increasingly online world, with £250 million directed to this challenge in our Fraud Strategy published this year.

Energy Sec refuses to answer, multiple times, whether she backs the government's immigration proposal. 🗣️ @SophyRidgeSky asks - "Do you support plans for people to live in the UK for 15 years before they get permanent residency?"