Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has pledged that a Labour government will impose no new taxes beyond those already announced, on energy company profits, private schools and private equity bonuses. The Conservatives say they will raise the tax-free pension allowance, in a £2.4bn giveaway to pensioners. Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israeli airstrikes on a refugee camp in Rafah that killed at least 45 people on Sunday night were a “tragic mistake”. Despite an international outcry over the incident, the Israeli PM has vowed to continue the offensive in the southern Gazan city. Hundreds of “dairy-loving daredevils” took part in Gloucestershire’s annual cheese rolling race yesterday, says Sky News. The event sees competitors throw themselves down the near-vertical Cooper’s Hill in an effort to catch a 7lb wheel of Double Gloucester. Watch more footage here.

Taxing private schools: just “red meat” for the left?

In an “otherwise narcoleptic” radio interview on Friday, Keir Starmer made one uncharacteristically hard commitment, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. Charging 20% VAT on private school fees, he said, was a “day one priority”; he claimed the new tax would raise £1.7bn and fund 6,500 extra state school teachers. This is nonsense. Yes, parents at the top handful of £50,000-a-year boarding schools will be able to bear the additional cost, but the “great majority” of private pupils are at day schools charging more like £15,000. The Adam Smith Institute estimates that if, in the worst-case scenario, the poorest 25% of those students are pushed into being educated at the taxpayer’s expense, the policy will end up costing the government £1.6bn. And for what? To remind voters that Rishi Sunak went to Winchester. “What a sordid stratagem.”

Everyone knows this is really just about “throwing a bit of red meat” to those on the left of the Labour Party who are “motivated by class envy”, says Ross Clark in The Spectator. But this attack would feel “a bit more of an outrage” had top independent schools not spent the past 30 years “steadily pricing the middle classes out of private education”. Since 2003, fees have risen by 55% in real terms, meaning doctors, small business-owners, newsletter deputy editors and the like have found themselves turning to the state system for the first time. Meanwhile, of the 556,551 pupils enrolled at private schools last year, 62,708 were from overseas. Not all these schools pitch themselves to the international market, but those which have “come to rely on oligarchs’ children to allow them to jack up fees” can hardly complain when Labour sees them as fair game.

🗳️ 37 days to go…
“Let me have men about me that are fat,” says Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And voters seem to agree, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. “A wealth of research shows that tubbier politicians – tubbier male politicians, at any rate – are seen as serious, dependable and likely to be good in a crisis.” And think of the MPs who have been called “heavyweights”: from Denis Healey to Ken Clarke, they have often “literally been heavy”. Rishi Sunak is certainly not fat; indeed, he tries to fast for one day a week. I wonder whether, “in this most superficial of ages”, this will count against him.

Loaded has returned to the shelves, nine years after the once-loved lads mag closed down, says The Times. The publication is being relaunched as a website, but members get a 30th anniversary print magazine featuring 58-year-old cover star Liz Hurley – who fronted the first issue back in 1994. “Men need to be men,” says editor Danni Levy, “and there should be no shame in them being able to ogle beautiful women.” She says the goal is to appeal to original Loaded readers, who are “now living happily at home with their wife and kids but still reminisce about their nights spent clubbing until 3am, drinking £1 shots, with a bedroom covered in posters of half-naked women”.

The eternal Conservative contradiction

Conservatives face an eternal contradiction, says Janan Ganesh in the FT: they support free markets, but those markets “scramble established patterns of life”, which they also cherish. Take Margaret Thatcher. She revived Britain’s economy, making it “Europe’s shambling neighbour” no longer. But in the nation she has moulded, national assets belong to foreigners, and the capital city belongs “more to the world than to Britain”. Former hedge-funder Rishi Sunak is “the most thoroughgoing capitalist to have held the office of UK prime minister”; he’s also enough of a stickler for nationhood to have supported Brexit before Boris Johnson did. And he too has been unstuck by this contradiction.

His government has tended to prioritise tradition: preserving the greenbelt over building more houses; legal sovereignty over exports, and so on. It’s a legitimate choice – but one made “with no awareness of the cost to growth”, just as Thatcher never anticipated the cultural upheaval caused by her quest for growth. An Abu Dhabi-backed consortium recently gave up its bid to buy The Daily Telegraph, in the face of “scandalised right-wingers” citing “the sanctity of national institutions”. Some of these very conservatives once told me that “buccaneering Brexit Britain” would embrace the outside world as Europe never could. For the UK, “traditionalism isn’t affordable”: our domestic market is small, and trade “a colossal share of national output”. I believe Sunak wanted to make Britain better off. “He just never resolved, or even recognised, the fact that one half of his worldview would always get in the way.”

London’s newly qualified corporate lawyers get paid astronomical salaries, but they still represent exceptional value for money, says John Gapper in the FT. An associate lawyer on £200,000, for example, can work 2,000 billable hours a year that can be charged to clients at £400 or £500 each. So they bring in “up to £1m in revenue”.

It’s the “holy grail of shipwrecks”, which the Colombian government has started exploring, says BBC News. The San José galleon was sunk off the northern coast of Colombia by the British Royal Navy in 1708, while carrying Spanish booty worth as much as £16bn in today’s money – one of the largest hauls of treasure ever lost at sea. The wreck was discovered in 2015, but its ownership remains contested. This week, a Colombian research vessel began deploying remote sensors and underwater robots to have a nose around.