UK inflation has risen to 2.3% in October, the highest rate for six months. The spike, driven by the increase in energy prices following the 10% lift in Britain’s energy cap last month, cements expectations that the Bank of England will not drop interest rates again this year. The US and several other western countries have temporarily closed their embassies in Kyiv after receiving information that a “significant air attack” could be imminent, says The Daily Telegraph. The threat comes a day after Ukraine fired US-supplied long-range missiles deep into Russia for the first time. “Manifest” has been named the word of the year by the Cambridge Dictionary. In its modern usage the word means to “dream or will something into existence”, and has seen a “surge of celebrity-inspired popularity”, says The Guardian. Pop star Dua Lipa and US gymnast Simone Biles both attribute their success to the woo-woo practice.

What Treasury bean counters get wrong about farmers

You can see why a Whitehall economist might think imposing inheritance tax on farmers was a good idea, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman. While the new headline threshold is £1m, for married couples that can effectively rise to £3m – and even then the 20% rate is half what it is for everyone else. But farmers really are different. The key distinction is that a farm’s assets – land, machinery and so on – are vastly disproportionate to its earnings. The CEO of a normal company with, say, £10m in assets would expect to earn a “very decent salary”; the equivalent family farmer might earn less than minimum wage. The other big difference is that most farmers – as many as 70%, according to one online poll – “wish their assets were worth less”. Try finding a start-up founder who “wishes their share price was lower”.

The government has clearly been taken aback by the anger over these changes, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Treasury bean counters thought only 500 estates a year would be affected; farming groups say those sums are wrong and that the real figure will be much higher. Crucially – and unlike with the VAT change for private schools – inheritance tax is “reviled” by most of the public, so farmers enjoy widespread sympathy. And Labour only has itself to blame. Keir Starmer won office in part by promising not to enact more wide-ranging, universal tax rises. That has left the chancellor “overly reliant on fiddly, precision-targeted revenue raids” – each of which carries the risk of annoying some particular interest group. First it was pensioners, with the cuts to winter fuel payment; now it’s farmers. With more of these to come, it’s going to be hard for Labour to get out of its “defensive crouch”.

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