UK inflation fell more than expected to 2.6% in March thanks to falling petrol prices. Rachel Reeves says it’s a sign that Labour’s “plan for change is working”. More likely it’s “the calm before the storm”, economist Michael Saunders tells The Daily Telegraph, with the impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs and higher taxes and bills introduced this month yet to be felt. Britain’s Supreme Court has ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, after a women’s rights group appealed against the Scottish government’s argument that anyone with a “gender recognition certificate” should be entitled to sex-based protections. Heart failure patients in Britain are being given larger doses of drugs at the start of their treatment after a global study found that this could cut deaths by 62%. Those involved with introducing the new method in London and Swansea tell The Guardian it has been a “total gamechanger”.

Why were the Chinese allowed to buy British Steel?

I was startled to discover at the weekend that “almost everybody in parliament” supports taking control of Britain’s steel industry, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. “The case seems pretty shaky to me.” Of course, politicians love saving jobs. But supporting employment in a loss-making industry means, sooner or later, there’s always another bailout. Meantime, such state intervention is a red flag to anyone thinking of investing in Britain. Many argue domestically produced virgin steel is vital for our defence. Perhaps so if we were fighting a war against Germany, Spain or Italy, where 60% of our steel imports come from. But is that likely? What’s lamentable is that Britain is the only G7 economy that can’t sustain virgin steel production, because of our appallingly high energy prices. Without fixing that, politicians are just pumping taxpayer money into a “lame duck industry”.

It’s worth remembering how we got into this mess, says Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. When Nigel Farage says he is “100 per cent certain” the Chinese Communist Party “bought British Steel to close British Steel”, he’s not wrong. Beijing was certainly “relaxed” about the firm’s Chinese owner, Jingye, trying to sabotage the country’s last two blast furnaces, which would increase our need for Chinese imports. But why was Beijing allowed into our critical infrastructure in the first place? Much of the blame lies with the Tories in the years after George Osborne and David Cameron started sucking up to Xi Jinping. But in their defence, when Cameron was entertaining Xi in a Buckinghamshire pub, the full horror of China’s treatment of its Uighur minority, its brutal crackdowns in Hong Kong and its use of slave labour in producing Ed Miliband’s beloved solar panels, weren’t clear. Today, Labour has no excuse.