Shabana Mahmood puts the signs up: Britain is full. No blacks, no dogs, no Irish

Shabana Mahmood was in a determined frame of mind. It was time to get serious. No more Mr Nice Guy stuff when dealing with illegal immigrants. Not that there was anything like a legal immigrant as far as she was concerned. The only good migrant was a deported migrant

Letter: Lord Taverne obituary

When my family arrived from Argentina in 1976, my mother, Rosalia Lelchuk Staricoff, shared a bench at the research laboratories of the Middlesex hospital with Janice Taverne. When our bank accounts were frozen for a while during the Falklands war of 1982, she and her husband, Dick Taverne, helped us. They continued to be supportive, and a couple of years later we became British citizens.In 2007, Dick handed over his parliamentary science communicator award of £500 for the benefit of the children at St Bartholomew’s CE primary school in Brighton, where I was the deputy headteacher. We put it to good use

UK downplays reports it has stopped sharing intelligence with US regarding narco-traffickers

Britain’s foreign secretary has downplayed reports that the UK had stopped sharing intelligence with the US that could be used by the Americans to conduct deadly attacks against alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean.Yvette Cooper, speaking on a ministerial trip to Naples, said “longstanding intelligence and law enforcement frameworks” that existed between the countries were continuing as the US deployed a carrier strike group to the region.She said: “As you know, we don’t comment on the detail of intelligence matters, but I think you’ll probably have seen the US secretary of state has dismissed some of the reports that have been made.”Cooper was making the first public comments by a British minister on reports from last week that the UK had halted a line of intelligence sharing amid concerns it believed the US bombing campaign was not legal under international law.Marco Rubio described the reports, first made by CNN, as “a false story, it’s a fake story”

How to stop the rise of Reform UK? Expose its contradictions | Letters

The combination of charts showing the spread of Reform UK supporters (Who supports Reform and why?, 13 November), and Aditya Chakrabortty’s typically shrewd and combative commentary (The real Reform voters have been revealed – it’s a slapdash coalition Farage will struggle to hold together, 13 November) represented a rare bright spot in an increasingly bleak political landscape.They provide a clear roadmap towards challenging what too many doomsayers have been presenting as the inevitability of a Reform UK victory at the next general election.The task now for those who are alarmed by the rise of Nigel Farage’s cult is to use these findings to constantly highlight the inherent contradictions within his policies, while remembering the wisdom of one 19th-century political economist who said that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the task is to change it. Keir Starmer, take note.Les Bright Exeter, Devon Aditya Chakrabortty suggests that, come a general election, Nigel Farage will have to “cobble together an actual platform, he’ll have to pick a side” from his “curious dish of microwaved Thatcherism, seasoned with a big dash of old Labour”

Wasted public money and Rachel Reeves’s income tax hokey cokey | Letters

In discussion of the chancellor’s need to raise taxes and cut spending, there has been too little focus on making better use of current resources. Every day, money is wasted because fragmented public services continue to work in silos and are not organised around the needs of individuals, families and communities. Too little is spent on preventing problems and too much on responding to them.As ministers and officials, we promoted Total Place pilots in 2009-10. They showed that far better outcomes could be achieved for the same money when Whitehall allowed local service leaders to work with local communities across service and budget boundaries

No 10 turns to influencers to reach audiences beyond mainstream media

Next time you’re scrolling on TikTok or Instagram and that fitness guru or “mumfluencer” you follow pops up, they might be joined by an unexpected guest.As part of a UK government strategy to reach voters on social media – where more than half of people now get their news – ministers including Keir Starmer are making appearances on some of the most popular channels.Last week, the science communicator Simon Clark broadcast his FaceTime call with Starmer at the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil to his 73,000 followers.The campaigner Anna Whitehouse – who goes by Mother Pukka – posted clips of her conversation with Bridget Phillipson about the inadequacies of the English childcare system to 444,000 followers in July.And earlier this month, two personal finance influencers, Cameron Smith and Abi Foster, were given front-row seats at Rachel Reeves’s press conference where she warned voters about forthcoming tax rises