Mahmood’s immigration backlash

Good morning. Shabana Mahmood’s proposals to exempt care workers from her immigration reforms have been criticised, as reporters questioned the Home Secretary’s own claim earlier this year that such a move would cost the taxpayer £10 billion. Andy Burnham will pledge £40 million for infrastructure projects in the Caribbean; he’s with the King in Antigua today. Americans are casting their votes in the midterm elections, while European nations are trying to work out who hacked the fridges again. At least 26 were killed in the Russian bombing of an aid distribution site in Ukraine. Anthropic announced plans to spend more than the annual US defence budget on computing power over the next few years, and scientists have managed to extract dinosaur blood from fossils. You’re reading Spectator Daily: here’s everything you need to know today.

IMMIGRATION BACKLASH

Well, it seems like no one’s happy with Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms. ‘Mahmood backs down’, says the Times. ‘Mahmood’s £10 billion migrant climbdown’, says the Mail, while the Telegraph goes with ‘Mahmood migrant U-turn to cost £10bn’. The Mirror is nice, predictably, praising a ‘rethink’, but the Guardian isn’t excited, merely saying Mahmood ‘rowed back on her most hardline plans’.

Not a sleeper agent after all, clearly

Let’s not beat around the bush: these immigration reforms are weaker than the ones Shabana Mahmood wanted a year ago. The critical change is care workers, a profession so close to the Prime Minister’s heart that discussing them brought him close to tears at Labour conference. Almost 300,000 foreign care workers will be exempted from tougher Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) rules. This means, if you add the care workers to other groups such as higher earners, NHS and education workers, only 500,000 of the 1.9 million foreign nationals eligible for settlement by 2030 will end up waiting longer.

One contentious aspect of this is the cost: Mahmood herself warned of a £10 billion drain on the public finances in March if ILR was not extended to care workers for 15 years. Between 2022 and 2024, some 612,266 health and social care-related visas were issued, half of them to dependants. All will have access to welfare by the end of the decade, from which they will be able to live, work and claim benefits in Britain for the rest of their lives (and change jobs away from social care).

Unison said it had ‘led the charge’ against the plans, but opposition also came from Angela Rayner, who described the reforms as ‘un-British’ before her return to the cabinet.

There were some tightenings, as Mahmood said that ‘until now [settled status] has been given almost automatically. From today it must be earned.’ Other low-paid workers will still have to wait ten years before becoming eligible, doubling the previous period. They’ll also need a perfect criminal record, sustained national insurance contributions and English at a higher standard. ILR was extended to up to 30 years for ‘illegal entry’ by small boat.

Opposition politicians were furious. Kemi Badenoch, in today’s Mail, said she would have supported some elements of Mahmood’s reforms, but said she reversed because ‘Angela Rayner and the left flank of Labour backbenchers didn’t like it’. Nigel Farage referred to it as a ‘very major U-turn’. Some on Labour’s left, such as John McDonnell and Diane Abbott, still said it was too mean. Steerpike has another interesting detail: only 18 per cent of respondents to the Home Office’s consultation were British citizens.

Now read: Madeline Grant sketched the speech, noting the transformation of Mahmood from ‘hardliner to marshmallow’. Today’s leader columns are also interesting. The Times points out that Labour will now hold some culpability over large numbers of people settling: ‘The Boriswave is now the Burnhamwave, and it may overwhelm Labour at the next election.’ Even the Guardian isn’t too favourable, saying that Mahmood’s logic ‘is to admit foreigners to fill labour shortages in lower-earning work while keeping their membership of society conditional. Calling this integration seems a stretch.’ The climbdown seems to have pleased no one outside the Labour party, but it might have done enough not to mortally offend those inside it.

CHARLES TO GO FURTHER THAN BLAIR

King Charles will address the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua at around 2 p.m. UK time; 53 of 56 eligible member states have signalled they will come, with leaders including our own Andy Burnham alongside Canada’s Mark Carney, Australia’s Anthony Albanese, India’s External Affairs Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishanakar, and Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister, Gan Kim Yong, all set to attend in person.

It was widely trailed that Charles would make a formal apology for Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, going further than Tony Blair, who made an informal apology in 2007. The Palace has since clarified that while the speech will acknowledge slavery, it will not put forward a formal apology: apparently the King’s role is not in the making of policy but helping to ‘inspire and convene’. The concern here is that a formal apology could be a slippery slope, both politically and legally, leading directly to reparations. Burnham has already written in the Guardian that while he is not against an apology, he does not want Britain to pay reparations.

‘“Inspire and convene”, they wrote…’

But that’s not the end of it. The Telegraph reports that Burnham is planning to give over £40 million over the next three years to fund infrastructure developments in the Caribbean. It is not a particularly large sum of money – by comparison in 2025 we handed £142 million to Nigeria (Africa’s largest oil and gas producer). But if British governments make a habit of handing over sums of money when they are embarrassed about historical injustices, there will be many more countries remembering our ancestor’s purported crimes against their own.

‘I see you have three years’ experience filling in job applications.’

AMERICA GOES TO THE POLLS

It’s midterm time across the Atlantic, with Americans voting today in elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives. In Washington D.C., Donald Trump made his last public speech to the nation yesterday by highlighting his renovations. He gave his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has had a paint job. He also referred to 2,300 lighting fixture fixes around the capital, as well as 83 statue renovations. He added that ‘the Democratic party has nominated the most extreme and dangerous slate of candidates in America’s history.’

‘If you vote me back in, I’ll give you all a kitchen extension’

However, he sounded downbeat at points, even noting that usually ‘the sitting President doesn’t win the midterms… [but] we gave this a very strong shot’. He said in a podcast recorded on Friday that he would be ‘Mr Veto’ if the Democrats take control of Congress: ‘I veto everything, I’ll be vetoing, vetoing’. In Ohio, J.D. Vance said that it was ‘the most important midterm election of my lifetime, and I am closing out this midterm campaign right where it all started for me, the great state of Ohio, because I know you’re going to choose right tomorrow’.

What are voters most worried about? Well, healthcare costs consistently top the polls. A third of voters said they were at least ‘somewhat worried’, with a quarter ‘very worried’. Those who get their insurance from the Affordable Care Act saw the average monthly benchmark premium rise from $497 a month in 2025 to $625 this year. An FT poll finds that more than two-thirds of voters are unhappy with Trump’s handling of the cost of living and affordability.

Most polls suggest the Democrats will win a majority in the House of Representatives, but the Senate is more of a toss-up. The party will be cheered by a New York Times-Siena poll from the weekend which showed them leading in almost all the seven ‘toss-up’ races, but we’ve seen pollsters get it wrong before.

However, it’s never quiet with the Dems, and the last few days have seen an interesting feud break out in Michigan between the candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, who he beat in the primary. Stevens has endorsed El-Sayed’s Republican rival, Mike Rogers, arguing that El-Sayed’s election would endanger Michigan’s Jews because he opposes America’s support for Israel.

We’ll have all we know in Morning Press tomorrow, but for those staying up… from midnight, we’ll start getting results from the East Coast. Georgia and North Carolina’s Senate results could indicate the strength of the Dems’ showing: they were previously thought to be toss-ups but should now be fairly positive for the Dems. However, registered Democrats are more likely to cast their ballots early, so expect lots of talk of initial ‘blue mirages’. Kansas could be a particularly interesting state: it’s on track to elect its first Democratic senator since the 1930s, although we might not know by tomorrow morning.

STRIKES IN IRAN AND RUSSIA

On Monday, the day before the midterms, the US renewed its strikes on Iran. Officials confirmed strikes had taken place on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, apparently in response to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shooting at an American aircraft. There has been speculation Trump will return to significant attacks in the region after the elections, but he has sought to play this down in recent days.

At least 26 people were killed in a Russian bombing of an aid distribution centre in Ukraine yesterday. At least nine 3,000kg aerial bombs hit the village of Komyshuvakha in the country’s south. Volodymyr Zelensky said the first strike on a local school hit a building being ‘used for humanitarian needs’. He added that ‘this is yet another proof that Russia does not want any de-escalation’. Ukrainian, Russian and American negotiators are due to restart peace talks in the next few days, although no breakthroughs are expected.

Instead, Washington continues to somewhat reintroduce Russia to the fold, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The White House wants a fast resumption of Russian natural gas sales to Europe via pipelines running through Ukraine, the paper hears. Russian gas would be sold to the continent via a US intermediary, so as to circumvent European sanctions, which American investors could make money from. Currently, EU legislation says all purchases of Russian natural gas must be phased out by the end of next year. A Kremlin spokesman on Monday said a resumption of the exports was impossible because of the ‘situation on the ground’.

Meanwhile, some suspected Russia’s hand behind another cyberattack on European supermarket freezers yesterday, although experts said the underlying weaknesses in such technologies are so simple that amateurs could expose them. Dozens of shops in at least seven European countries saw fridge temperatures raised as high as 55C, with large amounts of food being ruined. At least 60 shops were affected in Belgium, 13 in Ireland, and others in Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia and Luxembourg. A previous hack, three weeks ago on French shops, spoiled tens of millions of pounds worth of food.

Is now perhaps a time to ask why all the fridges are connected to the internet?

In the US, Californian voters will decide today whether to impose a one-off 5 per cent tax on the state’s billionaires. Those for the levy say they want to spend the tens of billions of dollars on healthcare to try and offset Donald Trump’s cuts (90 per cent of it will be reserved for that anyway). Bernie Sanders and healthcare unions have supported it, although the state’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom is against it, with several worrying that billionaires could relocate investment. Mark Zuckerberg is the most high-profile individual who’s threatened to leave the state, although Meta convinced him to stay by devising a plan to help him pay the tax without sacrificing any control of the company.

And Anthropic published plans yesterday to spend more than $1 trillion (£745 billion) on computing power over the next couple of years. In an updated stock market filing, the company announced plans to spend close to the GDP of Poland, as well as 32 times its revenues in the first nine months of this year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq had a slightly better day yesterday, although jitters over bubble fears are increasing: October was the index’s worst month for a year and a half.

Parents must be free to query a child’s sexuality – Kathleen Stock

The future of AI will be shaped by a few dozen people – New York

The end of online anonymity is here – Andrew Orlowski

Did the world just gain hundreds of millions of Alzheimer’s patients? – New Yorker

Is curiosity good for us? – London Review of Books

Prepare for a horror – the Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2026 has been announced as ‘mogging’. The playful term means outshining, outperforming or upstaging others. Other contenders for this year’s word were ‘maxxing’ (Dictionary.com went for this last week), ‘agentic’ or ‘aura farming’ (I wrote, a few years ago, about why this is all terrible here). Although, for that, you could reasonably call me ‘unc’.

The Champions League is back this evening. Barcelona will host Aston Villa at 8 p.m., which is nice to see: a particularly 1980s sort of fixture. However, all eyes will be on Manchester United’s home fixture against Roma, also kicking off at the same time. Under-pressure manager Michael Carrick said it might sound ‘crazy’, but he was looking forward to the game. If they don’t win, that’ll make it ten games, extending the winless run to its longest since 1977-78.

Think of the payout, Michael!

Good news! Scientists have managed to extract and identify fossilised dinosaur blood for the first time. Now we’ll be able to take a look at the blood chemistry of a distant relative of the T-rex. Now, of course, this is essentially the start of Jurassic Park, in which scientists resurrect dinosaurs by taking DNA from their blood. However, researchers haven’t yet been able to find DNA, which would be needed to recreate them. Having said that, scientists said it proved that ancient biological molecules are more durable than we thought. Practice your best Jeff Goldblum face.

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