See if you can do a better job than John Healey at creating a budget that keeps MPs and the bond markets onside

On 28 October, John Healey will announce the autumn budget to parliament. As in all years, the chancellor has to strike a balance between the following:

Raising the money needed to fund the services that voters demand.

Keeping taxes at levels that are acceptable to voters.

Persuading the government’s creditors in the bond markets that it will continue to be able to pay its debts.

Europe’s leaders can no longer trust a word that comes out of Washington. No more slaps on the wrist – we need concrete steps to punish Trump

Historical comparisons are always inexact. No one conflict precisely mirrors another. Yet Donald Trump’s shameless appeasement of Vladimir Putin carries more than a noxious whiff of Neville Chamberlain’s failed attempt in Munich in 1938 to head off war with Nazi Germany. To be fair to the former UK prime minister – and history largely hasn’t been – his peacemaking efforts had the enthusiastic backing of most people in Britain and France who, like him, were desperate to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the first world war. Trump enjoys no equivalent public support for his treachery. Nor does he face the prospect of a US war with Russia. His betrayal of Ukraine is cynically self-interested, globally dangerous and utterly contemptible.

US-Russian talks on agreeing the shoddy terms of a precedent-setting American sell-out of Ukraine are at an advanced stage, after meetings in St Petersburg this week. Trump has zigzagged over the war ever since returning to office. Now, panicked by record-low poll ratings, he seems determined to scapegoat Ukraine and force its de facto capitulation. Recent steps – his shocking decision to fund Putin’s war machine by buying Russian diesel, his waiving of tougher sanctions, his mysterious, lethal interruptions in US satellite and intelligence sharing with Kyiv, and his renewed attempt to oust Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – mark Trump out as the skulking Judas, the craven Brutus of the modern age. He makes Chamberlain look like a man of iron principle. All that’s lacking is an umbrella.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

James says Tony leaving the cat’s water bowl where they prepare food is unhygienic. Should they feed their feline on the floor? You decide

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It’s unhygienic. The cat will jump out of her litter box and on to the surface where we prepare food

An inflatable Lady Godiva is just one of the thrills in a Pia Camil’s ode to lust. But why is Mark Leckey feeling so doomy and Cindy Sherman so bougie?

Sundays were deadly, the generation gap between parents and their kids was enormous, and a pint cost 50p. The frisson of casual violence was everywhere. When I left school and set off to travel, I had no sense at all of where I was going or what I would find

I am wandering down a steep and unfamiliar street in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, a force seven gale blowing in my face, when I look up to cross the road and see a back garden running up the hillside opposite. It ends in a granite rock face about 30ft high, and in that moment, I have a vivid flashback to being sat on top of it, watching a group of people in the garden below. I can’t conjure their faces, but the memory is all too real: the sun on my face, a woman calling up: “Don’t break your neck!” I can tell she’s not worried and neither am I. Nobody is. It’s a party and we’re young and we’re drunk and we’re carefree, without a worry in the world. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.

I continue down the street, spooked by the power of the recollection, how it has ambushed me. I stand outside the house. I could swear I’ve never seen it before. Did I come to the party over the cliff? Should I knock on the door? Hi, this is going to sound weird but I was in your back garden about 42 years ago and I haven’t a clue why but I’ve just remembered it like it was yesterday …

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The nine-piece London-based group take a radically fresh approach to traditional music, sounding raging, lo-fi and joyful as they link Britain’s violent past to its present

Those thus far unaware of Shovel Dance Collective’s bracing approach to folk should probably note that their third album is not much interested in breaking newcomers in gently. Everything in Readiness kicks off with a three-song suite that lasts more than 10 minutes and takes you, via a series of dramatic sonic jump-cuts, from a grinding one-note drone to a reel that seems to split the difference between trad folk fiddle-playing and the punishing squall of the Velvet Underground’s Black Angel’s Death Song. It then leaps to Tally Ho! Hark Away!, which sets a hunting song first collected in the late 1940s over a blast of what might best be described as ecstatic noise. It’s genuinely hard to work out what instruments are involved in the clattering arrhythmic chaos behind the vocal – there’s definitely a heavily distorted guitar in the mix – but the effect is weirdly euphoric rather than claustrophobic: a kind of purgative release after the mounting weirdness of the preceding reel.

If you’re looking for evidence that the nine-piece London-based group take a radically fresh approach to folk music, then there it is. The glib shorthand is that they’re doing for traditional English music what Lankum have done for its Irish equivalent – joining the dots with the kind of out-there experimentation that fills the pages of the Wire magazine – although it should be pointed out they sound almost nothing like Lankum. Anyone who already has an interest in leftfield explorations of British musical history might suggest their chaotic collage approach feels more akin to the fascinating collections of field recordings, folk song and avant garde composition released by Todmorden-based label Folklore Tapes. The music on Everything in Readiness careens unpredictably from gentle lo-fi recordings caked in distortion and tape hiss to the tumultuous, surging racket they serve up on their version of the traditional coalminer’s song Jowl, Jowl and Listen; from singing unaccompanied by anything but the sound of birdsong to the disquieting ambient shimmer of Who Killed Cock Robin? A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), which sounds like it was recorded in a vast, echoing crypt.

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Andy Burnham has been urged by one of his most senior former advisers to tax internet sales more heavily than in-store purchases to help “level the playing field” for struggling high streets.

As the prime minister and his chancellor, John Healey, prepare for their first budget next week, Andy Haldane joined calls for action to stop more shops closing across the UK.

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The Office for National Statistics has also published a report on the gender pay gap. It says:

The gender pay gap for full-time employees has continued to decline in the UK. It was 6.8% in April 2026, down from 7.2% in April 2025. This compares with 9.4% a decade ago and 16.4% 25 years ago.

Secondly, I asked Healey whether he sees the banks as making excessive profits, which would be the coherent justification for him to increase the surcharge on bank profits – as he is expected to do in the Budget next week.

He said: “You know the banks are the engine of investment in this country. The banks are doing well at the moment and that is good to see.

Equating to the loss of 5% of its 93,000 global staff, job cuts come as bank announces jump in quarterly profits

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Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs as part of wider cost-saving plans that its bosses say are being driven by advances in AI.

The job cuts will mean losing about 5% of the bank’s 93,000 global staff, with executives confirming they had already cut 1,000 workers since the start of the year.

Experts say Russia is trying to destroy energy infrastructure before winter and US ‘appeasement and flattery’ will not achieve peace

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Russia has carried out a massive “demonstrative” attack on Ukraine, bombarding Kyiv with ballistic missiles just hours after Vladimir Putin said he had agreed to resume trilateral negotiations after talks with the US envoy Steve Witkoff.

Overnight, Moscow pounded the Ukrainian capital, killing at least two people and wounding 22, including four children. Targets included the southern bridge over the Dnipro River, civilian houses, energy infrastructure, an ambulance station, office buildings and a monastery.