Shadow chancellor’s remarks mark shift in tone for party, which has preferred to not talk about Brexit so far

Labour would try to improve elements of the UK’s trade deal with the EU, Rachel Reeves has indicated, saying also that most financial services companies have “not regarded Brexit as being a great opportunity for their businesses”.

While Labour remains committed to not making any major changes to Brexit, the shadow chancellor’s comments show that the party could nonetheless make more policy moves on EU trade links than previously believed.

Blow to London’s fashion scene as British creatives find it makes commercial sense to move shows to Italian city

Milan men’s fashion week is where all the big Italian names converge. It’s where Prada dictates what trouser shape everyone will one day be wearing and where Gucci drops the next it-bag. But as the shows got under way at the weekend an unexpected new trend was emerging: the great fashion Brexit.

Just four months after making his debut as creative director of Dunhill at London fashion week, Simon Holloway instead chose the Italian capital for the brand’s spring/summer ’25 show. On Sunday he aimed to recreate “the sense of a beautiful spring day in England” by showing in a garden in Milan.

Survey finds more people blame Brexit than anything else for supply problems

Almost half of adults in the UK have struggled to get medicine they have been prescribed – and more people blame Brexit than anything else for the situation, research shows.

Forty-nine per cent of people said they had had trouble getting a prescription dispensed over the past two years, the period during which supply problems have increased sharply.

One in 12 people (8%) have gone without a medication altogether because it was impossible to obtain.

Thirty-one per cent found the drug they needed was out of stock at their pharmacy.

Twenty-three per cent of pharmacies did not have enough of the medication available.

PM says it ‘would not be appropriate’ to say whether Craig Williams knew that he was going to call a July election

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Plaid Cymru is also calling for higher windfall taxes on energy companies, and for Wales to get revenue from the Crown Estate in Wales.

Ap Iorwerth said:

The lack of control over our natural resources means that we are energy-rich but fuel-poor. Plaid Cymru will fight for economic fairness by increasing windfall taxes and demanding the transfer of powers over the Crown Estate to create green jobs and build prosperity.

For Wales, fourteen years of Tory cuts and chaos have cut our public services to the bone but there is no sign that a Labour government will offer any meaningful change either. Our communities have been left to pay the price of decades of underinvestment from both London parties.

Dutch hauliers say facilities at border posts where some trucks are held for up to 20 hours are inadequate

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Lorry drivers could start rejecting jobs transporting goods from continental Europe to the UK unless delays are reduced and driver conditions improved at post-Brexit border posts, the biggest trade body for Dutch hauliers has warned.

Transport en Logistiek Nederland (TLN), which represents 5,000 Dutch transport companies, said its members were facing average waits of more than four hours in Britain because of the new checks brought in after the UK’s exit from the EU, with some being held at border posts for up to 20 hours.

Brexit border checks are just the latest hurdle placed before British farmers. Labour must do more to back our food producers

Just before the election was called, news broke of Sue Gray’s so-called “shit list”: an inventory compiled by the Labour leader’s chief of staff of the immediate challenges an incoming Labour government would face. They include the potential collapse of Thames Water, prison overcrowding and chronic-acute issues with the NHS. One challenge was notable for its absence: the very real risk of empty supermarket shelves. The fact is British agriculture is in crisis. Its absence from the list is not entirely surprising. Historically, Labour has been an urban party. At the 2019 election it won just three of the 100 most rural seats. It has never quite grasped the importance or complexities of agriculture and the food supply chain.

That said, the Tories won 96 of those 100 seats, have many farmer MPs and have still made a bloody mess of it. The first challenge they will bequeath to Labour, should it win, involves untying the tangled knot around imports and exports. The confused introduction of hyper-bureaucratic and horrendously expensive border checks is the result of hardcore Brexit ideology. Boris Johnson could have negotiated alignment with the EU on food standards and animal welfare. Then we would simply be doing internal checks as before, and trade would flow freely.

Although barely visible on TV, the UK’s 700,000-strong community has a growing presence in music, books and film. We meet some of its hidden stars

With its high-tempo use of Multicultural London English and blend of drum’n’bass and acoustic guitar, the song Five by Bedford-based rapper Pat is instantly recognisable as a product of the UK’s contemporary rap scene. Yet even the most fast-mouthed stars of British grime would probably struggle to integrate the word niezapowiedzianych (“unannounced”) into their rhyme schemes.

Born in Silesia, western Poland, Patryk “Pat” Wojcik moved with his family to England in 2007, three years after Poland joined the European Union. He learned to speak English by listening to British rappers such as Jme and Devlin, and makes music that pays homage to his native country and his adopted home, with lyrics such as “I chase cash like I’m Mateusz Gotówka” – a nod to the Anglo-Polish Aston Villa footballer also known as Matty Cash.

Antonio Soprano says he was told to walk to a McDonald’s for food as there was none at Sevington

An Italian lorry driver has described the UK’s new post-Brexit controls as a “mess” after his lorry was held at a government-run border post for more than two days.

Antonio Soprano, 62, who was stopped while bringing plants into the country from central Italy, said he was offered nothing to eat during his 55-hour ordeal and instead was told by border officials that he should walk to a McDonald’s more than a mile away to get a meal.

Underlining his credentials as a creative thinker, the economist and Labour candidate for Swansea West offers a hopeful vision of the nation’s future – spurning leftwing utopianism as well as tackling 14 years of creeping decline

As proposed national rallying cries go, perhaps this one lacks swagger. But its modesty is deliberate, as the economist and Observer columnist Torsten Bell’s surprisingly hopeful new guide to halting this country’s crumbling decline explains. Chest-beating political promises to put the Great back into Great Britain are, he writes, really just distracting from the real issue, which is that the British are exceptional all right – only not in a good way. We stand out from our pack of medium-sized, richer-than-average countries for our low productivity, chronic wage stagnation and American-style high inequality (but sadly without the higher growth of the US).

We have truly world-beating housing costs, higher than any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country but Finland, but magically still deliver less living space per capita in return than famously cramped New York; we boast, if that’s the word, fewer hospital beds than all bar one other OECD nation.

The disconnect between promises and the material lives of voters that opened up in the referendum has not been repaired

Remember Brexit? For a topic that dominated several years of British political life after 2016, and the last general election, its near-total absence from this one is remarkable. Brexit did not come up once in the BBC leaders’ debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. It did once in the seven-way debate on Friday, raised by the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, who described it as an unmitigated disaster. The silence is beginning to feel less like omission than an act of collective repression.

Between the Tories and Labour there is a silent agreement, perfectly observed in the English tradition of avoiding uncomfortable conversations. It is increasingly jarring. Brexit’s consequences are now part and parcel of our layered crises. It features in the cost of living crisis – it has driven up inflation, accounting for a third of food-price inflation since 2019, according to an LSE paper. It lurks in the labour market, where higher immigration from outside the EU has not plugged a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of EU workers. It holds back growth, clobbering small businesses and choking bigger ones desperate for labour. As was the conclusion of a report this year summarised by London mayor Sadiq Khan: “The hardline version of Brexit we’ve ended up with is dragging our economy down.”