Thursday briefing: The £40bn funding gap, £22bn ‘black hole’ and more tricky terms, explained

In today's newsletter: Chancellor Rachel Reeves is painting a bleak picture ahead of the budget later this month. Here's what all the jargon means

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Good morning. I'm really sorry about this, but today's newsletter is about the extent of the black hole" in the public finances and the government's fiscal rules.

I don't like this any more than you do: I'd frankly rather be writing about whether King Conker is a cheat. But the budget is nearly upon us, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has started talking about a 40bn funding gap, when you might have only just got used to being alarmed about the 22bn black hole". Several of today's front pages carry reports of planned tax rises to balance the books; meanwhile, Reeves is planning to redefine debt to give herself more room for manoeuvre. If you have found yourself confused by this, congratulations on at least paying close enough attention to notice how knotty it all is.

Music | Liam Payne, a former member of the boyband One Direction, has died after falling from a third-floor hotel room in Buenos Aires. Hundreds of fans gathered outside the hotel to pay tribute after the news, while authorities in Argentina said they were investigating the circumstances of Payne's death.

National security | Counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Russian spies planted an incendiary device on a plane to Britain that caught fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham in July, the Guardian can reveal. Investigators are examining possible links with a similar incident in Germany, also in July.

Extremism | An international network of race science" activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur. Seattle businessman Andrew Conru pulled his support after being approached by the Guardian.

Asylum | Nearly 63,000 people who were waiting for their cases to be processed at the time of the general election are expected to be granted asylum after Labour dropped the Rwanda deportation scheme, an analysis has found. The Refugee Council said the asylum backlog was on track to be 59,000 cases lower at the start of 2025 after the processing of claims accelerated.

US election | Kamala Harris said her presidency would not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency" in her first interview with Fox News as she criticized Donald Trump over his threats against the enemy within". In a contentious interview, Harris was pressed on subjects where she has come under attack from the right including immigration and the rights of transgender people.

That just means debt should be falling by the last year of that period. That's it. Think about what that means: it's like saying on 1 January, right, I'm going to go on a diet this year, but I'm going to lose all the weight in December.

Nobody would take you seriously if you said that, and economists from a broad spectrum think it's stupid. Fiscal rules are there to look plausible, they are often broken when it comes to the crunch, and they rely on the public not really knowing what they mean."