John Healey will deliver his first budget this afternoon, promising “breathing space” for households and targeted support for businesses. The chancellor will scrap standing charges on gas bills, and is expected to increase the minimum wage, flesh out Andy Burnham’s Your First Home scheme and raise taxes on banks. Dozens of people have been killed and scores more injured after two high-speed trains collided south of Madrid this morning. More than 500 passengers were travelling on the trains, and the region’s president has said the current death toll of 30 will almost certainly rise. Spanish newspaper El Pais quotes government sources blaming the crash on “human error” after a signal failure. An anonymous bidder has bought the skeleton of a Nanotyrannus lancensis for $47.3m, making it the second most expensive dinosaur fossil ever to sell at auction. The 67-million-year-old skeleton, named Jodi after the rancher who discovered it, spans 20ft from nose to tail and is made up of 191 bones.

The “virtue hoarders” destroying the left

Few would describe Zohran Mamdani as a shill for Israel, says Aaron Bastani in UnHerd. The socialist New York City mayor has consistently described events in Gaza as a genocide, and on his first day in office he revoked several pro-Israel executive orders signed by his predecessor. But for the radical left, that still wasn’t enough. When Mamdani attended a vigil marking the three-year anniversary of October 7, hundreds of protesters voiced their contempt for America’s most powerful left-wing politician. “Mayor Mamdani, you can’t hide,” they chanted. “We charge you with genocide!” The radical left are similarly deranged here in Britain. When senior figures in the Green Party questioned the wisdom of passing a motion that “Zionism is racism”, they themselves were accused of being Zionists.

Such intense internecine squabbling isn’t new, of course, nor limited to politics. Freud’s “narcissism of small differences”, where minor disagreements with those close to you assume outsize importance, is evident everywhere from bickering siblings to religious sectarianism. But the internet and social media seem to be making it worse. The cultural theorist Catherine Liu calls this “virtue hoarding” – where political activists aren’t trying to win power, but to display “an unbreachable moral superiority” over everyone else. It’s an inherently self-defeating approach. If virtue can only be hoarded when it’s a minority position, then once mainstream opinion shifts towards you – as should surely be the goal – you have to shift yourself. And it makes “movement politics”, of the sort we on the left have been successfully pursuing for more than two centuries, all but impossible. “When you have the virtue hoarders on your side, who needs enemies?”