The Financial Times this morning reports The Bank of England is expected to vote in favor of a second interest rate cut this year, despite predictions that Rachel Reeves’ budget will boost demand in the short term, as the British central bank focuses on a slowdown inflation in the longer term.

Related to this, Labour’s much-maligned tax raid continued to make (bad) headlines over the weekend and into today.

The FT reports the chancellor Comments from Rachel Reeves yesterdaywhich suggests that UK businesses can “absorb” the rise in national insurance, “by accepting a reduction in profits or making efficiency gains, rather than passing on lower pay rises to workers”.

But the same publication also runs an article by NFU president Tom Bradshaw ridiculing the new inheritance tax rules – which will see farming businesses worth more than £1million. hit with an IHT tax rate of 20%.

Bradshaw writes that “very few viable farms are worth less than £1 million”. and with looming increases in employers’ national insurance and increases in the national living wage, “many of these businesses will not be able to absorb the financial pressure”, he warns, in a worrying commentary titled “Farmers British people no longer have to pay anything. give”.

Reeves’ “malicious” budget, and his move to IHT in particular, is also one of the headline stories in The Times this morning, with a interview with entrepreneur James Dyson warning of the “death of entrepreneurship”. A separate editorial from Dyson claims budget will ‘tear the very fabric of our economy’.

Elsewhere, the Times says M&S set to announce ‘strong sales’ this week in its first half results, as its recovery continues. “Current consensus forecasts estimate that M&S ​​will report first-half sales of £6.6 billion, an increase of 7 per cent on the same period last year,” reports he.

The group’s share price has soared 70 per cent since the start of the year to its highest level in eight years, in a ‘vote of confidence’ from investors in its growth strategy .

As The grocer reported this morning, Sainsbury’s decided to match the price of up to 200 Aldi products in its small stores.

The BBC reports that while shopping locally may be “convenient,” those who rely on convenience stores “may end up paying more” — in an article used to resurface allegations from a September episode of Panorama, which revealed the price of Dozens of Tesco products – matching Aldi “were not identical”.

Read the grocer’s point of view on these Panorama revelations here…

All major media outlets also continued to cover the devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, with the The King and Queen were pelted with mud yesterday by residents angry at the government’s response to the disaster.

Hundreds of people died in floods, and as The Grocer reported last weekthe rains also devastated thousands of hectares of land in a key region for fruit and vegetable production.

The Times Saturday I went back to last week’s Neal’s Yard cheese theft story, with an article arguing that high-value British artisan cheeses should be considered “like fine wine or sports cars”. A 63-year-old man was arrested in connection with the case last Thursday, the Met Police confirmed.

Finally, the Observer reported yesterday campaigners are calling for new legislation on gene editing for crops to be extended to farm animals, with the aim of increasing their resistance to disease or reducing their carbon footprint. Professor John Hammond, director of research at the Pirbright Institute, told The Observer: “In an era of climate change and other threats, we need to be able to make the most of technologies such as Gene editing to improve the lives of animals. »