The kids growing up might have changed this show’s appeal, but they manage to go out in a flame-throwing, bullet-dodging blaze of glory – while still being more moving than ever before

Time’s up for Stranger Things. The fifth and last season arrives almost three-and-a-half years after a fourth run that felt like a finale, not least because it seemed the kids had grown up. Having originally aped beloved 1980s films where stubbornly brave children avert apocalypse, the franchise now starred young adults and had adjusted plotlines and dialogue accordingly. Life lessons had been learned. Selves had been found. Adolescent anxieties – as personified by Vecna, the narky telekinetic tree-man who rules a parallel dimension adjacent to the humdrum town of Hawkins, Indiana – had been put aside.

But Stranger Things now belatedly returns, with the cast all visibly in their 20s. This is a problem. The whole point is that it’s fun to watch kids outrun monsters by pedalling faster on their BMX bikes, or ignoring their mum calling them to dinner because they’re in the basement with their school pals, drawing up plans to bamboozle the US military using pencils, bubblegum and Dungeons & Dragons figurines. If everyone looks old enough to have a studio apartment and a stocks portfolio, none of the above really flies.

She’s the emerging star of this year’s dance show, wowing judges with her pasodoble. The pundit and former footballer talks about gentleness, bullying, her love of the Lionesses and why she’s never been so happy

The qualities that made Karen Carney an unstoppable winger on the football pitch – her speed and attack, and the sheer relentlessness of both – are more of a hindrance in the ballroom, for some of the dances at least. As the emerging star of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, she has had to learn to slow down, stand up straighter, to be softer, and it’s taken a lot of hard work. On week eight, she had just performed the American Smooth, and her pro partner Carlos Gu was tearfully describing Carney’s work ethic. Who could watch her trying to hold back her own tears, chewing on emotion like a particularly tough bit of gristle, and fail to see a woman who was giving it everything?

It was Carney’s dream to be on Strictly. The former England footballer, now TV pundit and podcaster, has just made it through week nine, performing an astonishing pasodoble at the all-important Blackpool week, and something will have gone very wrong if she doesn’t reach the final. The show has been struggling this year – a man described as a Strictly “star” was reportedly arrested in October on suspicion of rape last year, and the announcement from its longtime hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman that this will be their final series has been destabilising. But Carney says that for her, it has been an overwhelmingly positive time. “There’s a team spirit within the cast. Behind [the scenes], the team can’t do enough for you to have the best experience.”

The leftist party exploded out of Spain’s anti-austerity protests in 2011 and upended Spain’s entrenched two-party system. I was instantly captivated – and for the next decade, I worked for the party. But I ended up quitting politics in disappointment. What happened?

• This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art

I never expected to retire in my 30s, but I suppose politics is the art of the impossible: what it promises, what it extracts. A decade at the heart of Spain’s boldest modern political experiment aged me in ways I’ve only just begun to fathom.

In May 2014, just four months after it was founded, the leftwing Spanish party Podemos (“We Can”) won five seats in the European parliament. As a recent university graduate who had been part of a local Podemos group (or círculo, as they were known) in Paris, I was hired to work for these MEPs. We arrived in Brussels as complete tyros and had to learn everything on the job. But we were motivated by the promise of doing what we used to call “real politics” – that is to say, not the internal power struggles and ideological weather patterns of the movement (which were always abundant), but the actual issues, such as gender discrimination and unemployment.

New players have come in, too many of them, and that has meant a dilution of the collective will instilled by Klopp

Before this game Arne Slot had announced that he was “almost confused”. Which does at least raise some tantalising questions. Mainly, what is this Liverpool team going to look like when he gets there, when a state of full confusion is finally attained, when even Slot’s confusion stops being confusing and reveals its diamond-cut final form.

The chancellor’s statement will be remembered for the many taxes it raised, rather than the big one – income tax – it did not

Rachel Reeves’s chancellorship was already balanced on a knife-edge, even before the 2025 budget. After she delivered her second budget statement, it still is. Even more than usual, Wednesday’s speech was full of significant fiscal changes, altered spending commitments and adjusted economic forecasts, most of them accidentally (and, for journalists, conveniently) released a short while in advance by the obviously misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility. Politically, however, almost nothing has changed at all.

Reeves arrived in the Treasury last year offering what she, like Keir Starmer, had promised as the Conservative years ebbed: competence, stability and, above all, a focus on economic growth. Her problem, despite her upbeat assessments, is that she has delivered none of them. Nothing about the 2025 budget guarantees any early change in that, however defiantly Reeves spoke about reversing the OBR’s reduced new growth and productivity forecasts.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Black Friday isn’t all about pricey electronics. Here are all our favourite 2025 deals under £50

• How to shop smart this Black Friday
• The best Black Friday deals on the products we love

Garmin watches and iPhones whose prices fall from insanely unaffordable to merely very expensive may be the headline-grabbers of Black Friday, but they’re not exactly cheap. In a cost-of-living crisis, the true bargains of the sales season are those useful and joy-giving items discounted to genuinely affordable prices.

Here we’ve assembled the best sub-£50 bargains we’ve found so far, with prices falling even further as you scroll down the page. These deals span the Christmas gifting gamut from premium vodka to Sealskinz socks, plus the Filter’s top-rated household items and tech – all now for less than the price of a takeaway.

Chancellor defends budget and insists she will grow the economy and continue to defy forecasts

• UK politics live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves has admitted working people will need to pay more after her budget but insisted she had kept that to an “absolute minimum” by increasing taxes on betting firms, mansions and landlords.

The chancellor vowed to carry on in her role and “defy” economic forecasts as she defended her tax and growth measures.

Councils welcome move but OBR says it is a significant fiscal risk and could lead to 4.9% real fall in spending per pupil

• Budget calculator: find out if you are better or worse off

The government will take over full responsibility for special educational needs spending from local councils, it was revealed at the budget, prompting warnings that the Department for Education could be facing a £20bn timebomb in two years.

The Office for Budget Responsibility said the annual costs of special educational needs and disability (Send) spending in England would reach £6bn a year by 2028, increasing the urgency of a potentially decisive overhaul of Send provision in a schools white paper expected early next year.

Rachel Reeves’s new council tax surcharge on homes worth £2m or more earns mixed reception in well-heeled London borough

• Budget calculator: find out if you are better or worse off

In the leafy London borough of Richmond, on the south-western fringes of the capital, there was quiet resignation at the chancellor’s announcement of a “mansion tax” on England’s most expensive properties.

In an area where one-bed flats often sell for £300,000, and large, detached family homes regularly sell for upwards of £2m, “mansion” is seen as something of a misnomer.

Move will have greater impact on living standards of taxpayers in bottom half of income scale, thinktanks say

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Business live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves will punish poorer households more than the better off through the freezing of income tax thresholds announced in Wednesday’s budget, two major thinktanks have said.

The Resolution Foundation said the freeze on income tax thresholds for a further three years to 2031 would harm the living standards of taxpayers in the bottom half of the income scale.