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Britain’s largest housebuilder Barratt Redrow has warned of a “tough market” and expects little growth in the next 12 months amid uncertainty around property taxes.

David Thomas, the executive of the company, which was enlarged by Barratt’s £2.5bn acquisition of Redrow last October, cautioned that “the housing market remains challenging and we anticipate limited growth in 2026”.

High mortgage costs have squeezed homebuyers’ budgets. The Bank of England is widely expected to keep its base rate at 4% on Thursday. It faces a balancing act in light of stubborn inflation of 3.8%, almost double its target and partly caused by high food prices, while the jobs market is cooling and economic growth remains weak.

However, Barratt Redrow raised its annual dividend after reporting a 33.8% increase in revenue to £5.6bn in the year to 29 June.

Reporting full-year results for the combined group for the first time, the builder delivered 16,565 home completions, slightly below expectations. Adjusted profit before tax rose by 26.8% to £488.3m.

Thomas said: “We have delivered a solid performance in a tough market, with adjusted profits ahead of expectations despite home completions coming in slightly below our guided range.”

The group expects to complete between 17,200 and 17,800 homes this year, assuming a normal autumn selling season. However, it cautioned that “the extended period through to the budget and related uncertainties around general taxation and that applicable to housing, has introduced additional risk”.

Analysts fear buyers could hold off purchases as they wait for clarity on potential changes in stamp duty and other taxes in the autumn budget, which is scheduled for 26 November. The Westminster set-piece will take place a month later than last year, when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, presented her first budget in late October.

Thomas said Barratt’s acquisition of Redrow was “transformative” for the group, and that it had delivered cost savings ahead of its targets (£69m out of £100m), adding that the integration was now largely complete. Six divisional offices have been closed and three more are closing.

He stressed that “it is vital that government policy is focused on reforming the planning system, removing barriers to investment and supporting purchasers, particularly first-time buyers, if the sector is to build the homes the country needs”.

Last year, the government set an ambitious target of building 1.5m homes over five years, with a focus on social and affordable housing. In June this year, then-housing secretary Angela Rayner nearly doubled spending on affordable housing to £39bn. It is unclear whether Rayner’s recent resignation has affected housebuilders’ confidence in government policies.

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Average house prices in the UK were 2.8% higher in July than a year earlier, down from 3.6% price growth in June, according to the latest official figures from the Office for National Statistics released this morning.

Growth has slowed sharply since hitting a two-year high in March, when buyers rushed to complete sales before a tax break on house purchases expired.

According to Nationwide Building Society, house prices unexpectedly fell in August, with continued high mortgage costs dampening activity.

Rents charged by private landlords rose by 5.7% year-on-year in August, down from an annual rate of 5.9% in July – the smallest annual increase since December 2022.

The arrest of four men after images of Donald Trump alongside Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle on Tuesday was “Orwellian” and “ridiculous”, the group behind the protest has told the Guardian.

The political campaign group Led By Donkeys confirmed that it was behind the stunt, which saw several images of Trump and Epstein projected on to a tower while a soundtrack questioning the relationship between to the two men was played on a speaker.

A letter the US president allegedly sent to Epstein was also projected on to the castle, along with pictures of Epstein’s victims, news clips about the case and police reports.

The police said in a statement that four adults were arrested on suspicion of malicious communications after an “unauthorised projection” at Windsor Castle, which they described as a “public stunt”. The four remain in custody.

A spokesperson for Led By Donkeys, which is funded by capped donations, said it was the first time anyone from the group had been arrested.

“We’ve done, I reckon, 25 or 30 projections since we’ve been going. Often the police come along and we have a chat to them, and they even have a laugh with us and occasionally tell us to not do it,” they said. “But no one’s ever been arrested before, so it is ridiculous that four of our guys have been arrested for malicious communications.”

He added: “Forgive the cliche, but it is rather Orwellian for a piece of journalism, which raises questions about our guest’s relationship with America’s most notorious child sex trafficker to lead to arrests.”

They added: “We’re constantly told, you know, we need to see peaceful protests. Well, here’s a peaceful protest … We projected a piece of journalism on to a wall and now people have been arrested for malicious communications. I think that, frankly, says a lot more about the policing of Trump’s visit than it does about what we did.”

The group said it was waiting for news about the four men who had been arrested. The spokesperson said they had carried out an “Emperor’s New Clothes” protest.

“Trump is being welcomed to our country, being given the unique honour of a second state visit, and it’s being housed at our expense at Windsor Castle,” they said. “This is like The Emperor’s New Clothes – you’ve got to point at it and say, ‘Hang on. You know, this guy has incredibly close links to America’s most notorious child sex trafficker. We probably need to talk about that.’ And so we decided to build a film that would tell that story.”

Trump has come under increasing pressure over his links with Epstein after the publication of a letter, the existence of which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in July, by Congress’s House oversight committee earlier this month. The letter contains text of a purported dialogue between Trump and Epstein in which Trump calls him a “pal” and says: “May every day be another wonderful secret.”

The text sits within a crude sketch of a silhouette of a naked woman. Trump had previously denied writing the letter and the White House has denied its authenticity.

The president will be greeted by King Charles on Wednesday for a day of pomp at Windsor Castle, about 25 miles west of London. The Prince and Princess of Wales will also meet the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, in the grounds of the Windsor estate.

Trump will be treated to a historic flypast, the first time US and UK aircraft have flown together in a military flypast for a state visit. In the evening Trump and his wife will be the guests of honour at a white-tie state banquet in Windsor Castle, alongside 160 guests in St George’s Hall. The president will travel to the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers, on Thursday.

The main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was freed on Wednesday as German authorities said they no longer had legal justification to hold him in jail.

Christian Brückner, 49, was released from prison in Sehnde, northern Germany, after serving a sentence for the rape of an American woman, then 72 years old, in Portugal in 2005, journalists at the scene reported.

The rape took place in Praia da Luz, the holiday resort on the southern Portuguese coast where the three-year-old British toddler disappeared 18 months later.

Brückner was driven away from the prison entrance by his lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, in a black Audi A6 at 9.14am local time, accompanied by a police escort. Brückner, who police confirmed was covered in a blanket and sitting on the back seat, could not be seen owing to tinted windows. The car travelled northwards, taking him to an unknown destination.

German prosecutors say that Brückner, a German national, remains their prime suspect in the disappearance, which they are treating as a murder inquiry. British police call him a suspect in their investigation, which they continue to treat as a missing-persons case.

State prosecutors responsible for the investigation confirmed to German media on Wednesday morning that Brückner would have to wear an electronic ankle tag so that his movements could be tracked. His lawyer had tried to object to this, they said. He will also have to surrender his passport, is forbidden from travelling abroad and must declare a permanent place of residence, which he may not leave without permission.

However, his lawyers have said they plan to appeal against the supervision order. Philipp Marquort told Der Spiegel: “This is the public prosecutor’s attempt to keep him in a kind of pretrial detention where they have access to him at any time.”

Madeleine went missing on 3 May 2007 while on holiday with her parents. She vanished from the ground-floor apartment where the family was staying, while her parents were at a restaurant close by. Her young twin siblings had been in the room with her.

Hans Christian Wolters, a lead investigator in the case, reiterated in a recent interview his belief that Brückner was responsible for the girl’s disappearance. “We believe that he is responsible for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and that he killed Madeleine McCann,” he said in a recent statement.

Wolters told the AFP news agency last year that he believed Brückner was “fundamentally dangerous”. “He has not undergone any therapy or similar treatment in prison, which means that, from our point of view, we must assume that he will reoffend,” Wolters said.

German police have been investigating Brückner since 2017. State prosecutors have said they have circumstantial evidence indicating his possible involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. These include that his mobile phone was on and logged in in the area where she vanished, and the sworn testimony of three witnesses who say he confessed to them.

After being alerted about Brückner following a TV crime programme in Germany that called for information a decade after the child’s disappearance, the federal criminal police office named him as a suspect in 2020. They revealed he had convictions going back decades for child sex offences and other crimes, including drug trafficking, burglary and petty theft.

Brückner had lived in the Algarve region of Portugal between 1995 and 2007, and had worked at the Praia da Luz resort as a pool maintenance assistant.

The investigation has also involved several searches of land and property connected to Brückner, in Portugal and Germany.

Last October, Brückner was cleared by a court in the northern German city of Braunschweig of several unrelated sexual offences, alleged to have occurred between 2000 and 2017. He has consistently denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.

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The public prosecutor’s office appealed against this verdict, and a review is still pending by the federal court of justice.

He is due back in court in Oldenburg in October for a hearing into an incident in which he is accused of insulting a member of prison staff.

A court hearing is also listed for 27 October in Oldenburg in north-west Germany, to deal with a case in which he is accused of insulting a prison employee.

Before Brückner’s release, Fülscher said in a statement that no comment would be made to the media outside the prison either by him or Brückner.

Brückner has refused a request by British authorities, made through an “international letter of request”, for an interview on his release.

DCI Mark Cranwell, a senior investigating officer for London’s Metropolitan police, said the request had been “refused by the suspect”. He added that the Met would “nevertheless continue to pursue any viable lines of inquiry”.

After completing his seven-and-a-half-year sentence for the 2005 rape, Brückner had been expected to stay behind bars until January 2026 because of his owing €1,447 (£1,253) in fines for a separate offence. However, a former police officer who had worked on the investigation into Brückner paid the fine because, she has said, she “felt sorry” for him. She has since said she made a mistake.

Good morning. Donald Trump arrived in Britain last night, landing with his wife, Melania, at Stansted airport and then taking a helicopter to central London. But he had an advance party: the mass of Maga political messages that have been picked up and repurposed by some fellow travellers, namely those of the British nationalist right.

British politicians have imitated their frankly sexier US cousins for decades, of course. But something distinctive to the Trump era has been particularly apparent in recent months: the borrowing of an inescapably American political style in order to implant it in a political culture that barely knows what to make of it.

It’s been visible across the spectrum of the right for a while, from Kemi Badenoch to Tommy Robinson, but it was especially obvious at Saturday’s far-right rally in London, which Keir Starmer belatedly said yesterday represents the “fight of our times between patriotic national renewal and decline and toxic division”. Participants wore Maga hats, heard speeches from Elon Musk and Stephen Bannon, and, as Daniel Boffey sets out here, paid tribute to the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. For supporters and opponents alike, Trump’s trip to the UK may look like a glimpse of the politics they would like to bring here as well.

What’s far less clear is how much all this means to the wider voting public, who may not know their Bannons from their bunions – and whether it is a useful style for political actors whose appeal is based on relentless nativism. As Donald Trump meets the king today, and affirms that his main interest in the UK is as a kind of ossified theme park, today’s newsletter – with the help of Aamna Mohdin – asks what the British right wants from him. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Gaza | Israel unleashed its long-threatened ground offensive in Gaza City on Tuesday, sending tanks and remote-controlled armoured cars packed with explosives into its streets, in defiance of the findings of a UN commission that it was committing genocide in the Palestinian territory.

2. Hollywood | Robert Redford, star of Hollywood classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, has died aged 89.

3. US news | Tyler Robinson, the man accused of fatally shooting the far-right activist Charlie Kirk, was charged with aggravated murder in Utah yesterday. Prosecutors say they intend to pursue the death penalty against the 22-year-old if he is convicted.

4. Immigration and asylum | An Eritrean man has had his deportation to France under Labour’s “one-in, one-out” scheme halted at the 11th hour after he won a high court challenge. The 25-year-old man is the first to win such a challenge against the new scheme.

5. Obesity | A daily pill for weight loss can help people reduce their body weight by as much as a fifth, according to a trial that could pave the way for millions more to shed pounds. Orforglipron is manufactured by Eli Lilly and targets the same GLP-1 receptors as weight loss injections such as Mounjaro.

In depth: ‘The goal is not just victory, but reshaping the landscape’

Liz Truss complaining, endlessly, about the “deep state”. Nigel Farage promising to “make Britain great again” at a party conference (pictured above) designed to resemble an American political convention. Reform’s promise of Doge-style units to root out council waste. “Woke” supplanting “political correctness”. Tories calling on the government to “release the Mandelson-Epstein files”. Kemi Badenoch and Blue Labour warning about the dangers of “DEI” instead of “positive discrimination”. Even the assertion that a national flag is a straightforward emblem of patriotism rather than a potentially divisive symbol, a claim with a more plausible lineage in the US, where schoolchildren pledge allegiance to it every day, than it has here.

There are myriad recent examples of rightwing political discourse making the trip across the Atlantic and taking up residence in the UK. The strangest thing about it is that very little effort is made to explain the more obscure parts of it to a local audience, or to disguise the unmistakably Trumpy associations in a country where he remains pretty unpopular. So why is the right so attracted to a style that turns so much of the public off?

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The history

It would be wrong to suggest that a fascination with American politics is a singularly rightwing phenomenon. “There’s been a magnetic attraction to American politics in Britain for a long time,” said Robert Saunders, a political historian at Queen Mary University of London. “You think of Gordon Brown holidaying in Cape Cod, or the influence Bill Clinton had on Tony Blair.” We might add the enduring liberal obsessions with JFK, Barack Obama and The West Wing.

Journalist and author Daniel Trilling told Aamna that as recently as last year, “there was an idea that the incoming Keir Starmer Labour government would be the deputy to this revived US liberalism under Joe Biden. The Atlantic alliance was strong again and they were going to sort out Ukraine and the rest of it. So when the political weather in America changes, so it does here.”

But those habits were really about strategy, and conversations among political obsessives – not the messages they deliberately shared with the mostly indifferent public. “It has certainly ramped up to a new level recently,” Saunders said. “And that is largely happening on the right.”

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What’s different now

One obvious reason populists, extremists and their imitators look to the US for inspiration is that their politics are further advanced there than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. “American far-rightism is more developed in terms of actually wielding power,” Trilling said. “So it’s not surprising that it influences the development of the far right here and elsewhere.” As Sadiq Khan says in an opinion piece for the Guardian, Trump has “perhaps done the most to fan the flames of divisive, far-right politics around the world in recent years”.

“That’s the most straightforward explanation,” Saunders said. “It’s just a visible and exciting model of success for the right. The Tories are staring into the abyss after the worst defeat in their history; Reform is on the rise, but they still only have five MPs. What this language embodies is what the right can do not just electorally, but culturally – it’s part of a project that’s not just about winning elections, but reshaping the entire landscape.”

That nihilist streak is anathema to old-fashioned one-nation conservatives. But that group is now a political irrelevance, and their successors find alliances across the same borders they’re so keen to put on lockdown. “They share online spaces in a way that obviously wasn’t true 20 years ago,” Saunders said. “They are radicalised by the company they keep. And in a very concrete way, Tommy Robinson’s revival is obviously linked to Elon Musk reactivating Robinson’s X account.”

All that might point to one reason for adopting a style that is so baffling to so many people: political actors are no longer fighting for a majority, but for the attention of the share of the public who will give them the time of day. That engagement is inevitably deepest among the perpetually online.

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The political project

This is not a merely rhetorical relationship, said Trilling. “There are obvious shared aims between far-right populists in the UK and US. Going back at least to 2016, the big populist upsets of that year: Trump getting elected and the Brexit referendum being won by leave – the key figures behind those knew one another and talked about these things as part of a shared project.

“The far-right position then, which is now becoming the mainstream right position, is that globalisation went too far, it ended up weakening our own economies and diluting our national identity through mass immigration, and what’s needed is a restoration and reinforcing of the borders.” Similar trends can be seen in national conservative movements across Europe, whose adherents have picked up the same Maga idioms from Italy to Hungary.

Evidence for that shared project was visible in the appearances by Steve Bannon and Musk at Saturday’s rally, as well as JD Vance’s notorious intervention in European politics, and meeting with the AfD leader Alice Weidel, in Munich earlier this year. But it is also apparent in the financial support flowing from wealthy Trump supporters to rightwing British thinktanks – and which previously funded Tommy Robinson as he sought restoration to the national political stage.

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The risks for the right

Even if it gets their supporters amped up, there are limits to the utility of this style for the right. “They should be a bit cautious,” Saunders said. “There’s a danger for any nationalist movement in looking like the branch office of a foreign power, and if you look like somebody else’s mini-me, you have a problem.” He pointed to the example of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s, who was eventually interned because of suspicions that his first loyalties were to Germany. “That’s why Farage is so personally important,” Saunders said. “As a recognisably British character who it’s harder to define as a puppet.”

Then there’s the question of what policy prescription even those who might give the far right a hearing actually want. “The Maga movement is much more ‘let’s just slash everything away’,” Trilling said. “But in Britain, I don’t think most people, including a lot of those who were at that protest last Saturday, think about their relationship to the state in the same way. Opinion polls do seem to bear out that people in Britain, generally across the political spectrum, tend to favour higher social spending from the government.”

The question, then, is whether any branch of the right can yoke the thrill of Trumpy nihilism to a persuasive claim that they care about things like the NHS, in a more authentically British tone of voice. But it remains to be seen whether they can transcend the same thing they deplore in their country: a cosmopolitan, magpie spirit, addicted to aspects of a foreign culture even as they dismiss them.

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What else we’ve been reading

• After the death of Robert Redford (above) at 89, Peter Bradshaw pays tribute to a “supremely beautiful movie star” (the life in pictures proves it) who was also “always an outlier”. Archie

• In Knowsley, where healthy life expectancy is about 54 years, decades of social and economic decline have transformed one of Labour’s safest seats into what Kirsty Major found now feels like one of Reform’s newly minted constituencies. Aamna

• Educators across the world are working in dangerous and febrile conditions. I was moved by the quiet heroism of teachers in Lebanon, Niger, Ukraine and Afghanistan who spoke of what keeps them going. Aamna

• The banquet King Charles is hosting for Donald Trump tonight, Marina Hyde writes, is “the most hideously ill-starred dinner party since the vomiting scene in Triangle of Sadness”. And for more than one attendee, Jeffrey Epstein will be “a ghost at the feast”. Archie

• The Israeli city of Tel Aviv, long known as the country’s liberal capital, is only 60km away from Gaza. This video by Matthew Cassel, who speaks to Israelis about a war that is increasingly being described as genocide, is well worth a watch. Aamna

Sport

Athletics | Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon (pictured above) won the women’s 1500m in 3:52.15, securing her fourth world title in a row, while USA’s Cordell Tinch went from working in a toilet paper factory to winning the 110m hurdles.

Football | Substitutes Gabriel Martinelli and Leandro Trossard scored the goals that gave Arsenal a 2-0 victory over Athletic Bilbao on the opening day of this year’s Champions League. Later last night Tottenham beat Villarreal 1-0 thanks to an own goal from goalkeeper Luiz Júnior.

Basketball | A group of 18 former employees of the British Basketball League (BBL) are taking legal action against the competition that replaced it, Super League Basketball, in the latest development in the extraordinary civil war that has engulfed the sport.

The front pages

“Trump fans the flames of division, says Khan” is the Guardian’s top story while the Mirror goes with “The ego has landed”. The Times greets the US president with “Technology deal worth billions is boost for UK” while the i paper’s angle is “Starmer to press Trump on Israel – as UN warns of Gaza genocide”. The Financial Times has “Tax fears mount as productivity blow confronts Reeves with bigger fiscal gap”. The Express cites expert opinion in proclaiming “4m to pay tax on state pension in 2 years”. In the Telegraph you can read “Migrant flight grounded by court” which the Mail reports with glee: “Human rights fanatic PM sunk … by human rights” while the Metro wraps that together with Trump’s arrival: “Don in … none out” and it’s as well that we leave things there.

Today in Focus

US on the edge after Charlie Kirk’s killing

The killing of the rightwing activist and podcaster has left the US reeling. Yet President Trump and his supporters are a long way from calling for calm. Ed Pilkington reports.

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Red cups are a staple of the student partying scene in the US, beloved by revellers at frat parties and beer pong enthusiasts. But the material they are made from is very difficult to recycle, adding to the growing plastic crisis.

Enter engineering student Lauren Choi (above), who saw an opportunity to turn these problematic cups into fabric. In 2019, during her senior year, she led a team that built an extruder machine to spin plastic waste into textile filaments. They partnered with campus fraternities to gather thousands of red cups.

Choi then took a weaving class so she could make a sample fabric out of those filaments. That became the foundation for the New Norm, a textile company that today transforms a variety of post-consumer recycled plastic into stylish sweatshirts and beanies.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

The University of Technology Sydney will close its teacher education program and public health school as part of a sweeping restructure that would remove more than 1,100 subjects to return the institution to surplus.

The proposed cuts, released on Wednesday, are part of the debt-ridden university’s strategy to reduce expenditure by $100m annually, including previously announcing the cutting of about 400 jobs.

Under the proposal, the school of professional practice and leadership would be closed as part of a plan to reduce the total number of schools from 24 to 15, and the faculty of law, business school and transdisciplinary school would be combined.

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The school of public health would be disestablished and become the discipline of public health within the school of sport, exercise and rehabilitation, to be renamed the “school of health and human performance”, and the international studies and education school would be rested.

The proposal’s release was delayed for a week after SafeWork NSW imposed a rare order that the institution must pause job cuts over the risk of “serious and imminent risk of psychological harm” to staff.

Academics at UTS had described feelings of stress and a “culture of fear” after the university temporarily paused student enrolments for 120 of its 615 courses until the end of the autumn 2026 semester.

The updated proposal, seen by Guardian Australia, said UTS would discontinue 167 courses and 1,101 subjects – or 31% – after sustaining five years of deficits, escalating costs and changes to government policy.

It said reducing expenditure by $100m annually was essential to repay a $300m bond taken by UTS and fund “essential capital and strategic requirements over the next five years”.

Some $30m annually was expected to be saved by making 134 full-time staff redundant, including 55 in design and society, 30 in business and 22 in health – excluding voluntary separations.

The proposal said courses identified to be cut did not “meet thresholds relating to actual and predicted student demand, financial viability, or strategic alignment”, set by enrolment trends, their cost margins and whether they had “research strengths”.

The threshold was subjects with fewer than 50 student enrolments annually. Of the 1,101 to be discontinued, 463 had no student enrolments and weren’t taught in 2024.

The chair of a New South Wales legislative council inquiry into the university sector, Dr Sarah Kaine, described the proposed closures as “a direct threat to the public mission of higher education” in the state.

“These are not just academic disciplines – they are pillars of our public infrastructure,” Kaine said.

“To dismantle them in the middle of a teacher shortage crisis and ongoing public health challenges, particularly in Indigenous communities, is indefensible.”

The state government inquiry into university governance, transparency and the public value of higher education was prompted last month after a petition signed by thousands of staff and students who said the university sector in NSW was in “crisis” as a result of “drastic restructures”.

Kaine said universities were “not corporations”.

“They are civic institutions with a duty to serve the public good. We must protect the disciplines that serve our society – not abandon them in pursuit of short-term financial targets.”

The National Tertiary Education Union NSW division secretary, Vince Caughley, said the university’s plan was an “abandonment of their duty to staff, students and the wider community”.

“UTS recorded record income in 2024, staff costs are lower in real terms than in 2019, and their own modelling shows the university would return to surplus by 2029 without cuts,” he said.

“Yet the vice-chancellor and his executives are inflicting turmoil on staff simply to bring that surplus forward by two years.”

The UTS branch president of the NTEU, Dr Sarah Attfield, said staff had given “viable alternatives” to job and course cuts but alleged they had been “dismissed”. Staff have four weeks to provide feedback on the proposal.

“The lack of transparency, the decisions made without consulting staff and students, and the shutting down of valid criticism have all led to staff losing faith in the leadership at UTS,” Attfield said.

The vice-chancellor of UTS, Prof Andrew Parfitt, said UTS was focused on achieving a “sustainable future” where it could “continue to deliver research outcomes for the communities that benefit from our work”.

“Our commitment to public education and focus on the student experience is paramount.”

He said any discontinuation of courses would apply from next year, and current students would be able to complete their courses.

“In order to alleviate uncertainty and stress right across our community, we are taking every measure we can to limit impacts and ensure opportunities for engagement, consultation and feedback,” he said.

This story was amended on 17 September 2025. An earlier version incorrectly stated the faculty of health was being disestablished – in fact it is the school of public health that is closing.

Queensland’s deputy premier has labelled BHP “unAustralian” and defended the state’s mining royalties scheme after the mining giant blamed it for its decision to mothball a coalmine and cut hundreds of jobs while also reviewing the future of its training academy.

On Wednesday, BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) announced a decision to suspend operations at its Saraji South coalmine and slash 750 roles across the state, blaming “unsustainable” royalties and market conditions.

The coal lobby describes Queensland’s progressive coal royalties scheme as the world’s highest levy on the industry and has run a years-long campaign against the scheme, since it was legislated under the former Labor government.

The deputy premier, Jarrod Bleijie, told media on Monday morning that the LNP would not abandon the royalties regime and said BMA had made “billions of dollars from the resources owned by Queensland taxpayers and Queenslanders”.

“We are doing everything we can as a government to make sure that Queensland is open for business, particularly in the mining sector. We are not at war with the mining sector. We are approving leases and mining approvals far more efficiently and quicker,” he said.

The Saraji South mine, an open-cut metallurgical coalmine about 300km north-west of Rockhampton, will be put into care and maintenance – effectively in mothballs – in November.

The BMA asset president, Adam Lancey, said the mothballing and job cuts were “necessary decisions in the face of the combined impact of the Queensland government’s unsustainable coal royalties and market conditions”.

“The simple fact is the Queensland coal industry is approaching a crisis point,” Lancey said.

“This is now having real impacts on regional jobs, communities and small businesses.”

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But Bleijie dismissed BHP’s argument that the state’s royalties regime was to blame, saying that “care and maintenance is the cyclical nature of mines in Queensland and the coal industry, it’s not new; it’s not a new phenomenon”.

“When the company want to invest, they re-establish the mine and they rebuild it with workers,” he said.

Bleijie also described BHP’s decision to conduct a strategic review of the BHP FutureFit Academy in Mackay, an educational facility that trains new miners, as “unAustralian”.

Guardian Australia understands that current students of the academy will be permitted to complete their training even if the review recommends its closure, but Bleijie slammed the decision.

“I think that is unAustralian. I think they should keep investing. They have made billions of dollars from the resources owned by Queensland taxpayers and Queenslanders. And they should keep investing in the future of young people who want a job in a mine or resource sector in Queensland,” he said.

The Mining and Energy Union (MEU) accused the company of “using coal workers and communities as pawns in its fight with the Queensland government over royalties”.

“Coal prices have come back to more normal levels, but to fear-monger about a ‘crisis’ in coal is misleading and frankly shameful behaviour from BHP,” the MEU’s Queensland president, Mitch Hughes, said.

“Our high-quality coal belongs to all Queenslanders, not to BHP. If BHP want to focus on other parts of their business, they should get out of the way and let someone else operate these great central Queensland mines.”

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The mine has been mothballed before, in 2012, and reopened in 2020. Hughes said BMA has “form in turning this mine on and off to chase high coal prices, with no regard for the community or workforce impact”.

The union said the majority of the 750 jobs being cut at BMA – which claims to be the largest private sector employer in central Queensland – are in corporate and support roles across BHP’s whole Queensland business, including rail, ports and coal, with about 72 coal production jobs affected.

Other mines in the larger Saraji metallurgical coalmine complex will continue operating.

BMA is just the latest mining company to complain about royalties.

Under the scheme, miners pay a 20% royalty for prices above $175 a tonne, 30% for prices above $225 a tonne, and 40% for prices above $300 a tonne, well above comparable states. The scheme raised more than $10bn for the state budget in a single year at its peak. Revenue has since declined due to the falling price of coal.

Royalties were also cited by Bowen Coking Coal after it went into administration last month, while Coronado Coal blamed the levy for a reported $73m loss last week.

The Queensland treasury argues that royalties have little effect on profits.

The Labor leader, Steven Miles, said BMA made more than a billion dollars from the state and should continue to make a contribution to the state.

“The coal price is now much lower than it has been over recent years, and this didn’t occur when those prices were higher, which is when those progressive coal royalties would have kicked in more substantially,” he said.

“I think the government should send a clear signal by locking in the royalties for the next 10 years.”

Minneapolis police have said over a dozen people have been hurt in two separate shootings at homeless encampments across the city on the same day.

The first shooting at a transit station wounded five people, and happened in an area that had seen two prior shootings in the past month.

Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara rued the shootings as disturbingly commonplace.

“Here we are yet again in the aftermath of a mass shooting. This is not normal,” O’Hara said.

The second shooting, which wounded eight, happened just two miles away, in a site that has been a topic of controversy in the Minneapolis area. Private landlord Hamoudi Sabri, who has been involved in homeless activism since 2021, has allowed the encampment on his property because he does not believe the city is addressing the root causes of homelessness.

“If this city truly treated these shootings like the emergencies they are, people would already see grief and trauma counselors on the ground,” Sabri told local media after the shooting. “Instead, the mayor’s answer is the same tired move we’ve seen for years: displacement. Bulldoze people’s tents, fence off their space, and call it leadership.”

The city promptly moved to clear out the encampment on Sabri’s property, which could nullify the drawn-out legal battle between the two.

As housing affordability continues to soar beyond the means of most Americans and the number of unhoused people rises across the country, the topic is increasingly prevalent on the national stage.

The shootings were two of five mass shootings to occur in Minnesota’s largest city in the past two weeks, including one at a local Catholic school that killed two children.

A Trump executive order which month directed governments to begin “shifting” people without stable housing into “long-term institutional settings,” something many critics feared could lead to a direct criminalization of homelessness.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade recently floated the idea of “involuntary lethal injection” for homeless individuals around the country, stating: “Just kill ‘em.”