Reform UK would win a general election if it were held tomorrow, new polling has suggested. The Ipsos survey showed Nigel Farage's insurgent party with a 34% share of the vote, a nine-point lead over Labour, on 25%. The Conservatives got just 15%, the lowest Tory share ever recorded by the polling firm. 

Polling this far out from a general election "should always be taken with a pinch of salt", said Sky News. But "the symbolism of Reform UK topping another poll is likely to be noticed by MPs from all parties", and to renew scrutiny of Reform's policies. Here are some of them.

The Britannia Card
Farage this week announced the Britannia Card policy, a plan to attract wealthy individuals to the UK with a special tax regime and a £250,000 one-off fee for 10 years of residency. Reform estimates the fee – the "Britannia workers' dividend" – could fund a tax-free annual payout of £600 to £1,000 to around 2.5 million low-paid full-time workers. However, independent think tank Tax Policy Associates calculated that the policy could cost the government £34 billion in lost revenue over five years.

'Stop the boats'
A hard-line stance on immigration was, unsurprisingly, front and centre of the party's manifesto at the last election. The plan to "stop the boats" carrying migrants crossing the Channel is part of a four-point scheme to curb immigration. Reform would also freeze all "non-essential" legal migration and take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights so it can use offshore processing centres to ensure "zero illegal migrants" settle in the UK.

Tax reductions
A planned £50 billion-a-year reduction in government spending would help fund Reform's manifesto pledges to raise the income tax threshold from £12,571 to £20,000, exempting six million people from having to pay the tax. The party would also scrap VAT on energy bills; lift the VAT threshold on businesses to £150,000; cut fuel duty and corporation tax; and raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2 million. On energy, it proposes scrapping the UK's 2050 net zero targets and green levies.

"Do we really need another story of a scammer?" said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. We're "overloaded" with "tawdry tales" of con artists pulling ever more elaborate schemes on unsuspecting victims.

But Apple's first original scripted podcast doesn't take "any pleasure in the gullibility" of Charles Ponzi's doomed investors. Nor is it a "straightforward" story about the "dangers of fraudsters". At its heart, "Easy Money" is a compelling "character study" of an Italian immigrant who travelled to America in the early 20th century with a simple goal: "to make his fortune".

When he found himself "on his uppers", with a new wife to support and no job, Ponzi "spied an opportunity". Realising that he could buy international postal reply coupons in one country and then redeem them in another with a better rate of exchange, he started to recruit investors, promising high returns with low risk.

Over nine months, he swindled thousands of investors out of millions of dollars, using new investments to pay off the old, while pocketing money to splash out on a lavish lifestyle. "He had created what became known as a Ponzi scheme."

It's an "enlightening and entertaining" podcast series, said Rick Kogan in the Chicago Tribune. "Deeply researched and stylishly written" by Matt Hickey and Kevin Hynes, and "hosted with considerable charm" by former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Maya Lau, it's filled with "fascinating" details. By the end, I even started to feel a "grudging respect" for Ponzi.

I'm leaving the UK because of how Labour has treated wealthy non-doms like me… ciao!
Ann Kaplan Mulholland in The Independent
"A spate of high-profile (and very high-value) people have left the UK" since Rachel Reeves "scrapped the non-dom tax status" that limited the tax they paid on overseas earnings, writes entrepreneur Ann Kaplan Mulholland. Britain is set to "haemorrhage" 16,500 millionaires this year, including me, because I'm "off to start afresh in Italy". This "non-dom exodus serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of political decisions that ignore economic realities".

Are we human or are we spammer?
Stephen Bush in the Financial Times
"It is getting harder and harder to prove someone is who they say they are online," writes Stephen Bush, and our "trust in technology" in the form of "texts", "attachments" and "forms" is "slowly withering". As machines become "smarter than humans", verification gets "more difficult" and "the job of fraudsters easier". The solution may be a return to "face to face encounters", and the "next wave of jobs may not be as cyber experts, but as bank tellers".

Israel's dazzling, daunting, dangerous victory
The Economist's editorial board
"Notwithstanding the smackdown" delivered by Donald Trump, and "providing the ceasefire holds, this is a moment for triumph for Israel's prime minister", says The Economist. Following a "multi-front war" with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu has "humbled" them all. "Any pivot from war to negotiation will be constrained by Israeli domestic politics", but he may now have the "political capital to defy his radical partners and their designs of perpetual war and Gazan occupation".