Labour has left the nation sleepwalking into a welfare state that punishes work Daily Telegraph 24/05/26 How far have we travelled down the British road to socialism? We now live in a country where a family living on benefits in London can be better off than a household earning £70,000 per year, according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice. For much of Britain, the link between how much you work and what you can afford has been broken. If Labour has a core ideological belief, it is that fighting inequality is a moral crusade that trumps everything else. Economic growth must play second fiddle to this sacred cause. Conservative politicians of recent decades have been too frightened to challenge this mantra, for fear of being seen as heartless. There was, of course, the Thatcherite interregnum in the 1980s, when wealth creation was openly celebrated, and rising inequality was seen as a price worth paying for the country becoming richer. But that was an aberration from ...
Behind the SNP’s years of electoral dominance lay a tightly controlled partnership brought down by scandal and infighting Daily Telegraph 25/05/26 Early in the morning of April 5, 2023, dozens of officers descended on the suburban home shared by Nicola Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell. They set up an evidence tent on the driveway while large blue sheets were used to shield the view of the garage and back garden. In astonishing scenes beamed on to television screens across Britain, police searched the house, using the tent and sheets to shield the items they removed from the watching cameras. Ms Sturgeon, who had been Scotland’s first minister only two months before, later said her house looked “like a murder scene”. Her husband, who had been the SNP’s chief executive for more than two decades, was arrested as part of the police investigation into embezzlement. He admitted to embezzling £400,000 from the party over 12 years at Edinburgh’s High Court on Monday. It is an ex...